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Former Chicagoan here. Grew up in Evanston and lived in Lakeview area for almost 20 years. We moved to a small town in Colorado a few years ago. Chicago is just

Former Chicagoan here. Grew up in Evanston and lived in Lakeview area for almost 20 years. We moved to a small town in Colorado a few years ago. Chicago is just constantly running against the wind. Violent crime is a game-changer (property crime is one thing, violent crime another), public schools are dysfunctional, taxes are bad and only getting worse, weather is terrible the majority of the year, and there's nothing particularly interesting to visit within a few hundred miles (though I've always loved western Michigan). Chicago has a culture that's gotten progressively uglier and makes a lot of people generally not want to live there. I could go on, and I'm not saying anything unique. It's just running against the wind and prevents Chicago from ever really taking off and reaching escape velocity. It would take a real unicorn to jumpstart things more. Btw you ask any former Chicagoan and they'll say the same thing: their only regret was not moving sooner.

turndown 4y ago
I've also lived in Chicago/Chicagoland >20 years. Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore. I have no idea what you mean by uglier culture. Also, for anyone not from around here, Chicago has a significant crime delta between neighborhoods that, if one were to read about it, can only be thought of in terms of extreme racial injustice. 0: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/2013_Chicago_Homicide_Map.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/2013_Chi...
- helloworld11 4y ago
  >Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore. So you've spoken to a large number of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the neighborhoods most plagued by crime and know that they don't complain about it? It just has to be some derogatory classification of subgroup such as "old white people", As if the hundreds of murders per year were little more than something for them to whine about? >Chicago has a significant crime delta between neighborhoods that, if one were to read about it, can only be thought of in terms of extreme racial injustice. "Only" in terms of racial injustice? So those violent crime numbers by neighborhood are entirely the fault of the aforementioned white people? The people actually committing them in these neighborhoods have no agency or fault in what they do to their own neighborhoods? This logic just keeps getting more twisted in the absurdities it has to push to sustain itself. Doubtless there is racial injustice in a U.S. city with a famously corrupt police/civil administration like Chicago, but in recent decades Chicago has had multiple black mayors and a large percentage of its government and police are staffed by African Americans or people of color in general. Yet they somehow have had no say or co-responsibility for anything that has remained problematic?
  - turndown 4y ago
    >So you've spoken to a large number of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the neighborhoods most plagued by crime and know that they don't complain about it? It just has to be some derogatory classification of subgroup such as "old white people", As if the hundreds of murders per year were little more than something for them to whine about? Basically a strawman but whatever, I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View, two places I will call light on crime compared to South Side. OP is trying to describe Chicago as crime-ridden - when in actuality they would have never lived anywhere near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and are only operating on fear-mongering. >Only" in terms of racial injustice? So those violent crime numbers by neighborhood are entirely the fault of the aforementioned white people? The people actually committing them in these neighborhoods have no agency or fault in what they do to their own neighborhoods? Again, a strawman, but whatever. If you want to paint the problems of an entire area on someone/some group, then the government that dominates your local area is the best option. >This logic just keeps getting more twisted in the absurdities it has to push to sustain itself. When you twist everyone's words to misrepresent them and make them illogical, are you shocked that you get lemonade from lemons? >Doubtless there is racial injustice in a U.S. city with a famously corrupt police/civil administration like Chicago, but in recent decades Chicago has had multiple black mayors and a large percentage of its government and police are staffed by African Americans or people of color in general That's right, because there have been three black mayors since 1983 and because there is no more explicit policy of racism in the Chicago PD no policies that were formulated by racism, or economic impacts from racism exist anymore.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      >OP is trying to describe Chicago as crime-ridden - when in actuality they would have never lived anywhere near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and are only operating on fear-mongering. Besides being a pretty low-quality, racist comment overall (e.g., "I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View"), this specific bit of reasoning is particularly poorly-reasoned. Two things can be true: north-side Chicago can be crime ridden compared to other places and also it can have less crime than South-Side Chicago. The latter doesn't refute the former.