Quote:
Originally Posted by pj3000
I said I like that Chicago is still rustbelt at its core because I'll take a city where families live for generations through the ups and downs of a city's fortunes over a transient "hot" city any day of the week.
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my ears are burning (my two kids represent generation 7 in chicago for my family)
but overall, while chicagoland certainly has a crap-ton of multi-generational families just like anywhere else, there's also a fair bit of "transcience" as well, at least in the trendy favored quarter of the city.
there's a very sizeable demographic in chicago that can best be summed up as: grew up somewhere in the midwest, went to a big10 school, moved to chicago for first job, romped around the urban theme park for 5-15 years, then (a) career climb and move on to the next city, (b) get married, have kids, move back home
"to be closer to my family", or (c) plant roots in chicagoland. my own wife falls into camp (c).
anecdotal: i still have a lot of childhood friends in my social network who come from multi-generation chicago families like mine, however, along with all of those old-schoolers, I also have newer friends born in: downstate illinois, cleveland, milwaukee, detroit, seattle, connecticut, guatemala, peru, and poland.
so i feel like there's a somewhat healthy balance bewteen rootedness and new blood in this town. yeah, we could definitely use more international immigration juice like we got back in the '90s, but it's not at all like the truly dying small rustbelt cities where newcomers can be pretty few and far between.