Chicago, where rich live 30 years longer than the poor
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/introducing-the-scarlet-e-...
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-40-acres
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/scarlet-e-part-iii-tenants...
OTM is always good. This is transcendent.
Listen.
(Or read: yes, there are transcripts.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
In short: legal apartheid ended in the US in the 1960s, but economic apartheid, some of it state-supported, continued through the 1970s --- that's in many of your lifetimes. The form it took in Chicago was particularly pernicious: redlining carved up the city like a scalpel, destroying the economic and social fabric of neighborhoods, making it impossible for black folks to productively own homes or create a base on which to build businesses.
It would have taken profoundly competent and principled leadership for the city to pull out of the engine of despair that redlining created. We have not had that.
1) Decades ago, instead of raising taxes, the city started borrowing money and issuing deferred payments, such as excessively generous retirement packages (instead of raises, which would have required additional taxes).
2) Now the bill is due. Large amounts of taxpayer dollars aren't actually being used to pay for police, libraries, and schools, but are instead paying off deferred expenses from decades ago.
3) Without adequate funding, crime has skyrocketed as the city continues to crumble, unable to provide basic services. This hits the poor disproportionately.
I don't recommend anyone live in Chicago. I never want to go back. Every year I lived there I hated it more and more. It's a scary place. Now I live in Dallas. At first I hated Dallas, but every year I've been here I loved it more and more.
Also known as "starve the beast", a proud strategy still proposed by many of the so called elites in charge of tax policy and their good, rich friends.
Bad news: Those who profited from it are the same people who live 30 years longer. And with the low taxes they pay there's more than enough money left for bribing .. err I'm sorry .. completely legal lobbying to make sure this doesn't change.
Just part of a privilege divide?
I was robbed in Chicago twice, once successfully, once not. A person was murdered on my street corner, probably because the perpetrator thought they could get away with it because of the victims skin color and the way they looked.
I would say to those college kids that they probably don't get out enough. Perhaps they live in a far northern suburb, removed from the problems of the city
Edit: For example our murder victims are predominantly male black and young. There are a lot of neighborhoods where the murder rate is crazy near 100 murders / 100,000 people per year and a bunch of neighborhoods with 0 https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-homi...
The safe parts of Chicago are very safe. The dangerous parts of Chicago are, for residents or people who could be mistaken for residents, a calamity and a legitimate national embarrassment.
Likewise, a lot of the health issues are the result of poor nutrition, lead paint, and lead in the tap water. Middle class people live in more recently renovated houses, have more grocery stores nearby, and can afford water filters or bottled water.
Race statistics for victims. Do you also have them for perpetrators?
FWIW, it's not clear that the former has much to do with the latter.
https://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132076786/the-root-the-myth-o...
>3) Without adequate funding, crime has skyrocketed as the city continues to crumble, unable to provide basic services. This hits the poor disproportionately.
The demographics of the city are changing rapidly, anyone who lived here “years ago” and thinks they know about living here today is working with old data.
Anyway, I had to google thee historical violent crime data myself. Turns out neither of you are being entirely honest. GP is definitely wrong when he asserts that crime has skyrocketed from "three decades ago". Would have been late 80s, early 90s and historical data says crime was much higher at that time. (Multiple times higher actually. So "jostmey" was not a little off, but way off on that assertion according to data.)
And you're not being entirely honest when you say demographics have changed and imply that means a change in crime rates. At least, the rate of decrease of violent crime has gone nowhere over the past 30 years or so. It's decreasing at the same rate today, as it was in 2009, and in 1999. Meanwhile, demographic rate of change was near constant until it ratcheted up around 2008 apparently. (And then only in downtown, and only in the income dimension. Not racially.) So, following your implication, the rate of decline in, say, violent crime, should have ratcheted up around that time as well.
The really interesting thing though is that even if I had validated either of your assertions in the data, neither of your explanations shed much light on plausible reasons for the disparity the article mentions. It's like you two just took your preferred world views and started arguing with each other without regard to what the data actually stated, or even what the original question actually was.
I mean, OK, we get it. You like Chicago. Fine. Just say that and leave it at that, don't try to snow us.