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  > Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore. Unless "old" is >29, there are plenty of people who still complain about crime in Chicago including many black people (black communities have been most impacted by the 2014-onward crime wave). But Chicago is a segregated city, so the cushier, largely white, progressive neighborhoods are more insulated from both crime and minority opinion about crime. There are definitely lots of Fox News listeners who complain about Chicago's crime (my father-in-law being among them), but while the Fox caricature might be inaccurate, crime is still very much an issue even to the "old" 30+ crowd of various races and ethnicities.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    The Chicago crime narrative is mostly a bad-faith political football. By the numbers, it's safer to be a professional in Chicago than it was at any point in the 1990s, where this wasn't part of the national conversation. But a movement towards criminal justice reform (which started out bipartisan, with Koch support!) elected a bunch of high-profile reformist prosecutors and shifted everyone's attention towards police oversight at exactly the least congenial time, on the eve of a bunch of exogenous shocks (the pandemic, the economy, the full flowering of a disastrous anti-gang policing strategy) that juiced violent crime. There's political hay to be made of the crime numbers (Chicago's are far from the worst of all the metro areas in the US, but we're such a large city that the decontextualized numbers are easy to sell on TV), and easy sides to take --- the defunders on one end, the "tough on crime" conservatives on the other, here to make the case that Chicago (and Philly and San Francisco) fucked up by electing reformist Democrats to prosecutor posts, and so now crime is the first word out of everyone's mouth when it comes to this city. Notably, none of that attention has anything to do with improving the lot of the people who live in Lawndale or South Shore; the national conversation basically boils down to whether we should create National Guard cordons around these areas, or whether we should instead abolish the police departments in these neighborhoods. It's a joke, not a public policy debate. We're not going to resolve any of it on this thread. It sounds callous to say this because it is callous, but it is also, non-normatively, the descriptive correct answer for professionals wondering about how crime in Chicago would effect them: if you don't live in the hardest neighborhoods in Chicago, it's unlikely to be meaningfully different from any other comparably dense urban area.
curiousllama 4y ago
This is the opinion I always hear - but, after a decade, never really understood. (no shade - you're definitely in the majority with this opinion!) Crime is bad, but concentrated in some parts of the city. Sure, I can't leave my bike with a cheap lock, but I've also lived in some questionable areas and never had real issues - nor have 95%+ of people I know, about the same rate as friends in other major cities (Philly, DC, etc.) Public schools are dysfunctional - yea, I guess I'm young, but isn't that similar in most major cities? Taxes are bad - yes, but so is NY/SF. Getting worse - fair point. Agree there. Weather - yea, fair. Sucks hard. Travel - yes, nothing close - but it's also an airline hub for 2/3 major airlines, and it's easy to get $100 tix to cool places. I guess I may have just been too young much of the time to "get it." But it has so many great things, too - the summers, the restaurants, the colleges, the neighborhood variety & subcultures. I kinda just wish I could buy long-term Calls on Chicago.
- bedhead 4y ago
  The crime issue is debatable based on various stats, and I would tie partly into my general comment about the culture having become uglier, but to me it felt like violent crime was a smog cloud constantly over the city. Sure, the odds of something bad happening to me or my family was very low in the absolute, but it was off the charts relative to others places. The reports of shootings and carjackings and armed robberies in my neighborhood were disconcerting and we would alter our lives to help avoid stuff. Eventually, I looked at my wife and said, "You know, we don't have to live like this. This isn't normal. It's only normal here." It's weird when you're surrounded by it every day for decades, like anything else it becomes normalized. CPS is uniquely dysfunctional with the number of times they strike. I had three kids in Coonley and the mood was constantly adversarial. The teachers see everyone as the enemy. It was pervasive and nasty and it spilled into the classroom. Like many other things it's become self-sorting. The good teachers mostly want to take a pay cut to go to a private school where the culture is different, and same for families that place a high value on education. The public system is the residual, and I'd say this is proven in various grim stats. I really just think the culture is ugly, I don't know how else to say it. Everything felt negative, everyone was angry. Leaders (and the majority who elect