ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, October 19, 1996 TAG: 9610210055
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
Professor Julian H. Levi, a Chicago lawyer, educator, city planner and an influential advocate of urban renewal, died Wednesday at his home in San Francisco.
He was 87 and had formerly lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, where he helped stem the tide of urban blight that threatened to swamp the University of Chicago community in the 1950s.
Levi was one of the country's foremost experts in stabilizing racially changing neighborhoods and helped shape national urban policies.
He retired in 1980 as professor of urban studies at the University of Chicago. At his death he was a professor at the Hastings College of Law, part of the University of California at San Francisco.
Levi argued that vibrant urban environments should reflect the nation's diversity. He saw this as people naturally living, working and shopping together, places where white homeowners could sell to blacks and blacks to whites without ado.
From 1952 to 1980, he was the executive director of the South East Chicago Commission, which was created to save Hyde Park-Kenwood, the country's first large urban community to undergo such planned redemption at its own request.
Hyde Park-Kenwood was the only truly integrated section of Chicago. But whites, including members of the university faculty and staff, were fleeing en masse as mostly poor black Southerners moved in. Housing was falling apart, crime and drugs stalked streets, and what had been a desirable city environment was turning into a slum.
``The very life of the university is at stake,'' Lawrence Kimpton, the chancellor, warned the City Council at a time when the University of Chicago was seriously considering a new lease on life in the suburbs.
The response to the community's plight, with its implications for Chicago's future as a whole, was a ``total wallop,'' in Levi's phrase. It ranged from a Quaker group training dogs to patrol the campus against muggers to a huge influx of federal construction aid.
With the community, civic and religious groups, Chicago, Illinois and Washington all pulling together, and with Mayor Richard J. Daley's lending powerful political support, the effort became one of the country's great urban success stories.
The project involved an area of about 900 acres and some $200 million in city, federal, university and private money. Large tracts near the university were cleared as unredeemable, but the emphasis was strongly on preservation and rehabilitation.
Eighty percent of existing structures and gabled architecture lived to see a new day. And Hyde Park-Kenwood survived as the same highly articulate, highly organized and racially integrated community it was before.
In 1974, Daley named Levi chairman of the Planning Commission, giving him a hand in development throughout Chicago. Levi also helped draft amendments to the federal Housing Act.
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