Quote:
Originally Posted by ChiMIchael
I think a lot of it was also the projects being taken down, with many of the voucher recipients going out of the city. I've also talked to many people in the south and west sides and number one reason for leaving the city was the crime, especially after hearing that they had to bury a friend of family member.
And I think that the demographic trends indicate Chicago going the direction of a"prosperous relic": A successful city not as economically strong as it used to be. Yeah, we city making strides in some ways the eludes most of the Rust Belt, but it hasn't really expanded it's economic base. It'll be great to get perhaps 10 more Grubhubs and Groupons, and that will me the moment when Chicago can achieve that desired turnaround.
|
Obviously crime was and is a factor for some, but crime has been an issue in Chicago for
decades. The 90s were arguably the worst time for crime in Chicago (80s and 70s were not good either), yet the city grew by nearly 113,000 people in that period of time. People did not all of a sudden say in 2001-2004 "Well, enough is enough crime wise" and a mass exodus happened. Actually, crime had decreased a very large amount in 2000 from a decade previous. That's not how it works especially when things were bad at that point for 30+ years. It had to do with jobs - there was a recession in 2001 if you remember and the US share of manufacturing in the world declined nearly 30% in 2002. Chicago, being a large hub of manufacturing, lost a ton of jobs. The areas that especially had a lot of these types of jobs were on the south and west sides. This is fairly well documented. Yes, crime is a factor, but your anecdotes pale in comparison to the actual reality of what happened in Chicago and some other cities in this period of time for why a bunch of people left. I'm sure the crime contributed to many people moving, but only after the economy for them went to crap and their opportunities became more limited. People were tolerating the crime in numerous areas of the city for decades because there were jobs in those places.
If you compare 2000 vs. 2017 in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' OES (
https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm), you can see that there are 130,300 less Production Operations jobs in 2017 than 2000. These jobs are everything from butchers to carpenters to welders to assemblers to fabricators etc - it's the "manufacturing" types of jobs. Yet at the same time there's 142,620 more jobs of people in Computer, Business/Finance, and Management fields in 2017 vs. 2000. Then on top of that, there's 129,290 more people in the Healthcare industry in 2017 than 2000. There's 88,350 less office/admin assistant types of jobs (clerks, admin assistants) in 2017 than 2000.