them) de facto support and enable all this dysfunction because for various reasons it's now part of their ethos. It wasn't until we moved that I understood it, and I admit it's very difficult to articulate. I'm not saying Chicago is a hell hole, but the future of Chicago is at best stagnant to me...real estate values partly prove that. Migration stats, especially among high earners, should be deeply concerning to anyone involved. I haven't even touched on how financially screwed Illinois is. The city just looks checkmated to me. This isn't Rochester but it's clearly in decline. When the companies start leaving is when people should start taking it really seriously, and we just had Caterpillar, Boeing, and now Citadel all bail, Citadel quite publicly. We can debate all sorts of things but the scoreboard here, the ultimate things which we'd use to measure a city's overall health and direction, is deeply and objectively troubling.
tptacek 4y ago
I grew up in Beverly, on the south side of Chicago, and moved to Lakeview when I was 18. I moved from Chicago to San Francisco (I lived at 7th and Folsom), and then back again, regretting only that I hadn't moved back sooner. Then a company I started got funded and I got hauled back to San Francisco (this time in Noe Valley), where I stayed for another couple years, before moving back to the midwest (Ann Arbor), regretting only that I put up with San Francisco for as long as I did. We lived in Ann Arbor for 4 years before moving back to Chicago and putting down roots. I had vastly bigger problems with crime in San Francisco than I did in Chicago. I've only heard about the public school problems in San Francisco; my kids public school here has extraordinarily well-compensated teachers who ran a pretty competent college-prep playbook that got both of my kids into hardcore STEM majors (the boy's a biochemist now, the girl is out in Utah doing geology field work). The weather was literally the first thing I missed about Chicago. I don't know what "culture" means to you, but one of the first things I noticed about SFBA was that none of the touring bands I followed ever played there (a track record of closing every music venue in the city for like a decade couldn't have helped, a story you'll find well told at Jamie Zawinski's blog), and last call at the bars was, like, 11PM. Does culture mean museums? Check. Public art and architecture? Check. A theater scene? Check. I'm sure Colorado is lovely and don't begrudge you your preferences. I don't think it's at all true that if you "ask any former Chicagoan" you're going to get agreement on all these points, or even most of them. If you'd said you grew up in Evanston and then lived in Kenwood, or Humboldt Park, the violent crime thing would be easier to take seriously --- but you lived in Evanston and Lakeview, which means that as far as violent crime exposure goes, you might as well have lived in Glenview. Chicago has a violent crime problem, but it's a deeply racist violent crime problem (not just demographically, with crime endemic to regions of the city that were de jure segregated until the 1970s, but literally racially: violent crime will follow you across the city border into the suburbs, but only if you're Black and have Black friends on the other side of the border). I'm a startup operator in Chicago, and we do not have a good startup scene. Don't let me be taken as saying there's no tradeoffs to being here. You don't come to Chicago because it's going to be a game-changing win for your startup.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  > A theater scene? Check. Oh my god do I miss the theater scene. My new city has some big name venues, but just can't compare to the local productions
esoterica 4y ago
I don’t mean to downplay Chicago’s crime problem, which is very bad, but if you’re not a gang member and you don’t live on the south side your odds of getting murdered in lakeview are literally orders of magnitude lower than your chances of dying in a car crash in rural Colorado where you have to drive long distances to get anywhere and everyone has a pointlessly huge truck optimized for inflicting maximum carnage in an accident. When you go from a dense, transit friendly city where people drive less to a rural auto-oriented one, your odds of dying an untimely and violent death go up dramatically, even if the latter has much less crime.
NonNefarious 4y ago
Really? You encountered a bunch of violent crime in Lakeview? The unusable schools and taxation are way bigger issues, and the everyday corruption through which the city rips off citizens is despicable (much of it revolving around their vehicles). The special tax it imposed on Netflix and similar services stands as a particularly egregious embarrassment. But the complaints about the weather are tired, overblown BS. If you don't want to experience real seasons, don't live in a seasonal area. The "oh it's so cold" one is particularly bogus, since bouts of extreme cold are typically short (and getting shorter) followed by 45-degree F periods all winter long.
RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
Chicago is slowly dying by self imposed policies. Cue in guy shoving stick into bicycle wheel then holding shin meme. Chicago is a great city and everything you mentioned is completely avoidable. But again, its shoving a stick into its own wheel, quite intentfully at that.

