CHICAGO | General Discussions

[moorhosj1]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

This idea of global warming and available freshwater fulfilling Chicagoans’ fantasy of people bolting en masse from the coasts (which are now under water!) and the South to the shores of Lake Michigan, whereby Chicago asserts its destiny of being the supercity of the Western Hemisphere is.........like.........never gonna happen.

This is a strawman, as nobody is suggesting what you claim. The real question is: Does climate change have the chance to impact migration patterns within the United States of America? Based on historical examples (Dustbowl, potato famine, etc.) it seems highly possible over a multi-decade timeframe.

Which leads us to the question of whether Chicago stands to benefit from that migration. Who knows? We have fresh water, reasonable cost of living, and jobs. We also have extreme cold in winter, high levels of violence, and stagnant population growth. Pure numbers would suggest that Chicago would benefit, but I don't see anyone expecting 500,000 new citizens like the Great Migrations brought us.

Dustbowl reference:

Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states—Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma—during the 1930s. It was one of the largest migrations in American history. Oklahoma alone lost 440,000 people to migration. ... From 1935 to 1940, roughly 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California.

[LouisVanDerWright]

If this year is any indication of the kind of weather Chicago is going to start having because of climate change, then I don't see why it wouldn't affect migration patterns. It's been 80-90 degrees and sunny since like May 1st...

[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright

If this year is any indication of the kind of weather Chicago is going to start having because of climate change, then I don't see why it wouldn't affect migration patterns. It's been 80-90 degrees and sunny since like May 1st...

The high is 73 today.

And we had the shittiest February since shit starting existing. That month, my managers had to make countless treks out to my properties to clear feet of snow off of the sidewalks and walkways, costing me mucho $$

Pipes froze and flooded.

Yeah, we're on our way to becoming Arizona...

[IrishIllini]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

The high is 73 today.

And we had the shittiest February since shit starting existing. That month, my managers had to make countless treks out to my properties to clear feet of snow off of the sidewalks and walkways, costing me mucho $$

Pipes froze and flooded.

Yeah, we're on our way to becoming Arizona...

Extremes at both ends of the spectrum are more frequent in a changing (warming) climate.

[MayorOfChicago]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

The high is 73 today.

And we had the shittiest February since shit starting existing. That month, my managers had to make countless treks out to my properties to clear feet of snow off of the sidewalks and walkways, costing me mucho $$

Pipes froze and flooded.

Yeah, we're on our way to becoming Arizona...

Other than the few weeks in February where it snowed a ton and was cold - it managed to be the warmest winter on record.

I remember at the end of January asking people if we were going to get any sort of winter at all, it was in the mid to upper 30's and quiet for all of December and January.

[Rizzo]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

The high is 73 today.

And we had the shittiest February since shit starting existing. That month, my managers had to make countless treks out to my properties to clear feet of snow off of the sidewalks and walkways, costing me mucho $$

Pipes froze and flooded.

Yeah, we're on our way to becoming Arizona...

The neighboring apartment building dumped all their snow into my buildings gangway. I basically had nowhere to put the snow and could only clear a narrow path. Our owners and tenants were forced to walk around the building to take out the trash. On top of that, the garbage company wouldn’t pick up the trash because the alley was impassable and when the neighbors’ dumpster filled up, they just dumped their trash in my dumpsters and I still ended up paying an extra $100 for overflow. It was a frustrating month.

[ardecila]

^ Maybe coastal cities will build their way out of flooding with levees and dikes, but I don't see property owners getting over their own selfishness in those places.

Just recently, I was reading that Miami can't agree on a floodwall because people are too worried about their property values, but you know what really kills your property values? Catastrophic floods happening regularly. I think for a lot of these coastal areas, people are gonna have to find out the hard way when the big one comes, before agreeing to an ugly levee cutting their neighborhood off from the water. There's a similar dynamic out West with wildfires. In both cases the obstacle is rich people who bought their dream home in a vulnerable place and will fight like hell to make sure they don't have to deal with the consequences of their choices (levees, forced relocation, higher flood insurance premiums, etc).

