The picture in neighboring Calumet Avenue is not essentially different; perhaps the early occupants represented fewer of the "first families," and the deterioration is more obvious.
The evidences of the oncoming of commerce and industry from the north are numerous and inescapable. In this and adjoining blocks are now garages, an auto-repairing shop, the South Side Dispensary of the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, a factory for grinding bearings, and a carpentry and glazing shop. An auto-laundry occupies the old church building.
This area is a comparatively short distance from the "Loop." In real estate parlance it is known as "close-in" property. A former president of the Chicago Real Estate Board stated that a large part of this "close-in" property depreciated because of its change from residential to commercial property. He mentioned Prairie and Calumet avenues, north of Thirty-first Street—which includes the block studied. The depreciation, he asserted, was also due to the "departure of many owners of costly homes to other districts."
With the city's growth, transportation became an increasingly influential factor. The automobile made it easy to reach the business center from outlying and suburban regions. It thus became less desirable to live near the "Loop," particularly as such districts are susceptible to changes that may quickly destroy an exclusive residence district.
The rapidly developing automobile industry gravitated very largely to this part of the South Side. Its salesrooms, shops for the sale of accessories, and kindred business places spread along Michigan Avenue from Twelfth to Thirty-fifth street. Michigan Avenue is only two blocks west of Prairie Avenue and one block west of Indiana Avenue. Garages, repair shops, welding factories, and the like accompanied this invasion, and spread into adjoining streets. For instance, on an Indiana Avenue corner a large eight-story factory was built immediately adjoining the rear of a handsome Prairie Avenue residence, and a one and one-half story garage and repair shop was built in the rear of 2900 Prairie Avenue. Just northeast of the block are factories and breweries with their noise, smoke, and heavy traffic; and from the west and south Negroes have recently been approaching—long after these other factors were operating.
A peculiar fact about the property in this block and northward on Prairie Avenue is that the lots are long and narrow, and the houses are built to the side lines. These lots, when threatened with encroachment by factories and the automobile industry, lost their residence value but did not easily take on a new industrial value because they were individually owned and it required several lots to make a suitable industrial site. The owners, though not desiring to live there, were yet loath to sell as cheaply as the individual strip sales would make necessary. And no investor would buy a single lot for industrial purposes unless certain of getting two or three others adjoining.
In 1910 land values on Prairie Avenue between Twenty-sixth and Twenty-eighth streets were $250 a front foot; and from Twenty-ninth to Thirtieth streets, $200; on Indiana Avenue between Twenty-sixth and Twenty-eighth streets, $200, and between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth streets $175. In 1920, however, values had dropped on Prairie Avenue to $60 a front foot while on Indiana Avenue, a semi-business street, they were $150 and $180.[27] Negroes first moved into the block on Prairie Avenue between Thirtieth and Thirty-first streets about 1917, though very few lived there at the time of the inquiry in 1920. In 1919 they purchased an abandoned church in this block which at one time was valued at $125,000.
To summarize the results of this investigation of depreciation: Negro occupancy depreciates the value of residence property in Chicago because of the prejudice of white people against Negroes, and because white people will not buy and Negroes are not financially able to buy, at fair market prices property thrown upon the market when a neighborhood commences to change from white to Negro occupancy; nevertheless a large part of the depreciation of residence property often charged to Negro occupancy comes from entirely different causes.