turndown 4y ago

I've also lived in Chicago/Chicagoland >20 years. Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore. I have no idea what you mean by uglier culture. Also, for anyone not from around here, Chicago has a significant crime delta between neighborhoods that, if one were to read about it, can only be thought of in terms of extreme racial injustice. 0: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/2013_Chicago_Homicide_Map.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/2013_Chi...

helloworld11 4y ago
>Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore. So you've spoken to a large number of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the neighborhoods most plagued by crime and know that they don't complain about it? It just has to be some derogatory classification of subgroup such as "old white people", As if the hundreds of murders per year were little more than something for them to whine about? >Chicago has a significant crime delta between neighborhoods that, if one were to read about it, can only be thought of in terms of extreme racial injustice. "Only" in terms of racial injustice? So those violent crime numbers by neighborhood are entirely the fault of the aforementioned white people? The people actually committing them in these neighborhoods have no agency or fault in what they do to their own neighborhoods? This logic just keeps getting more twisted in the absurdities it has to push to sustain itself. Doubtless there is racial injustice in a U.S. city with a famously corrupt police/civil administration like Chicago, but in recent decades Chicago has had multiple black mayors and a large percentage of its government and police are staffed by African Americans or people of color in general. Yet they somehow have had no say or co-responsibility for anything that has remained problematic?
- turndown 4y ago
  >So you've spoken to a large number of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the neighborhoods most plagued by crime and know that they don't complain about it? It just has to be some derogatory classification of subgroup such as "old white people", As if the hundreds of murders per year were little more than something for them to whine about? Basically a strawman but whatever, I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View, two places I will call light on crime compared to South Side. OP is trying to describe Chicago as crime-ridden - when in actuality they would have never lived anywhere near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and are only operating on fear-mongering. >Only" in terms of racial injustice? So those violent crime numbers by neighborhood are entirely the fault of the aforementioned white people? The people actually committing them in these neighborhoods have no agency or fault in what they do to their own neighborhoods? Again, a strawman, but whatever. If you want to paint the problems of an entire area on someone/some group, then the government that dominates your local area is the best option. >This logic just keeps getting more twisted in the absurdities it has to push to sustain itself. When you twist everyone's words to misrepresent them and make them illogical, are you shocked that you get lemonade from lemons? >Doubtless there is racial injustice in a U.S. city with a famously corrupt police/civil administration like Chicago, but in recent decades Chicago has had multiple black mayors and a large percentage of its government and police are staffed by African Americans or people of color in general That's right, because there have been three black mayors since 1983 and because there is no more explicit policy of racism in the Chicago PD no policies that were formulated by racism, or economic impacts from racism exist anymore.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    >OP is trying to describe Chicago as crime-ridden - when in actuality they would have never lived anywhere near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and are only operating on fear-mongering. Besides being a pretty low-quality, racist comment overall (e.g., "I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View"), this specific bit of reasoning is particularly poorly-reasoned. Two things can be true: north-side Chicago can be crime ridden compared to other places and also it can have less crime than South-Side Chicago. The latter doesn't refute the former.
throwaway894345 4y ago
> Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore. Unless "old" is >29, there are plenty of people who still complain about crime in Chicago including many black people (black communities have been most impacted by the 2014-onward crime wave). But Chicago is a segregated city, so the cushier, largely white, progressive neighborhoods are more insulated from both crime and minority opinion about crime. There are definitely lots of Fox News listeners who complain about Chicago's crime (my father-in-law being among them), but while the Fox caricature might be inaccurate, crime is still very much an issue even to the "old" 30+ crowd of various races and ethnicities.
- tptacek 4y ago
  The Chicago crime narrative is mostly a bad-faith political football. By the numbers, it's safer to be a professional in Chicago than it was at any point in the 1990s, where this wasn't part of the national conversation. But a movement towards criminal justice reform (which started out bipartisan, with Koch support!) elected a bunch of high-profile reformist prosecutors and shifted everyone's attention towards police oversight at exactly the least congenial time, on the eve of a bunch of exogenous shocks (the pandemic, the economy, the full flowering of a disastrous anti-gang policing strategy) that juiced violent crime. There's political hay to be made of the crime numbers (Chicago's are far from the worst of all the metro areas in the US, but we're such a large city that the decontextualized numbers are easy to sell on TV), and easy sides to take --- the defunders on one end, the "tough on crime" conservatives on the other, here to make the case that Chicago (and Philly and San Francisco) fucked up by electing reformist Democrats to prosecutor posts, and so now crime is the first word out of everyone's mouth when it comes to this city. Notably, none of that attention has anything to do with improving the lot of the people who live in Lawndale or South Shore; the national conversation basically boils down to whether we should create National Guard cordons around these areas, or whether we should instead abolish the police departments in these neighborhoods. It's a joke, not a public policy debate. We're not going to resolve any of it on this thread. It sounds callous to say this because it is callous, but it is also, non-normatively, the descriptive correct answer for professionals wondering about how crime in Chicago would effect them: if you don't live in the hardest neighborhoods in Chicago, it's unlikely to be meaningfully different from any other comparably dense urban area.

