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As someone who lives in Chicago, I would caution against taking the claims in this post as face value. This specific point is not true: >3) Without adequate fu

As someone who lives in Chicago, I would caution against taking the claims in this post as face value. This specific point is not true: >3) Without adequate funding, crime has skyrocketed as the city continues to crumble, unable to provide basic services. This hits the poor disproportionately. The demographics of the city are changing rapidly, anyone who lived here “years ago” and thinks they know about living here today is working with old data.

bilbo0s 7y ago
I honestly couldn't tell which one of you was being truthful? I thought maybe you were trying to make Chicago seem better than it is or maybe HN User "jostmey" was being a bit alarmist. Anyway, I had to google thee historical violent crime data myself. Turns out neither of you are being entirely honest. GP is definitely wrong when he asserts that crime has skyrocketed from "three decades ago". Would have been late 80s, early 90s and historical data says crime was much higher at that time. (Multiple times higher actually. So "jostmey" was not a little off, but way off on that assertion according to data.) And you're not being entirely honest when you say demographics have changed and imply that means a change in crime rates. At least, the rate of decrease of violent crime has gone nowhere over the past 30 years or so. It's decreasing at the same rate today, as it was in 2009, and in 1999. Meanwhile, demographic rate of change was near constant until it ratcheted up around 2008 apparently. (And then only in downtown, and only in the income dimension. Not racially.) So, following your implication, the rate of decline in, say, violent crime, should have ratcheted up around that time as well. The really interesting thing though is that even if I had validated either of your assertions in the data, neither of your explanations shed much light on plausible reasons for the disparity the article mentions. It's like you two just took your preferred world views and started arguing with each other without regard to what the data actually stated, or even what the original question actually was. I mean, OK, we get it. You like Chicago. Fine. Just say that and leave it at that, don't try to snow us. Same with "jostmey". We get it. You don't like Chicago. Just say that and leave it there. Why try to blow smoke up our collective rears?
- moorhosj 7y ago
  According to Census ACS from 2017, the city went from 35% Black in 2010 to 30.5% in 2017. That is a pretty rapid shift in under s decade. Hard numbers fell from 930k to 830k. Most of the population loss is concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods. There are also plenty of South Side neighborhoods that are doing quite well (Hyde Park, Beverly, Mt Greenwood, Kenwood, Woodlawn, McKinley Park, Chinatown, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Garfield Ridge, and a few more). Those places don’t get the news coverage so everyone lumps an entire 1/3 of the city into “dump”. ==https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    Sigh. OK moorhosj, let's try to step through this. What does that have to do with Chicago's life expectancy disparity being 30 years? Are you saying then, that what we should really be doing is comparing the life expectancy of people in Chinatown, with people in Chinatown, instead of comparing people across your whole city? Because what I'm trying to explain to you guys is that, this is not how the rest of us outside Chicago think. If you were to ask me, I would say, yeah, it seems totally reasonable to compare life expectancies across the entire city of Madison for instance. (I'm from Wisconsin.) I'd wager if you'd ask someone from Nebraska, they'd say, "Yeah, it seems reasonable to compare life expectancies for people across the entire city of Lincoln." We're not coming up with some off the wall metric to try to make Chicago look bad here. You and this "jostmey" guy are doing that for us. Finally, look, for the average person, we see a black guy, we're gonna say he's black. Not "Two or more races". Not "Black with hispanic origin". Etc etc etc. So, going back to the original point, we didn't get hung up on that stuff 3 decades ago. In 70, 80,90, whatever, we, even the census,just called people black. (Maybe we might have called them mixed if they were mixed, but that's certainly not how our censuses would have counted them back then.) So, you throw the 2 or more ethnicities or whatever group in and you get, what? 33, 34% of what we in 1980 would have simply called "black"? I'd be willing to bet money that the two or more races / hispanic census stuff started right around the same time that the percentage of blacks in the census declined. Point being, these ratios aren't really changing much. Only society's definitions of what is black has changed. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, maybe that's neither? The point I'm making is that demographics aren't changing much from 80, 90, 00 whatever. At least racially. Fewer total people, yes. But the ratios seem to be relatively constant. Now if you go back further, obviously you get radical change. But the original post said "last three decades". So you have to look at the last 3 decades, and not cherry pick.
