Chicago Black Belt: Overcrowding and Rent Exploitation During Great Migration

During the 1920s, Chicago's South Side 'Black Belt', a narrow corridor of racially covenanted neighborhoods, housed hundreds of thousands of Great Migration arrivals in severely restricted space. Landlords charged Black renters 25–50% more than white renters for equivalent apartments in a phenomenon documented by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations (1922). Buildings were subdivided into 'kitchenette' units, single rooms with hotplates, generating triple the rental income per square foot. Overcrowding rates were three to four times higher than in comparable white neighborhoods.