curiousllama 4y ago

This is the opinion I always hear - but, after a decade, never really understood. (no shade - you're definitely in the majority with this opinion!) Crime is bad, but concentrated in some parts of the city. Sure, I can't leave my bike with a cheap lock, but I've also lived in some questionable areas and never had real issues - nor have 95%+ of people I know, about the same rate as friends in other major cities (Philly, DC, etc.) Public schools are dysfunctional - yea, I guess I'm young, but isn't that similar in most major cities? Taxes are bad - yes, but so is NY/SF. Getting worse - fair point. Agree there. Weather - yea, fair. Sucks hard. Travel - yes, nothing close - but it's also an airline hub for 2/3 major airlines, and it's easy to get $100 tix to cool places. I guess I may have just been too young much of the time to "get it." But it has so many great things, too - the summers, the restaurants, the colleges, the neighborhood variety & subcultures. I kinda just wish I could buy long-term Calls on Chicago.

bedhead 4y ago
The crime issue is debatable based on various stats, and I would tie partly into my general comment about the culture having become uglier, but to me it felt like violent crime was a smog cloud constantly over the city. Sure, the odds of something bad happening to me or my family was very low in the absolute, but it was off the charts relative to others places. The reports of shootings and carjackings and armed robberies in my neighborhood were disconcerting and we would alter our lives to help avoid stuff. Eventually, I looked at my wife and said, "You know, we don't have to live like this. This isn't normal. It's only normal here." It's weird when you're surrounded by it every day for decades, like anything else it becomes normalized. CPS is uniquely dysfunctional with the number of times they strike. I had three kids in Coonley and the mood was constantly adversarial. The teachers see everyone as the enemy. It was pervasive and nasty and it spilled into the classroom. Like many other things it's become self-sorting. The good teachers mostly want to take a pay cut to go to a private school where the culture is different, and same for families that place a high value on education. The public system is the residual, and I'd say this is proven in various grim stats. I really just think the culture is ugly, I don't know how else to say it. Everything felt negative, everyone was angry. Leaders (and the majority who elect them) de facto support and enable all this dysfunction because for various reasons it's now part of their ethos. It wasn't until we moved that I understood it, and I admit it's very difficult to articulate. I'm not saying Chicago is a hell hole, but the future of Chicago is at best stagnant to me...real estate values partly prove that. Migration stats, especially among high earners, should be deeply concerning to anyone involved. I haven't even touched on how financially screwed Illinois is. The city just looks checkmated to me. This isn't Rochester but it's clearly in decline. When the companies start leaving is when people should start taking it really seriously, and we just had Caterpillar, Boeing, and now Citadel all bail, Citadel quite publicly. We can debate all sorts of things but the scoreboard here, the ultimate things which we'd use to measure a city's overall health and direction, is deeply and objectively troubling.