Of course, when the big one comes a lot of people get displaced, and many end up relocating permanently. Will they come to Chicago? Doubtful. It's about as far from the coasts as you can get, and doesn't have a reputation for affordable living or job creation. I assume most of the relocations will be to inland Southern and Western cities that are already seeing growth - Nashville, Austin, Charlotte, SLC, Denver, Boise, etc.

[Chi-Sky21]

SOM with some out of this world architecture.....

https://news.wttw.com/2021/06/15/ski...heFGksYA0k3ZLM

[pip]

Last weekend I biked through the West Loop and explored. Second time in a few weeks. I'm really liking this neighborhood and it's growing by a ton by what I saw.





My bike in all it's glory

[the urban politician]

^ That second pic looks like the Gold Coast

[pip]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

^ That second pic looks like the Gold Coast

Omg it is lol. NM! That was on my way home from the West Loop

[the urban politician]

Looks like soon we will be cruising “Dusable Lakeshore Drive”

I think it’s a decent compromise, and boy did we dodge one there.

I suspect most people will still just call it ‘Lakeshore Drive’, and they won’t be incorrect either since that is still in the name.

[ardecila]

I still think this is a waste of time when we still have streets named after actual fascists and murderers.

However, if we do it we should do it properly. Would be great to get specialized highway signs like NYC uses on their parkways. Let's turn it into a moment of civic pride and identity instead of a ho-hum name change.

https://specialmoderndesign.com/projects/ny-signs/

[sentinel]

Why do I keep reading that Pointe de Sable (real name, NOT 'du Sable'), had slaves of his own? It seems like a highly dubious claim, especially considering that very little is actually known of him. But I've read it before, and it would be very troubling that the City and state would continue honoring such a man if there was documentation of that.
Regardless, the man's life story is clearly more mythical than anything idiot alderman want people to believe.

[ardecila]

Pretty much everyone back then was a real SOB, you had to be if living on the frontier and colonizing Indian land was appealing to you. Whether a slaveowner or not, duSable was clearly a self-interested guy and not a noble person or role model in any sense.

In the end the city's decision to honor duSable says more about us in 2021 than the actual facts of his life 200 years ago. The symbolism of including Black and native people in the city's creation myth, which I don't have a problem with. It's just so fucking clunky in execution - LSD was an iconic name without any historical baggage and the new name is ridiculous.

[LouisVanDerWright]

Originally Posted by sentinel

Why do I keep reading that Pointe de Sable (real name, NOT 'du Sable'), had slaves of his own? It seems like a highly dubious claim, especially considering that very little is actually known of him. But I've read it before, and it would be very troubling that the City and state would continue honoring such a man if there was documentation of that.
Regardless, the man's life story is clearly more mythical than anything idiot alderman want people to believe.

Yeah, frankly I think the fetishization of someone who was undoubtedly a murderous, greedy, colonizer is one of the more offensive government actions in recent memory. I get that they want to celebrate a free black man as the founder of the city, but the fact remains this is land stolen from the Potowatami and guys like DuSable are directly to blame for it. If they wanted to actually be politically correct they would do something, anything, to celebrate the true founders and owners of this place, not a literal colonizer. I would be much more supportive of it being renamed Potowatami Drive or something like that.

[twister244]

Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright

Yeah, frankly I think the fetishization of someone who was undoubtedly a murderous, greedy, colonizer is one of the more offensive government actions in recent memory. I get that they want to celebrate a free black man as the founder of the city, but the fact remains this is land stolen from the Potowatami and guys like DuSable are directly to blame for it. If they wanted to actually be politically correct they would do something, anything, to celebrate the true founders and owners of this place, not a literal colonizer. I would be much more supportive of it being renamed Potowatami Drive or something like that.

Which is why, as this point was just made two posts up, they should have just stuck with "Lakeshore Drive" because it didn't have any baggage associated with it. But, hey, politics.....

[Klippenstein]

Can anybody provide any reliable source to support the claim that he was undoubtedly a terrible person?