yardie 7y ago
Has the city caught up on its debt? Have taxes been raised to adequately fund the city? Chicago is a “nice city” if you are inside the ring. Outside the ring are heavily secured rich enclaves, smoldering ghettoes, and the shrinkinh middle class communities who sit inbetween. Demographics may change, debt obligations do not.
- moorhosj 7y ago
  I think you effectively described every American city. Even Dallas, the example of a well-run city provided, had a pension bubble that almost burst into insolvency in 2017. ==https://interactives.dallasnews.com/2017/the-85th/issue/pensions/ https://interactives.dallasnews.com/2017/the-85th/issue/pens...
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Chicago’s problem is compounded by the fact that Illinois is extremely indebted, to the tune of tens of billions more compared to other states, and since Chicago is where all the money in Illinois is, that is where it will have to come from.
    - moorhosj 7y ago
      Half the state’s population lives in the Chicago suburbs, not the city. Most of the wealth is in the suburbs.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  "The ring"? Do you mean The Loop? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loop_(CTA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loop_(CTA) "The ring" turns up little particular to Chicago. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chicago+"the+ring"&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chicago+"the+ring"&ia=web There's also "collar counties": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collar_counties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collar_counties
- tptacek 7y ago
  I am having trouble connecting any part of this to the actual city of Chicago, in which there are no "heavily secured rich enclaves", and absolutely huge tracts of middle class bungalow-belt housing. You can drive to Lincolnshire or Kenilworth to see rich-folks compounds, in the suburbs. In Chicago, the white folks in Beverly and Oak Park and Evanston live in nice houses on small lots across the street from rougher neighborhoods. You'll find more metal gates in (rough) Lawndale than you will in (rich) Lincoln Park. Also, what is this "ring" you're talking about? Can you be more specific?
tptacek 7y ago
I've lived here my whole life (grew up in Beverly, moved to Lakeview and Uptown, ultimately ended up raising our family in Oak Park, just off Austin) and I don't know what change you're referring to.
- moorhosj 7y ago
  Right on time: Chicago’s new demographics: ‘A third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit’ >His analysis of U.S. Census Data found that between 2005 and 2017, the city of Chicago’s 25-39 year-old age cohort grew 15.7 percent, while falling dramatically in the rest of Cook County (7.2 percent drop) as well as the metro area outside of Cook County (5.9 percent decline). >In addition, between 2005-17, Chicago’s population of 25-44 year-olds with a bachelors degrees or additional advanced degrees grew 42 percent. As Saunders wrote in a Twitter thread sharing his findings, “An older, less educated, manufacturing-oriented populace is being replaced by a younger, more educated, knowledge-economy populace.” Chicago now has a higher share of college educated workers than the surrounding suburbs. ==https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/6/24/18691792/chicago-economy-development-demographics https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/6/24/18691792/chicago-econom...
  - tptacek 7y ago
    None of this has anything to do with crime in Chicago. By 2005, Uky Village, Wicker Park, Logan Square and Lincoln Square had been completely gentrified, so much so that we considered moving there with our kids. The fundamental dynamics of Chicago – the yuppy near-north and near-west side neighborhoods, the middle class northwest and bungalow belts, and the tragic, redlined west and south sides, has changed since I was a kid in Beverly. What you would have said about crime in Chicago in 1998 remains true today, with one possible change being that the 1990s gang crackdowns atomized the gangs and amplified the violence.
    - moorhosj 7y ago
      ==None of this has anything to do with crime in Chicago.== Sure it does. As working/middle-class jobs leave, neighborhoods who overwhelming relied on those jobs fall into a spiral of dis-investment, de-population and crime. ==the middle class northwest and bungalow belts== I think this is the part you are missing. Neighborhoods like Portage Park, Jefferson Park, Old Irving Park, Norwood Park and Avondale on the northwest side are not the same middle-class neighborhoods they were 15 years ago. They have become upper-middle class neighborhoods filled with young families. The traditional city workers who made these strong middle-class communities are getting priced out. The residency requirements are pushing them to other neighborhoods on the west and southwest side. This trend, along with future immigration may be the best hopes for revitalizing these neighborhoods. ==with one possible change being that the 1990s gang crackdowns atomized the gangs and amplified the violence. == Yes, breaking up the larger gangs has led to less-structured, block-by-block affiliations. That said, the homicide rate is lower today than it was in the 1990s.