Same with "jostmey". We get it. You don't like Chicago. Just say that and leave it there. Why try to blow smoke up our collective rears?
Most of the population loss is concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods. There are also plenty of South Side neighborhoods that are doing quite well (Hyde Park, Beverly, Mt Greenwood, Kenwood, Woodlawn, McKinley Park, Chinatown, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Garfield Ridge, and a few more). Those places don’t get the news coverage so everyone lumps an entire 1/3 of the city into “dump”.
==https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
OK moorhosj, let's try to step through this.
What does that have to do with Chicago's life expectancy disparity being 30 years? Are you saying then, that what we should really be doing is comparing the life expectancy of people in Chinatown, with people in Chinatown, instead of comparing people across your whole city?
Because what I'm trying to explain to you guys is that, this is not how the rest of us outside Chicago think. If you were to ask me, I would say, yeah, it seems totally reasonable to compare life expectancies across the entire city of Madison for instance. (I'm from Wisconsin.) I'd wager if you'd ask someone from Nebraska, they'd say, "Yeah, it seems reasonable to compare life expectancies for people across the entire city of Lincoln." We're not coming up with some off the wall metric to try to make Chicago look bad here.
You and this "jostmey" guy are doing that for us.
Finally, look, for the average person, we see a black guy, we're gonna say he's black. Not "Two or more races". Not "Black with hispanic origin". Etc etc etc. So, going back to the original point, we didn't get hung up on that stuff 3 decades ago. In 70, 80,90, whatever, we, even the census,just called people black. (Maybe we might have called them mixed if they were mixed, but that's certainly not how our censuses would have counted them back then.) So, you throw the 2 or more ethnicities or whatever group in and you get, what? 33, 34% of what we in 1980 would have simply called "black"? I'd be willing to bet money that the two or more races / hispanic census stuff started right around the same time that the percentage of blacks in the census declined.
Point being, these ratios aren't really changing much. Only society's definitions of what is black has changed. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, maybe that's neither? The point I'm making is that demographics aren't changing much from 80, 90, 00 whatever. At least racially. Fewer total people, yes. But the ratios seem to be relatively constant. Now if you go back further, obviously you get radical change. But the original post said "last three decades". So you have to look at the last 3 decades, and not cherry pick.
To the rest of your point, test we should compare these things across cities, that is how we see the disparities. That point is more relevant to the original article and not the specific point I was responding to.
And counting blacks since 2010, when you changed the definition, so that people who were called black in 1980, or 1990, or whatever, are no longer called black. Well duh. Yeah, if mixed kids are born in Chicago, and you guys call them, I don't know, whatever it is you call them. Then they won't be counted in your data as black. Is that surprising to you? So basically to me, I feel like you guys don't count any mixed blacks, and then are surprised that the number of blacks is going down? I mean come on man. That should be a no brainer. But the important thing here, is that no one really outside of Chicago would look at those people and say they are not black. And again, in 80 or 90 or maybe even 00, they counted them all as black in the census. That's all I'm saying.
==His analysis of U.S. Census Data found that between 2005 and 2017, the city of Chicago’s 25-39 year-old age cohort grew 15.7 percent, while falling dramatically in the rest of Cook County (7.2 percent drop) as well as the metro area outside of Cook County (5.9 percent decline).
==In addition, between 2005-17, Chicago’s population of 25-44 year-olds with a bachelors degrees or additional advanced degrees grew 42 percent. As Saunders wrote in a Twitter thread sharing his findings, “An older, less educated, manufacturing-oriented populace is being replaced by a younger, more educated, knowledge-economy populace.” Chicago now has a higher share of college educated workers than the surrounding suburbs.
This phenomenon is dragging down the already depressed neighborhoods the most. The jobs their residents relied on are disappearing. The residents with means are typically moving out (to the suburbs or Sun Belt cities), leaving behind the most at-risk residents.
>https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/6/24/18691792/chicago-econom...
The white enclaves you're talking about occupy a relatively small amount of real estate. The troubled South Side is comparatively vast.
Demographics may change, debt obligations do not.
