By CHARLES B. CLEVELAND Chicago

Pierre DeVise: Taking urban statistics out of the closet and into public debate

PIERRE DeVISE (pronounced Dee Viz-zay) operates out of an office in the Behavioral Sciences Building at the University of Illinois Circle Campus. It looks like what it is: A college instructor's office cluttered with books, reports and memoranda which overflow the desk onto every available chair and sofa.

DeVise goes under a variety of job titles, urban scientist, urbanologist, urbanist, and his task is to take government census data, keep it current through his own ongoing research and interpret it all into proper patterns.

Such people and their findings are usually buried in obscure corners of government or relegated to that other worldly world of academia where urban studies concerns only students and social science researchers. DeVise himself puts it this way: "Urban planners in America are just window dressing, a necessary nuisance when cities apply for federal funds. Politicians don't want to plan ahead."

His own career tends to verify that view. He has worked for the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, the Chicago Department of City Planning, the Chicago Regional Hospital Study and has lectured at several colleges. But he is without tenure and he can probably predict more accurately the world in the year 2000 than he can his own status in 1980.

The reason, in part, is that he is right. We're all fascinated with predictions of how the world will be at some point in the future, but if it isn't good news — or sufficiently ambiguous to be more vague than threatening — we ignore it. That's especially true of many, probably most, politicians whose vision tends to be limited by the end of their term or the date of the next election.

DeVise refuses to be (a) quiet, (b) diplomatic in the sense of downplaying his findings, or (c) predictable. He's had more than one speaking date cancelled because the hosts had last minute concerns that he might be too candid on such topics as, say, integration. He has both supported pet projects of Mayor Daley (DeVise supports the Crosstown Expressway) and rejected-others.

A group of downtown business bigwigs and a major architectural firm prepared an elaborate plan for developing a 650-acre middle-income community on obsolete railroad tracks south of Chicago's Loop as a way to reverse the flight to the suburbs and revitalize the central city. The key feature was "superblocks" meaning a city block containing pyramid-like structures with several thousand dwelling units creating a minicity of its own. City Hall thought it was great news and nearby neighboring communities also took it seriously. But DeVise dismisses the whole idea as "foolish."

"Plans like this don't face reality. The reality today is that people won't live in superblocks. That's behind us, high density living. High density is a relic of the streetcar era."

DeVise is equally critical of other plans he feels are unrealistic. "Fair share" plans to build moderate income housing in the suburbs, he says, are "doomed to failure." White suburbs won't change zoning or other regulations to admit lower income residents. A more workable plan, he suggests, is based on social, not economic, grounds. He recommends that open housing groups attack the barriers in suburbs that keep out 230,000 black families, who can afford to move to the suburbs but don't because they know they are unwelcome.

DeVise reaches these and other conclusions on the basis of what charts and graphs tell him. There was, for example, a widespread belief that younger physicians were more socially oriented than their predecessors. DeVise studied the area's doctors and found the opposite: that Chicago area doctors are three years older than the national average and that the oldest group (average age 62) serves the poor communities.

When DeVise isn't shooting down popular myths or confronting civic boosters with the facts of social change, he's likely to be tilting with those he believes are misusing urban data. One major target is Chicago's poverty program. He argues that, in many instances, they are treating the wrong patient. The reason: the city's designated poverty areas were based on the 1960 census, but many of the people who made those neighborhoods economically poor have moved out to other areas. As a result, he says, poverty programs in education, housing, health care and labor are available for the new middle class residents of Edgewater, Lincoln Park, Carl Sandburg, Marina City, South Commons and Lake Village, but not for the displaced poverty populations who have moved into new poverty areas in Austin, South Lawndale, Englewood and Grand Crossing.

DeVise is not without critics. Using census tract data, DeVise called Chicago the nation's most segregated city in a 1971 study. The City Hall expert, Lewis Hill, said his study showed the city had a smaller black population growth from 1960 to 1970 than other large cities. The difference, in part, was the base of the studies; Hill's used neighborhoods instead of census tracts.

But whatever his role— publicity seeker or serious student, gadfly or analyst, windmill tilter or prophet — DeVise has taken the social science researcher out of the academic closet into I the spotlight of public debate.

What will Chicago be like in the year 2000? This column will continue next month with DeVise's opinion.

30 / May 1976 / Illinois Issues