(wood cracking) (oven shutting) - So, let's go wake up my thirteen-year-old.

(ominous music) (alarm ringing) Get up, turn your alarm off, okay?

I was living in an apartment in Hyde Park and we had a party-- - [Ari] Fourth of July.

- On the fourth of July, 1996.

- That was, you know, when we met.

- Yeah, she was really into me though.

(both laughing) That's not true.

Actually, I remember it.

(both laughing) Good morning.

(lips smacking) - [Ari] We looked at quite a few houses over here.

- Sleepy.

- We bought this house.

What was it, a month later?

I found out I was pregnant with our third kid.

- Was it in the kitchen?

Bring them here.

- It was just kind of relief that we did buy the house that we did, because I think we would have felt kinda cramped.

- [Ted] Yeah.

You wanna do it?

Did you brush your teeth?

- Yes.

- Look at me.

Did she brush your teeth?

- No.

(Ted laughing) - Go brush your teeth.

I had an attitude about the house.

I think when we first moved here, I felt like it was a place where we would settle and raise our children.

- [Daughter] I hear mommy.

- You hear Mommy?

Okay.

- [Daughter] Mommy is here.

- Is Mommy here?

Okay, good.

It felt like, you know, a home that we had not had before.

But I'm over it, honestly.

I'm over it.

We're selling our house.

It feels like a good moment for a change.

- [Ari] I am not going to miss the home.

It's called the Jackson Park Highlands.

- [Ted] Jackson Park Highlands is a part of South Shore.

It's a community within that broader neighborhood.

- [Ari] It definitely has a reputation of being a tight knit community.

It can look really pretty and nice over here, but at the same time, there's a lot of violence.

- You got everything?

- 71st is just a few steps away and we get a lot of residual traffic, drug traffic, and shootings.

- Why you all dressed up today?

(Ted laughing) - I don't let Cosima walk to where there's the bus stop or the Metro by herself.

I'm tired of having that anxiety.

- As our children get older, we'd like for them to be able to move around, have places to go in the community they live in.

There's been a frustrating lack of just general investment in the community.

Like, 71st Street lacks a lot of amenities and resources.

- I mean, it's just easy to see the difference in development that's happening in Hyde Park.

And then you come here, there's nothing happening on 71st Street.

(car engine revving) - It would also be nice if we could go get anything on 71st Street, there really is very little.

We lived there for what, six years, before we even had a grocery store in the neighborhood.

(train bell dinging) South Shore, more generally, being near the lakefront, having easy public transportation downtown.

I mean, there's beautiful homes, not just in the Highlands, but throughout south shore, there's really beautiful homes.

So it felt like-- - [Ari] There was a lot of potential.

- [Ted] There was a lot of potential for growth and for more development.

- [Daughter] Pick a card, any card.

(Ted and Ari laughing) You'll become everything in the whole entire world.

- Everything?

I like that.

And I think like, we have the means in this neighborhood to be able to help the broader area.

But I don't know if the interest is even there.

- I'm leaving, have a good day.

- It's early.

- Okay.

- I still feel like it's early.

- I love you.

- Is it in there?

- There's a white, lightweight, like economic class in the neighborhoods.

If you immediately say Jack's by Highlands, it's like a signifier of your social class.

- And I do the opposite.

Somebody asked me, I'm like, oh, I live over in south shore.

And it's almost like, I don't want to be seen as like, this class is person.

- There've been times where we felt like, rather than try to like uplift south shore as a whole, people are much more concerned with just-- - Just this little enclave.

- You know, and looking down on the rest of the community, which we don't feel like really helps anyone.

To east 42nd?

- Mm-hmm.

- Wait a second.

- And then Chicago, you have people who have certain ideas about you and you're a black person.

I had this woman one time she dropped off Uber eats and she was like, oh my, my husband said he was coming with me because I shouldn't be on the south side by myself.

I mean, they tried to feed you that when you went to, when you came to go to college.

- Yeah.

As soon as I got there, it was like very clear boundaries where you shouldn't cross.

Yeah.

They said, don't go past 47th street.

What they didn't say out loud because it would've sounded too obviously racist was that what they were really saying was don't cross the street because that's where black people live.

That's what they were actually saying.

So this is where you have to go in order to get to Jackson park.

'Cause you can see that it's all - [Ari] Right fenced off.

Right.

So Jackson park, because of the golf course, you can't access it from the south at all.

Now, if we were in high park, we'd just be able to walk right into it.

- Yeah, this house came up on the market yesterday I think.

- Segregation isn't just about people choosing to live in different spaces.

It's about how resources are distributed.

- Just turn around.

That's a lot of space to build in Bronzeville.

- Yeah it's amazing.

- I'm hoping that's all left-- - When they're building to everywhere.

If you live in a neighborhood, anywhere in Chicago, you could encounter things like violence.

Right.

This looks like a nice park over here, but we still wanna feel like we're part of a community as a whole where people are looking for holistic solutions to those problems rather than just like-- - We got out of the police patrols up in our neighborhood.

- Yeah.

- You know, just these very-- - Yeah.

I mean, and that's the only kind of solution that people talk about here.

There are a lot of things that could be improved in the neighborhood that would, alleviate some of the violence.

- [Ari] So at first we weren't even gonna look west of King Drive.

I was really surprised it was this much, development over here.

- [Ted] The lots are smaller here than in the Highlands, but they make more creative about the use of it.

I used to spend a lot of time in Bronzeville.

It's changed so much.

- [Ari] Yeah.

- Since the 90's, you know.

- [Ari] I think they're just gonna just develop on this land.

I hope that, you know, you don't see a lot of people get pushed out.

We've been here forever either, you know.

That's the tricky part.

Oh now watch out, don't hit none of these kids, you know how they just walk right down in front of you.

- They got a whole police force just to help him walk across the street.

(both laugh) That's the business school too.

So, you know.

- So this was the house that we looked at where like , we loved.

- We really liked it.

- My family has a home on 62nd in Greenwood.

So it's just the next block down.

And that's been my family's for over 50 years.

My grandmother was heavily involved in like helping to keep the university from pushing this way.

- We wanna live in an area that's safe and has like nice stores and all that kind of stuff.

Restaurants, everybody, everybody wants that.

Right?

But the history of the university has been to foster that development while excluding or removing people.

The south side of Chicago always is home for us.

Part of the reason that we want to stay on the south side is because we want our children to be raised around their community.

But there's a tension raising black children between the violence of under-resourced neighborhoods and the violence of having them in a predominantly white neighborhood.

Different kind of violence, but it's still like a violence.

In both cases.

We talked about safety in terms of like gun violence, but there's also like the other kind of safety, which is the safety to be who you are and not have to like justify your existence all the time.

I guess I would say that everyone wants to be in a place where they feel like they belong.

And so what segregation does and the inequity of resources that it results in leads to being forced to make a choice between belonging and having those best resources.

And so, you know, we've made our choice.

(ominous music)