==https://interactives.dallasnews.com/2017/the-85th/issue/pens...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loop_(CTA)
"The ring" turns up little particular to Chicago.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chicago+"the+ring"&ia=web
There's also "collar counties":
You can drive to Lincolnshire or Kenilworth to see rich-folks compounds, in the suburbs. In Chicago, the white folks in Beverly and Oak Park and Evanston live in nice houses on small lots across the street from rougher neighborhoods. You'll find more metal gates in (rough) Lawndale than you will in (rich) Lincoln Park.
Also, what is this "ring" you're talking about? Can you be more specific?
>His analysis of U.S. Census Data found that between 2005 and 2017, the city of Chicago’s 25-39 year-old age cohort grew 15.7 percent, while falling dramatically in the rest of Cook County (7.2 percent drop) as well as the metro area outside of Cook County (5.9 percent decline).
>In addition, between 2005-17, Chicago’s population of 25-44 year-olds with a bachelors degrees or additional advanced degrees grew 42 percent. As Saunders wrote in a Twitter thread sharing his findings, “An older, less educated, manufacturing-oriented populace is being replaced by a younger, more educated, knowledge-economy populace.” Chicago now has a higher share of college educated workers than the surrounding suburbs.
==https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/6/24/18691792/chicago-econom...
What you would have said about crime in Chicago in 1998 remains true today, with one possible change being that the 1990s gang crackdowns atomized the gangs and amplified the violence.
Sure it does. As working/middle-class jobs leave, neighborhoods who overwhelming relied on those jobs fall into a spiral of dis-investment, de-population and crime.
==the middle class northwest and bungalow belts==
I think this is the part you are missing. Neighborhoods like Portage Park, Jefferson Park, Old Irving Park, Norwood Park and Avondale on the northwest side are not the same middle-class neighborhoods they were 15 years ago. They have become upper-middle class neighborhoods filled with young families.
The traditional city workers who made these strong middle-class communities are getting priced out. The residency requirements are pushing them to other neighborhoods on the west and southwest side. This trend, along with future immigration may be the best hopes for revitalizing these neighborhoods.
==with one possible change being that the 1990s gang crackdowns atomized the gangs and amplified the violence. ==
Yes, breaking up the larger gangs has led to less-structured, block-by-block affiliations. That said, the homicide rate is lower today than it was in the 1990s.
Second, to the extent that these places have changed, none of these changes impact the fundamental dynamics of crime in Chicago. Neighborhoods are gradually gentrifying, sure. That's incompatible with the idea that neighborhood flight is worsening crime.
I think anyone who lived here in the 1990s would recognize pretty much the same Chicago in 2019, modulo the wifi in the cafes.
And I have two different co-workers and my tech company who have moved there in the past 5 years. These anecdotes aren't data, but show how personal experience drives perception.
==I think anyone who lived here in the 1990s would recognize pretty much the same Chicago in 2019, modulo the wifi in the cafes==
I think the data disagrees with you. Today, 39% of city residents have college degrees, in 1990, it was 19% [1]. The city has a higher percentage of residents with a college degree than larger, metro Chicago, the first time that has ever been the case. Other ways this can be observed is through the disappearance of the "Chicago accent". As more Big Ten graduates have migrated to the city from around the Midwest, the city's make-up has changed [2].
It relates to crime in the way these people have migrated. If the city was 1/3 working class, 1/3 middle class and 1/3 upper class 30 years ago; today it is more like 2/5 working class, 1/5 middle class, and 2/5 upper class. This mirrors what we have seen across the US economy. It reminds us of the quote, "Chicago is the most American of American cities."
This change has meant that previously working class neighborhoods have lost jobs, residents and investment. Those are the things that lead to increased levels of crime/violence. If we look at any Rust Belt city, we see high murder rates [3]:
>Out of the five metropolitan areas with the highest per capita murder rates, according to CBS News, four are deindustrialized cities: St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and Cleveland.
Chicago has managed to avoid much of the population loss and economic collapse of these cities, but still saw both happen over the past 40 years.
