Quote:
Originally Posted by TimeAgain
Anyone who doesn't understand Chicago's population loss hasn't stepped foot on the south and west sides in years. While you have growing parts of the South Side, such as Hyde Park, Woodlawn, Bronzeville, and maybe Pullman seeing some growth and resurgence, huge swaths of the south side are becoming barren.
This city has serious and fundamental problems that are being covered to an extent by big private investment. In areas that don't have that, there's not much else to keep things going.
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Not to take this thread even more off topic, but what could be done to address that? Are people in these neighborhoods trying to start businesses, and not being allowed because of some kind of zoning or other regulation?
Otherwise, I'm not sure what you can do. Manufacturing would do the trick, perhaps, but you'd have to examine why that's a less compelling place to build a plant or DC than exurbia. Access to interstates and intermodal transport?
It's not like even, for instance, Amazon's HQ would fix the South Side's issues, except by replacing existing residents with new, different people hired by Amazon.
And they're going to need to stiff public pension holders. A massive haircut is the only way. Pass a constitutional amendment, give everyone 50 cents on the dollar (perhaps above a low minimum threshold like $50k in total pension value). And then do away with public employee pensions entirely, and have state employees participate in Social Security instead. You can only get one or the other, and so the existence of pensions is just voluntarily shifting the obligation from the federal government to the state, which is insanity.