bilbo0s 7y ago

I honestly couldn't tell which one of you was being truthful? I thought maybe you were trying to make Chicago seem better than it is or maybe HN User "jostmey" was being a bit alarmist. Anyway, I had to google thee historical violent crime data myself. Turns out neither of you are being entirely honest. GP is definitely wrong when he asserts that crime has skyrocketed from "three decades ago". Would have been late 80s, early 90s and historical data says crime was much higher at that time. (Multiple times higher actually. So "jostmey" was not a little off, but way off on that assertion according to data.) And you're not being entirely honest when you say demographics have changed and imply that means a change in crime rates. At least, the rate of decrease of violent crime has gone nowhere over the past 30 years or so. It's decreasing at the same rate today, as it was in 2009, and in 1999. Meanwhile, demographic rate of change was near constant until it ratcheted up around 2008 apparently. (And then only in downtown, and only in the income dimension. Not racially.) So, following your implication, the rate of decline in, say, violent crime, should have ratcheted up around that time as well. The really interesting thing though is that even if I had validated either of your assertions in the data, neither of your explanations shed much light on plausible reasons for the disparity the article mentions. It's like you two just took your preferred world views and started arguing with each other without regard to what the data actually stated, or even what the original question actually was. I mean, OK, we get it. You like Chicago. Fine. Just say that and leave it at that, don't try to snow us. Same with "jostmey". We get it. You don't like Chicago. Just say that and leave it there. Why try to blow smoke up our collective rears?

moorhosj 7y ago
According to Census ACS from 2017, the city went from 35% Black in 2010 to 30.5% in 2017. That is a pretty rapid shift in under s decade. Hard numbers fell from 930k to 830k. Most of the population loss is concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods. There are also plenty of South Side neighborhoods that are doing quite well (Hyde Park, Beverly, Mt Greenwood, Kenwood, Woodlawn, McKinley Park, Chinatown, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Garfield Ridge, and a few more). Those places don’t get the news coverage so everyone lumps an entire 1/3 of the city into “dump”. ==https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Sigh. OK moorhosj, let's try to step through this. What does that have to do with Chicago's life expectancy disparity being 30 years? Are you saying then, that what we should really be doing is comparing the life expectancy of people in Chinatown, with people in Chinatown, instead of comparing people across your whole city? Because what I'm trying to explain to you guys is that, this is not how the rest of us outside Chicago think. If you were to ask me, I would say, yeah, it seems totally reasonable to compare life expectancies across the entire city of Madison for instance. (I'm from Wisconsin.) I'd wager if you'd ask someone from Nebraska, they'd say, "Yeah, it seems reasonable to compare life expectancies for people across the entire city of Lincoln." We're not coming up with some off the wall metric to try to make Chicago look bad here. You and this "jostmey" guy are doing that for us. Finally, look, for the average person, we see a black guy, we're gonna say he's black. Not "Two or more races". Not "Black with hispanic origin". Etc etc etc. So, going back to the original point, we didn't get hung up on that stuff 3 decades ago. In 70, 80,90, whatever, we, even the census,just called people black. (Maybe we might have called them mixed if they were mixed, but that's certainly not how our censuses would have counted them back then.) So, you throw the 2 or more ethnicities or whatever group in and you get, what? 33, 34% of what we in 1980 would have simply called "black"? I'd be willing to bet money that the two or more races / hispanic census stuff started right around the same time that the percentage of blacks in the census declined. Point being, these ratios aren't really changing much. Only society's definitions of what is black has changed. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, maybe that's neither? The point I'm making is that demographics aren't changing much from 80, 90, 00 whatever. At least racially. Fewer total people, yes. But the ratios seem to be relatively constant. Now if you go back further, obviously you get radical change. But the original post said "last three decades". So you have to look at the last 3 decades, and not cherry pick.

yardie 7y ago

Has the city caught up on its debt? Have taxes been raised to adequately fund the city? Chicago is a “nice city” if you are inside the ring. Outside the ring are heavily secured rich enclaves, smoldering ghettoes, and the shrinkinh middle class communities who sit inbetween. Demographics may change, debt obligations do not.

