Exploiting federal funds for urban renewal, they declared downtown black neighborhoods to be "slums," tore them down, and put up commercial buildings or housing for whites in their place. African-Americans were displaced into dilapidated neighborhoods, increasingly in all-black public housing projects. Most of the 21,000 family units of public housing erected in Chicago during the 1950s were built in already black regions of the city, thereby greatly increasing the density of blacks in these areas.24
