Over the following decades, the CCAC played a powerful role in Chicago's real estate development, while representatives of low-income members of central area communities (Pilsen and Cabrini–Green), asked for a louder voice in the planning process.
When Richard J. Daley was elected mayor of Chicago in 1955, he inherited a city dealing with the issues facing many urban American centers - mainly a decline in manufacturing and industrial jobs and the exodus of middle-class white residents to the outlying suburbs.
[2] As his term as Mayor progressed, Richard J. Daley's planning and development staff was continuing to create a relationship between City Hall and the downtown business community, mainly the CCAC.
"[3] Cautious of the feelings of many in the city's white population about racial mixing, the majority of the public housing built between 1946 and 1976 was contained in the 6-mile (9.7 km) square area of the South Loop which was almost an exclusively African-American neighborhood.
Three of Chicago's most influential business leaders, Gordon M. Metcalf, then CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Co., Donald M. Graham, CEO of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co. of Chicago (then the biggest employer in the downtown area) and Thomas G. Ayers, President of Commonwealth Edison Company, were the brain trust behind the idea of turning 600 blighted, abandoned acres of train yards located behind the old Dearborn Station on Polk Street into a mixed-income community of 120,000 people.
Residents of nearby Pilsen (Chicago's largest Mexican-American community) complained that the city was using precious public funds for new roads and infrastructure for Dearborn Park as their streets and schools fell into disrepair.
This redevelopment was to create an ever-increasing buffer zone to protect the downtown investments from the growing number of poor and minority people living in Chicago's surrounding neighborhoods.
"[citation needed] In his book Global Decisions, Local Collisions: Urban Life in the New World Order author David Ranney argues that, in attempting to appeal to commercial growth, the federal government has cut public housing programs and emphasized privatization.
A 1978 editorial in the Chicago Defender stated that "If this was a federally funded project, HUD, the Labor Department or some other agency would have descended on the planners with an ultimatum long ago.
"[citation needed] Starting in the 1950s, Chicago politicians steadfastly believed that the key to the city's economic survival was in revitalizing the central areas surrounding the Loop by luring white, middle- and upper-class professionals into renovated lofts and re-built neighborhoods.
City Hall gradually allied themselves with the business community, eventually ceding control of much large-scale planning to private organizations like the CCAC and the Chicago 21 Corporation.
As developers and planners vow they have the city's best interest at heart, those residents in the central areas charge that they are being driven out of their neighborhoods by new construction and rising property taxes.