moorhosj 7y ago
I think you effectively described every American city. Even Dallas, the example of a well-run city provided, had a pension bubble that almost burst into insolvency in 2017. ==https://interactives.dallasnews.com/2017/the-85th/issue/pensions/ https://interactives.dallasnews.com/2017/the-85th/issue/pens...
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Chicago’s problem is compounded by the fact that Illinois is extremely indebted, to the tune of tens of billions more compared to other states, and since Chicago is where all the money in Illinois is, that is where it will have to come from.
  - moorhosj 7y ago
    Half the state’s population lives in the Chicago suburbs, not the city. Most of the wealth is in the suburbs.
dredmorbius 7y ago
"The ring"? Do you mean The Loop? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loop_(CTA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loop_(CTA) "The ring" turns up little particular to Chicago. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chicago+"the+ring"&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chicago+"the+ring"&ia=web There's also "collar counties": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collar_counties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collar_counties
tptacek 7y ago
I am having trouble connecting any part of this to the actual city of Chicago, in which there are no "heavily secured rich enclaves", and absolutely huge tracts of middle class bungalow-belt housing. You can drive to Lincolnshire or Kenilworth to see rich-folks compounds, in the suburbs. In Chicago, the white folks in Beverly and Oak Park and Evanston live in nice houses on small lots across the street from rougher neighborhoods. You'll find more metal gates in (rough) Lawndale than you will in (rich) Lincoln Park. Also, what is this "ring" you're talking about? Can you be more specific?

tptacek 7y ago

I've lived here my whole life (grew up in Beverly, moved to Lakeview and Uptown, ultimately ended up raising our family in Oak Park, just off Austin) and I don't know what change you're referring to.

moorhosj 7y ago
Right on time: Chicago’s new demographics: ‘A third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit’ >His analysis of U.S. Census Data found that between 2005 and 2017, the city of Chicago’s 25-39 year-old age cohort grew 15.7 percent, while falling dramatically in the rest of Cook County (7.2 percent drop) as well as the metro area outside of Cook County (5.9 percent decline). >In addition, between 2005-17, Chicago’s population of 25-44 year-olds with a bachelors degrees or additional advanced degrees grew 42 percent. As Saunders wrote in a Twitter thread sharing his findings, “An older, less educated, manufacturing-oriented populace is being replaced by a younger, more educated, knowledge-economy populace.” Chicago now has a higher share of college educated workers than the surrounding suburbs. ==https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/6/24/18691792/chicago-economy-development-demographics https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/6/24/18691792/chicago-econom...
- tptacek 7y ago
  None of this has anything to do with crime in Chicago. By 2005, Uky Village, Wicker Park, Logan Square and Lincoln Square had been completely gentrified, so much so that we considered moving there with our kids. The fundamental dynamics of Chicago – the yuppy near-north and near-west side neighborhoods, the middle class northwest and bungalow belts, and the tragic, redlined west and south sides, has changed since I was a kid in Beverly. What you would have said about crime in Chicago in 1998 remains true today, with one possible change being that the 1990s gang crackdowns atomized the gangs and amplified the violence.
  - moorhosj 7y ago
    ==None of this has anything to do with crime in Chicago.== Sure it does. As working/middle-class jobs leave, neighborhoods who overwhelming relied on those jobs fall into a spiral of dis-investment, de-population and crime. ==the middle class northwest and bungalow belts== I think this is the part you are missing. Neighborhoods like Portage Park, Jefferson Park, Old Irving Park, Norwood Park and Avondale on the northwest side are not the same middle-class neighborhoods they were 15 years ago. They have become upper-middle class neighborhoods filled with young families. The traditional city workers who made these strong middle-class communities are getting priced out. The residency requirements are pushing them to other neighborhoods on the west and southwest side. This trend, along with future immigration may be the best hopes for revitalizing these neighborhoods. ==with one possible change being that the 1990s gang crackdowns atomized the gangs and amplified the violence. == Yes, breaking up the larger gangs has led to less-structured, block-by-block affiliations. That said, the homicide rate is lower today than it was in the 1990s.