Growth & Abandonment: Chicago's Population Continues to Shift

Why the Smartest People in the Midwest All Move to Chicago (Edward McClelland, Chicago Mag)

Despite Population Growth, Chicago Still at a Loss (Sun-Times)

The Census estimates came out today. Chicago gained about 10,000 over the last year - which is significant but still half the rate of growth in New York and L.A. Meanwhile, the only two major cities in America to loose population over the last year where Detroit and Cleveland. The trend continues. I suspect that Chicago's far South and West Sides are still loosing population at a steady clip. Most of this, again, is due to African American out-migration (90% of Chicago's population loss during the 2000 - 2010 decade can be attributed to "Black Flight"). I discussed the tragedy of this trend in earlier posts.

If we were to take Detroit as a comparable example to Chicago's South Side (they're very similar in terms of size, demographics and economic history), we might estimate that Chicago lost anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 people from these neighborhoods during 2012 (Detroit lost 12,000). This means that the city had to gain a total of 20k - 25k people in the Central Area, North and Northwest Sides to offset the loss on the South and West Sides. 20k - 25k would put Chicago right in line percentage-wise with the growth rates of New York in L.A., which don't have anything close to the poverty, decay and abandonment of the South and West Sides.

I illustrate this only to reinforce the point that Chicago is now two cities: One post-industrial city that is still in a free fall - becoming more and more impoverished and abandoned every year and another "Global" city that is growing as fast (if not faster) than any city in the country. This would explain why apartment occupancy and rents in the Central area and North Side are as high as they've ever been while the South Side continues to bleed.

Why do so many people think gun violence is getting worse? (Atlantic Cities)

"So why might this be? If gun violence has dramatically declined in America, and many cities are safer today as a result – and plenty of people moving back into them seem to intuitively understand this – why do so many people think gun violence is getting worse?"

The Hidden Geography of America's Surging Suicide Rate (Richard Florida, Atlantic Cities)

"While the economic crisis has clearly been a contributing factor to America's rising suicide rate, perhaps it is not the only, or even the most important factor, behind the surge. In fact, another key factor appears to be at play: guns. Guns are the leading cause of suicide by far, according to the CDC report, accounting for nearly half (48 percent) all suicides among adults ages 35 to 64 in 2010. Slightly less than a quarter of suicides of people in this age group are caused by suffocation, and another 22 percent are poisonings, mainly drug overdoses."

The Gilded City: Bloomberg's 21st Century New York (The Nation Special Issue)

"New York, of course, has always been a city of striking contrasts, but its wealth gap is growing ever more extreme. The richest 1 percent of New Yorkers claimed almost 39 percent of the city’s income share in 2012—up from 12 percent in 1980. The money pouring in at the top of the income brackets has simply pooled there, without trickling down to the bottom or even the middle. This great pooling has occurred as median wages have fallen, the cost of living has increased, and the poverty rate has risen to 21 percent—as high as it was in 1980. As a result, America’s most iconic city now has the same inequality index as Swaziland."

Chicago Responds to the New York Times & their transplant, Rachel Shteir

It's a periodic tradition for the New York Times to print something completely out of touch about Chicago, Detroit or the Midwest in general. Last year it was a travel piece written by a dim-witted bimbo. This year it was Rachel Shteir's turn. Shteir established her credibility on all maters related to Chicago by declaring in 2010 that Rahm Emanuel would never be mayor because the city wouldn't elect a Jew... yeah.

In the Sunday Book Review Stheir prefaced her limited comments on the three books she supposedly read by bashing Chicago with the great enthusiasm. As you can imagine, Chicago's local media has not taken kindly. Shteir claims to have lived here for 13 years but displays a level of insight about our City that I would expect from someone who's only seen Chicago through a layover at O'hare. Perhaps she spends her weekends in New York.

Not Quite Detroit - Chicago as Described by the New York Times Book Critic (The Reader)

Chicago- based New York Times Book Critic Doesn't Get Chicago (The Chicagoist)

Where Are Chicago's women writers? - Right Here (Claire Zulkey, WBEZ)

Keep Your Head up - you're a Chicagoan (Neil Steinberg, The Sun Times)

Why does Chicago care about New York Times' Dope Slap (Bill Savage, Crain's)

Rahm Dismisses, Disses Rachel Shteir's Caustic New York Times Review (DNA Info)

The Morning Shift (WBEZ)

Everything you need to know about why Chicago is Furious with Rachel Shteir and the New York Times (Atlantic Cities)

Why People Perceive Some Cities as Safer than Others (Atlantic Cities)

"...Not surprisingly, feeling unsafe is closely associated with race and poverty. Resident perceptions of safety across metros are negatively correlated with the share of the population that is non-white (-.55), the share of residents below the poverty line (-.53), and the unemployment rate (-.47)."

... Metro Areas that are percieved as the safest in America are also the least diverse among major cities.

Culture Clash: New history of Chicago taps into our malaise (Chicago Tribune)

"The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream," which comes out this week from Penguin Press, has a gentle title and a sanguine black-and-white cover image of the rotating beacon on the roof of the old Palmolive Building throwing light over Lake Michigan. It also has an elegant, unflinching, non-nostalgic clarity about Chicago that you rarely see in books about Chicago. It gave me a dizzying rush, the impression that I had come across a new touchstone in Chicago literature, an ambitious history lesson no one had written: The story of how, from 1945 to 1960, Chicago created the culture that shaped American culture, delivering, in that brief window, Studs Terkel, McDonald's, Hugh Hefner, the atom bomb, modernist architecture, Chess Records, The Second City, the Chicago School of Television and "Kukla, Fran and Ollie."

Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society (Edward Lifson, Architect's Newspaper)

"To end then, we quote Moholy-Nagy, from Chicago Makes Modern. He wrote his wife, "There’s something incomplete about this city and its people that fascinates me...It seems to urge one on to completion. Everything still seems possible.”

I look out of the Reliance Building lobby, on a pre-spring day on State Street. Out there, people of all backgrounds hurry by, bent forward against the elements that hit you in the face in this creative, modern American metropolis. Most peek only fleetingly through the glass lobby windows.

But we’re united by the tall towers above, some still rising, the new ones mostly of taut glass. And at ground level, as I travel through the city, I see an equal number of broken-glass-filled empty lots on which, here in Chicago, everything still seems possible."

NYC's Luxury Housing Market (Atlantic Cities)

"In New York, luxury ghost apartments have been steadily proliferating, with certain parts of Manhattan especially devoid of life According to a 2011 New York Times article, in the chunk of the Upper East Side where the Chinese woman bought her little girl a future dream home, “about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than 10 months a year.” Census figures from 2010 show that since 2000, there was a 70 percent increase in absentee-owned apartments in Manhattan, which jumped from 19,000 to 34,000, with the wealthiest neighborhoods seeing even more pronounced gains."

... More evidence that Manhattan has become a Luxury escape pod for the World's superweathly and their spoiled offspring.

Chicago tackles the next big challenge in urban ag: Growing farmers (Grist)

"A new, seven-acre urban “accelerator farm” taking root on Chicago’s south side will soon grow one of the Windy City’s most-needed crops: farmers."

CHA residents marginally better off than when living in high-rises (Chicago Tribune)

"Public housing residents in Chicago are marginally better off today than when they lived in the high-rise towers that have since been torn down, though more social services are needed to prevent a backslide, a study scheduled to be released Monday finds."

"Opportunity Areas:" Long-Term Strategic Vision (City of Chicago)

"As part of a holistic and strategic vision to foster and seize upon growth and development in neighborhoods across Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel today announced nearly $3 billion in private and public development projects in seven targeted Chicago neighborhoods through a new “Opportunity Planning” initiative. The neighborhoods include Englewood, Pullman, Rogers Park, Uptown, Little Village, Bronzeville, and the Eisenhower Corridor."

A Short Lesson in Perspective (The SF Egoist)

"The creative industry operates largely by holding ‘creative’ people ransom to their own self-image, precarious sense of self-worth, and fragile – if occasionally out of control ego. We tend to set ourselves impossibly high standards, and are invariably our own toughest critics. Satisfying our own lofty demands is usually a lot harder than appeasing any client, who in my experience tend to have disappointingly low expectations. Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go."

A Brief History of Suburbia's Rise & Fall (Eric Jaffe, Atlantic Cities)

"All told, these movements resulted in behaviors of avoidance ("the determination to escape the vice, disease, ugliness, and violence of the city") and attraction ("the desire to embrace the virtue, health, beauty, and seclusion of the countryside") that combined to form suburban culture."

Saving Chicago Greystones (WBEZ)

"Greystones are to Chicago what brownstones are to Brooklyn. And while many of these stately, limestone-faceted beauties line the grassy boulevards of wealthy North Side neighborhoods, many others exist in a state of neglect, disrepair or abandonment."

[Down-sizing Baby Boomers] could cause the next Housing Crises (Emily Badger, Atlantic Cities)

"A vast majority of today’s households with children still want such houses, Nelson says. But about a quarter of them want something else, like condos and urban townhouses. That demand "used to be almost zero percent, and if it’s now 25 percent,” Nelson says, “that’s a small share of the market but a huge shift in the market.” And this is half of the reason why many baby boomers may not find buyers for their homes. “Even if the numbers matched,” Nelson says, “the preferences don’t.”

An endangered piece of history beneath Lake Michigan's surface (Julia Thiel, The Reader)

"Today that boiler is still visible from the beach, a boxy metal structure rising a few feet above the top of the water. From the shore it's easy to mistake for a rock or chunk of concrete, and for years I saw it without giving it a second thought. Last August, on a bike ride with a friend, I passed the concrete blocks that separate the beach from the Lakefront Trail and noticed a sign colorfully markered on a dry-erase board: SHIPWRECK TOURS 10:30-NOON, FREE."

Q & A with IIT Professor Marshall Brown (Architect's Newspaper)

"One of the ideas that I hold consistently for myself and for my own practice, but also try to communicate to the students, is that I truly believe, and I try to help them understand, that architecture is a cultural practice. It’s a discursive practice that sometimes, if we’re lucky, results in building. Exploring the implications of what that means is really important for me."

Can Chicagoans save the waterway that made their city great? (Matthew Power, On Earth Magazine)

"In the alternate vision, however, the river meets all of these demands -- and more. Its proponents seek nothing less than to turn the Chicago River into a civic treasure, its newly cleaned banks lined with parks and homes and restored ecosystems, its very presence a clear and shimmering symbol of a great city built on making, trading, connecting: a symbol of American history’s inexorable flow toward progress. And in the bargain, they seek to make the river a living -- and flourishing -- example of environmental innovation and ecological stewardship, one that generations of Chicagoans will cherish."

The Area: A Vanishing Corner of Englewood

Why do we keep anointing "it" cities? (Chuck Thompson, The New Republic)

"It starts with the local brewpub. Always with the goddamn local brewpub, located in some renovated craftsman schoolhouse or 1920s fire station with the locally sourced Czechoslovakian-style hops and the brewmaster with the certification from the Golden Barley Council or whatever governing body oversees alcoholic hipsterdom."