Posted Aug 20, 2021, 7:45 PM
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The City
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Chicago region
Posts: 21,373
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Has anybody seen this yet? I wish I could see a larger version:
Got it from Crains:
Quote:
Fascinating development on South Side lakefront
Census figures suggest Bronzeville and other mostly Black areas are starting to follow in the path of affluent North Side neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Lakeview.
GREG HINZ
Is the South Side lakefront headed toward the same type of revival that has lifted the North Side in recent decades and made neighborhoods such as Lincoln Park, Lake View, Roscoe Village and North Center among the most desirable in the city?
The answer may well be yes, suggests some very solid new data emerging from the 2020 Census.
The phenomenon is in its early stages and is coming from a small base. But it appears real and is backed up by other data. If it continues, it suggests that despite all of Chicago’s other problems, a portion of the city that is heavily Black is making major strides to move up the economic scale.
The data is the first actual population count by community area in the city. It comes from demographer and consultant Frank Calabrese, who developed it while working on upcoming ward reapportionment for the City Council’s Latino Caucus.
As expected, the data shows that population plummeted in the past decade in some, mostly outlying heavily Black portions of the South and West Side, while population in mostly white areas from the Loop north and west grew solidly.
What was really eye-catching, though, are gains on South Side neighborhoods along or close to the lakefront. All the way from the Loop down to Woodlawn, their population grew a lot, in some cases more than 10 percent.
Who are these people? According to Chicago demographer Ed Zotti, who first tipped me several years ago that interesting things were starting to happen on the South Shore, it’s mostly affluent, middle-class Black people with college degrees, many of them working in in the same kind of high-end service jobs downtown that power North Side neighborhoods.
“Chicago is on the leading edge of a trend toward a new Black middle class, consisting of college-educated professionals living in big-city neighborhoods with good access to downtown and to recreational and cultural amenities,” Zotti says.
His initial conclusions were based on American Community Survey data, another U.S. Census Bureau product that is less extensive than the census. But now that the census is out, we know population definitely is up in those South Side lakefront areas. And we’ll soon quite likely have data confirming the racial, educational and economic trends first seen in ACS data.
Real estate sources are fully aware of what’s going on. They’re busy making a lot money from the return of the Black middle class to Bronzeville and nearby areas.
My colleague Dennis Rodkin reported in May that 67 homes homes in Bronzeville sold for more than $500,000 in the past 12 months, up from 40 in the prior year and 36 in the year before that. Another 53 units worth that much were proposed or under construction. “Everything gets snapped up,” one developer told Rodkin.
That’s an utterly different story than in other Black neighborhoods miles farther South and West that are hemorrhaging people, neighborhoods that appear to be still be dependent on factory jobs that no longer exist.
Lots more research needs to be done. But as Mayor Lori Lightfoot tries to do her best to spark development in some of those other neighborhoods with her Invest South/West program, the new data suggests she ought to keep an eye on the South Side lakefront, because it’s a lot easier to keep build on an existing trend than start a new one.
The census figures indicate something really good and noticeable is occurring. The job now is to keep it going on.
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https://www.chicagobusiness.com/greg...side-lakefront
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