Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Chicago is already pretty similar to Paris. The poverty of Paris suburbs is greatly overstated - rather than being a radial model with rich in the center and poor on the outskirts, it's more like the sector model where certain quadrants of the city remain wealthy whether you're in the core or out closer to the fringe. For Paris, the north is the poorest (like Chicago's Southland) while the east is middle-class and the west is wealthiest. And this is a country with one of the biggest commitments to socialized housing in the Western world. Vienna is similar.
wikipedia/Magicboost
(this is just the Petit Couronne - Paris plus inner suburbs - but the pattern holds true even at the larger scale of Ile-de-France (akin to Cook + Collar Counties
You can see the lowest income level even crosses the Peripherique expressway into central Paris, where the 19e arondissement (19th ward) is as poor as the northern suburbs.
So, even if we switch to an urban pattern closer to Paris, I don't think the North Shore is going anywhere as a seat of wealth. It's actually pretty similar to wealthy suburbs outside Paris, walkable, good schools, oriented around train stations with strong town centers. Same goes for portions of western suburbia along UP-W, BNSF lines.
London is actually closer to the inverted donut model with rich in the center (and only the center) but I think that might be a consequence of their strict greenbelt policies. Ironically, from an architectural perspective, wealthy English people have always wanted to distance themselves from commercial activity and live in single-family townhouses, while the French wealthy were totally fine living in a fancy apartment above a shop... but they're the ones who have suburbanized their wealth to a greater extent. |
OK great, except it's not really accurate. The area inside of the "Peripherique" is roughly the size of the Loop all the way out to Oak Park:
https://www.timeout.com/chicago/blog...o-other-cities
That same area in Chicago doesn't have "the lowest income crossing into" the central area, it's almost entirely the lowest income including East and West Garfield, North Lawndale, and Austin. The poverty in these areas doesn't even slightly compare to whats going on in Paris, it's like a warzone compared to the tiny infringement of poverty on Paris' core.
Furthermore, a city like Paris is on an entirely different scale than Chicago. The North Shore of Chicago wouldn't even be an inner ring suburb of Paris. Places like Lakeview and further north would lie beyond Siene St Denis, again not even comparable. If you are going to compare Chicago to Paris then you need to scale down distances in Chicago to account for the fact that Paris is crammed into 40 Sq Mi and Chicago is 235. If you do that even slightly then pretty much everything South and West of the Seine in Paris would have to be abject poverty as everything South of I-55 excluding Bridgeport is in Chicago.
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