==Neighborhoods are gradually gentrifying, sure. That's incompatible with the idea that neighborhood flight is worsening crime.==
Except there are 77 neighborhoods, so 25 can be gentrifying and seeing lower crime while 5 are facing de-population and increased crime. It's pretty obvious when you look at the 3 most violent neighborhoods (community areas) of Austin, Garfield Park and Englewood. They are each seeing population decrease and together account for 25% of murders in the city.
[1] https://danielkayhertz.com/2019/05/15/out-of-state-college-g...
[2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/04/why-city-accents-are-fa...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/cbs/why-are-murder-rates-so...
Jeff Park is full of houses between 200-300k, and Zillow forecasts the median price there to drop to near 250k. That's data.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/05/nyregion/recalling-new-yo...
However, this doesn’t mean that I don’t agree Englewood is in bad shape and anything that could be done to better the lives of it’s residents should be attempted.
The finances of the city will inevitably end in some combination of bankruptcy and ruin thanks to toxic pensions, the abuse of them, and the city's refusal to prudently manage around them (though in fairness the pensions have been so toxic that no prudence could keep up with them). It's just algebra. The city (and state) is already insolvent and just resorts to various can-kicking tactics.
Violent crime is tolerated and ignored by most. No one dare point out the elephant in the room that it's committed wildly disproportionately by minorities. A white kid trolls the Cubs with that bogus "okay" symbol and the city goes berserk; 25 black kids shot over the weekend and it's a collective shrug. Things tend to settle at the level of expectations, and a liberal ethos has set expectations for the black community to be all but nonexistent.
The suburbs are dying, and this is reflected in real estate values. Follow the Chicago Tribune's architecture columnist, Dennis Rodkin, on Twitter. Every day this guy features a new home sale in the suburbs where it's sold for less than what it sold for 20, even 30 years ago. It's depressing to see how Illinois' failed policies have a massive tax against families' greatest asset.
The city is dying, as population loss continues at a rapid pace. Chicago has lost more millionaires than any other city in the world over the last decade. The stats are all readily available with a quick search. The real estate values will inevitably follow the path of the suburbs.
The new governor - a bored billionaire heir who's never accomplished anything on his own merit in his life - is about to effectively double the state income tax. The death spiral accelerates. When you tax something you get less of it.
The corruption of the city politicians is tolerated and even joked about as The Chicago Way. Corruption has been normalized, just like it has for places like Russia. These sorts of cultural rot are difficult to reverse.
Death spiral.
What you describe of black kids dying sounds nothing like “lack of expectations” to me. More like “forsaken communities”.
Not denying any longstanding cultural factors, people go into crime because of a combination of opportunity and motivation (from the studies I remember reading). “Lack of expectations” has never been measured as a problem as far as I know. And your sentiment just sounds like 21st century “white mans burden” all over again.
If poor crime policy is the problem then that’s another thing entirely. But then crime gets reduced by a combination of reducing inequality, increasing opportunities and yes good (sometimes draconian) policing. But you don’t mention that, only that black people in Chicago are criminal somehow because the political class has a “lack of expectations” for them.
Why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory is quite race independent FWIW.
Of course he immediately attacked me and refused to answer it directly and called what I said gobblygook. Which makes me think I was right in calling him out.
Firstly, Chicago is one of the top economic cities in the world. Pensions are a big problem, but they are not going to wreck it. The algebra is fine.
Violent crime is another big problem, but it's a big problem everywhere in US. Cities, and Chicago isn't even near the top, per-capita. It's almost entirely gang-related. The big problem, as everywhere, is the red-lining of the past, drugs, and no opportunities. Illinois just legalized weed, will release tons of people for drug-related crimes, and this might help the hood a lot.
The suburbs are not dying. Real estate isn't great, but guess what, other than a few markets on the west coast, this is what home prices are going to do everywhere. The baby boomers got to have their houses triple, quintuple in value, millennials will not.
The population loss of Chicago is only in areas that, frankly, need population loss. There's no reason to live in some of these communities that are beset with drug problems and have no opportunities. These days people have cell-phones and the internet, they can move to better places all over the country. It's the reverse of the great migration and it's because the country hasn't helped these people ever in their entire history. Meanwhile middle-income and high-income 20 somethings are still flocking to Chicago.
