Sunday, June 2, 2013

National Media Sources Finally Write Intelligently about Chicago

The national media continues to focus on the challenges and changes affecting Chicago, but finally we have a couple of examples of more thoughtful, complex reporting about our city.

The Death and Life of Chicago (Ben Austen, NY Times Magazine)

“We’re not like Detroit, cordoning off sections of the city,” Benet Haller, Chicago’s principal adviser for planning and design, told me. “But we are like London or Jakarta, with a hyperdense core — a zone of affluence — and something else beyond.” What the housing crisis has revealed, in stark relief, is a Chicago that already looks increasingly like this vision of a ring city, with the moneyed elite residing within the glow of that jewel-like core and the largely ethnic poor and working-class relegated to the peripheries, the banlieues."

Rahm's Kind of Town (David Von Drehle, Time Magazine Feature)

"Revealing the stripes of a pragmatic, pro-business New Democrat, the mayor has lengthened the school day for Chicago's elementary and high school students, reorganized the city's enormous system of community colleges to emphasize job-skills training and established an infrastructure trust to allow private investment in public-works projects. All of these are popular ideas among some Democratic policy mavns, but no other mayor has taken them so far, so fast."