He was the son of an enslaved person, which would give him a unique perspective on the world compared to a lot of the Europeans claiming indigenous territories as their own. From what I read, he came to Chicago after gaining the trust of the native people and established a trading post where he had connections to many places in the area from his travels.

He actually seems like a decent and competent person. I really think it’s BS for everybody to decide just because of the time period he lived in that he was a murderous, greedy colonizer… I mean I can understand if you have a problem with foreigners living on this land without permission from the indigenous people, but it seems like we fit that more than he did.

I’m certainly interested if anybody has any evidence of his terrible nature, but I haven’t seen it. From what I understand there is more mystery around the reason why he sold his property at the mouth of the Chicago river and died as poor man. There are some theories that he was forced to sell it. Perhaps history would have been different if he would have been respected and hailed as a leader in his old age.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by Klippenstein

Can anybody provide any reliable source to support the claim that he was undoubtedly a terrible person?
...

No source, but generally speaking the men who set out as explorers in that era were terrible people - people in that era in general were not wonderful human beings in general in a modern sense, and ones who decided to up and leave society and strike out on their own had good reasons to do so, reasons that generally had to do with not being good at playing by what few societal rules existed in those days.

Was he worse relative to other, similar men of the era? Not that i'm aware of. But he most definitely wouldn't be the kind of person your average Millennial would want to subscribe to his podcast.

[BrinChi]

Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright

Yes, this.

I've realized I was doing it myself, noticing that every conversation about Garfield Park or Lawndale or any other beautiful, but stereotypically "crime ridden" area always began with accolades about the location or housing stock or transit access and ended with some form of "too bad the wrong people live there". Of course no one ever says it so directly, it's always couched in terms of poverty or crime, but that's the f-ing point.

The entire history of real estate in this country is just one race baiting dog whistle replacing the last until it became a self fulfilling prophecy where no shit you didn't want to invest there "because poors" or "because crime". That doesn't change the fact that it very much was openly about race in the beginning and now crime and poverty is so racially segregated that we can be totally racist without even bringing up the concept.

In my opinion it is racist to make investment decisions based on "crime" or "disinvestment", that's the whole damn point. If you continue to perpetuate racial and income segregation then you are the problem. Period. There is no excuse aside from "I don't have the means to actively participate in revitalizing this area". Frankly, given how low real estate prices are, that basically applies to no one in the middle class and up.


PS: perpetuating income and racial segregation also applies to the "anti gentrifiers" unless they are only resisting late stage gentrification that results in a mostly rich and white community. Anyone claiming no one should be able to move into Pilsen or Little Village if they aren't Latino is a segregationist just as much as the guy refusing to invest in Black areas. The conversation should be exclusively about "how do we enable as many people to move in as possible while allowing as many existing residents to remain and enjoy the benefits of reinvestment as possible". Any time it becomes about a place being "our neighborhood" youve gone beyond the pale and are openly advocating racial segregation.

BOOM. Well said. And I love your personal mission. I also certainly hope that if TUP's assumption is true, where you don't live anywhere near the place you're investing in, that you reconsider the location of your own home very soon.

As a white guy who lived in Garfield Park for 9 years and now Bronzeville for the last 2.5 years, it's just laughable to me when I hear people justify not going to certain parts of the city (or paying twice as much for housing to live in certain neighborhoods) because of the crime stats. I'm privileged and unlikely to be involved in a random act of crime, but the biggest frustration of my neighborhood is when litter gets out of control -- seriously that is the worst part of living in the less affluent parts of the city imo. (Recognizing that even the wealthy parts of a dense city often get badly littered, but it's usually taken care of quicker.) That's been my focus of neighborhood initiatives because most places stop looking scary when the trash is cleaned up and the grass/foliage is trimmed... even if the area has some empty lots with old foundations and crumbling sidewalks. If the city wants the south and west sides to continue attracting investment and filling in, it's essential to keep them clean. It should be a low-cost, high-return investment. This *especially* includes the neighborhood parks.