tptacek 4y ago

I grew up in Beverly, on the south side of Chicago, and moved to Lakeview when I was 18. I moved from Chicago to San Francisco (I lived at 7th and Folsom), and then back again, regretting only that I hadn't moved back sooner. Then a company I started got funded and I got hauled back to San Francisco (this time in Noe Valley), where I stayed for another couple years, before moving back to the midwest (Ann Arbor), regretting only that I put up with San Francisco for as long as I did. We lived in Ann Arbor for 4 years before moving back to Chicago and putting down roots. I had vastly bigger problems with crime in San Francisco than I did in Chicago. I've only heard about the public school problems in San Francisco; my kids public school here has extraordinarily well-compensated teachers who ran a pretty competent college-prep playbook that got both of my kids into hardcore STEM majors (the boy's a biochemist now, the girl is out in Utah doing geology field work). The weather was literally the first thing I missed about Chicago. I don't know what "culture" means to you, but one of the first things I noticed about SFBA was that none of the touring bands I followed ever played there (a track record of closing every music venue in the city for like a decade couldn't have helped, a story you'll find well told at Jamie Zawinski's blog), and last call at the bars was, like, 11PM. Does culture mean museums? Check. Public art and architecture? Check. A theater scene? Check. I'm sure Colorado is lovely and don't begrudge you your preferences. I don't think it's at all true that if you "ask any former Chicagoan" you're going to get agreement on all these points, or even most of them. If you'd said you grew up in Evanston and then lived in Kenwood, or Humboldt Park, the violent crime thing would be easier to take seriously --- but you lived in Evanston and Lakeview, which means that as far as violent crime exposure goes, you might as well have lived in Glenview. Chicago has a violent crime problem, but it's a deeply racist violent crime problem (not just demographically, with crime endemic to regions of the city that were de jure segregated until the 1970s, but literally racially: violent crime will follow you across the city border into the suburbs, but only if you're Black and have Black friends on the other side of the border). I'm a startup operator in Chicago, and we do not have a good startup scene. Don't let me be taken as saying there's no tradeoffs to being here. You don't come to Chicago because it's going to be a game-changing win for your startup.

curiousllama 4y ago
> A theater scene? Check. Oh my god do I miss the theater scene. My new city has some big name venues, but just can't compare to the local productions

esoterica 4y ago

I don’t mean to downplay Chicago’s crime problem, which is very bad, but if you’re not a gang member and you don’t live on the south side your odds of getting murdered in lakeview are literally orders of magnitude lower than your chances of dying in a car crash in rural Colorado where you have to drive long distances to get anywhere and everyone has a pointlessly huge truck optimized for inflicting maximum carnage in an accident. When you go from a dense, transit friendly city where people drive less to a rural auto-oriented one, your odds of dying an untimely and violent death go up dramatically, even if the latter has much less crime.

NonNefarious 4y ago

Really? You encountered a bunch of violent crime in Lakeview? The unusable schools and taxation are way bigger issues, and the everyday corruption through which the city rips off citizens is despicable (much of it revolving around their vehicles). The special tax it imposed on Netflix and similar services stands as a particularly egregious embarrassment. But the complaints about the weather are tired, overblown BS. If you don't want to experience real seasons, don't live in a seasonal area. The "oh it's so cold" one is particularly bogus, since bouts of extreme cold are typically short (and getting shorter) followed by 45-degree F periods all winter long.

RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago

Chicago is slowly dying by self imposed policies. Cue in guy shoving stick into bicycle wheel then holding shin meme. Chicago is a great city and everything you mentioned is completely avoidable. But again, its shoving a stick into its own wheel, quite intentfully at that.