[marothisu]

I've written about this a few times before - and yes, it's absolutely true. I grew up as an outsider - but when I grew up, we thought of Chicagoans as kind of arrogant about the city. My mom, being from NYC originally, kind of gave it crap too but had never visited. That continued until she visited and realized it's actually a good city. Today, it's actually annoying to read comments on pretty much every article - people are sometimes insanely negative now. I don't mean to say there's nothing wrong, to fix, etc - but a lot of people have a "grass is greener" mentality and many frankly haven't lived many other places and don't know better about various things.

I don't agree about when it started. This has been going on since at least when Obama got elected in 2008. Not that the homicide rate was really low, but it was MUCH lower in that time period than it was versus the 90s and even very early 2000s, and still lower than the 70s and 80s too - it started to turn around in the mid 2000s. Go back to 2013 or 2014 when Chicago had some of the lowest homicide numbers it had since the 1960s. The rate at the time was lower than that of Miami, Philadelphia, DC, etc yet Chicago was always in the news, even on low years for homicides. It has nothing to do with the uptick of 2016 - that's not when it started. It was around when Obama took office - maybe not right away but soon after.

I honestly don't even think that some people realized number wise how bad some areas were, so when micro news agencies like DNA Info and the open data started picking up a movement and all these negative articles about Chicago came out, people didn't know any better. I can remember people even in 2009 or 2013 or 2014 saying that things were out of control even worse than the 90s - but yet statistically they were MUCH lower than back then in every single crime category. People started reading about every little crime that occurred whereas 10 or 15 years before that, it wouldn't have ever made the news. Only the bigger things would have and they would have been all the less wise. It's both a good and a bad thing to have reporting like this - it depends on who is interpreting and reading it.

Also in 2010, the US Census released its data showing that the city had lost some 200K people since the last Census. People thought that the RECENT projects were that it must have lost so much. As I posted a few weeks ago, the Census estimated that Chicago actually lost most of these people between 2001 and 2004. With the exception of 2009, the US Census estimated from 2005 to 2010 that Chicago had around 2.7 Million to 2.75 Million people which is basically the same as today. However, I don't think this made much news and people were fine in the mid 2000s publicly into the late 2000s. Then this came out and people just assumed that it had lost most of its population at the end of the decade and also due to the recession. The US Census thinks otherwise, but again - this is what people saw - the 2010 Census and that got them down more. Then there was the Olympics thing when they lost in 2010. Making the final vote is amazing as is and maybe it's better the city lost it (not going to get into that now), but again - people start latching onto negative news.

Obama's term continued until not too long ago - the negative articles about Chicago continued and very rarely were they positive maybe outside of food scene things. It didn't help one bit that in 2016 the city's homicide count increased over 300 from the previous year - this kicked things into gear again, but in no way was that the beginning of this. It's been going on since at least 2009 or 2010 in my opinion.

People have these crazy stereotypes about the city until they visit it. I can't tell you how many people I've shown around from all over the world who had this dissonance because what they saw in real life was nothing like what they saw in the media. I do honestly think there is something that SOME of the media is doing to screw with the image of the city. I don't think it's all unwarranted, but at the same time they spin it in a way that makes people believe the city is worse off now than it has been which I think is a load of BS for most things. People even in the city bought it hook line and sinker.