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reassertion of this negative view of the city was compounded by wartime social changes, particularly a chronic housing shortage and the northern migration of rural, southern African Americans seeking new industrial labor opportunities. It was under these circumstances that real estate businessmen stressed the importance of protecting improved residential areas from invasion by uses and groups they deemed incompatible, including all African Americans, irrespective of class.
During the late 1910s, professional real estate businessmen and grassroots improvers became accomplices in adapting the ideology of improvement to advance and legitimatize the emerging practices and discourse of legalized housing discrimination. This development provided further evidence of the limits of improvement as an ideology promoting substantial, liberal social change, particularly in relation to the aspirations of African Americans. Indeed, the characterization of all African Americans by white professional real estate businessmen and many middle-class Chicagoans as “undesirable” anti-improvers was central to the evolution of what Axel Schäfer described as a “new racialist discourse that excluded blacks and defined them as the anticivilizational other.”46 White middle-class acceptance of this new variant on the racist stereotyping of black Chicagoans was partially dependent on the positive and negative environmentalism underpinning grassroots improvement.
Ongoing racial and social conflict in postwar Chicago prompted the abandonment of the informal and semiformal system of regulations devised to insulate white, improved residential areas from incompatible, urban land uses. From the early 1920s, real estate businessmen emphasized the antithetical nature of cities, improved residential landscapes, and built a meticulous, formalized system of land use controls in suburbs beyond the city limits. This was achieved with the assistance of reconstituted NIAs that were established by real estate businessmen to “protect and preserve” the morality of suburbs and their white inhabitants by ensuring social homogeneity and low population densities.47
In general, changes in the improvement ideology and its accompanying grassroots practices are measurable against their relationship to the city. When improvement arrived in Chicago during the 1890s after