JB Pritzker is the new governor. He is the absolute opposite of a "bored billionaire" who has never accomplished anything in his life. He has guided the Pritzker funds in a huge amount of charity work all over Chicago including, this audience might want to know, huge investment in startups in Chicago.
We are nowhere even close to the normalization of corruption as Russia, that's just stupid.
Edit: I also want to add that I've seen this narrative from three places -- journalists trying to be provocative; Chigoans that like to complain about politics but not get involved (favorite pastime); and Hanity trolls trying to stir up reasons why Democrat havens are poorly run / liberal policies supposedly fail.
Real estate values are some of the worst performing in the country. (see Rodkin)
Taxes keep skyrocketing. (Thanks JB!)
Pension underfunding keeps increasing. (https://wirepoints.org)
Population loss continues.
Violent crime continues. (http://heyjackass.com/home)
Politicians keep getting arrested with almost comical regularity. (See Mick Jagger's joke the other night?)
State/city assets keep getting sold. (Parking meters, Thomson Center, Skyway, etc)
Debt keeps going up, often with usurious terms.
Credit ratings keep getting worse. (Illinois is worst in the US)
New sources of taxes enacted. (Weed, gambling)
It's all right there, man. I don't like it anymore than you but sadly every warning sign, every symptom is right there staring at you in the face. If I asked someone to generally describe a death spiral this is what they would describe. And it's not like these are modest problems, we often rank DFL in the country for most of these things.
Violent crime in decline. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-chicago-...
State/City assets should be sold. Why should the state operate any assets?
Weed and gambling taxes are a good thing, not a bad thing.
Population loss is indeed continuing but it's to be expected. Older people moving to Florida is a big reason. Another reason, Chicago is more expensive than neighboring states. And unless you value big city amenities, there is no reason to stay.
Looking through some of these, I'm not surprised.
However, I think its not just taxes and Illinois corruption to blame for the 'death spiral' of far flung suburbs. The housing market in the US is changing in general. Buyers want shorter commutes, urban lifestyles. Living in some of the places Rodkin looks at - Lake Forest, Burr Ridge, Vernon Hills are 1+ hour commutes by train to the loop which a lot of buyers don't want.
He retweeted this comic which is one aspect:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D9XTp8MXUAE7T7B.png:large
>The real estate values will inevitably follow the path of the suburbs.
How long do you think that'll take?
The suburbs were growing and thriving while Chicago rotted away in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. However, since then the economy, culture, and tastes have changed and there's been a sustained period of urban renewal. As businesses seek to relocate to cities to attract millennial talent, suburban office parks and shopping centers have struggled, forcing them push more of their tax burden on residential property taxes. The younger, college-educated workforce prefers urban amenities like shorter commutes, public transit, cycling and walkable living. This is all exacerbated by the financial circumstances of millennials and zoomers.
It's no surprise that suburbs that provide those things continue to do well. For example, my hometown of Elmhurst, a Chicago suburb, has radically gentrified since I was a child. The home my parents purchased in 1980 for $68,000 is now worth more than ten times that. Why? Because it's walkable, has a legitimate downtown and you can commute to Chicago in 30 minutes during rush hour with Metra.
What's unique about Chicago, I think, isn't the discrepancy in life expectancy but the visibility of it. Chicago's segregation of outcomes is much more visible for historical reasons including being a Northern city, being a city of millions and being a city in the Midwest. My hope is that Chicago's fix can be applied to the rest of the country.
One item to deeply consider: The same gun laws, yet there is a world of difference in gun violence just a mile or two apart. The same gun laws. What's up with that?
I look forward to the day a difference like this isn't possible.
However, a book about illinois, Mars, or one specific moon isn't really the same subject even if it is part of the larger subject. Illinois is not California any more than Mars is Earth.
such a weird thought. i can think of many reasons: to have fun (i.e. fritter away), to spread advantage to other, to use to build something (that won't necessarily confer advantage later).
What percentage of being poor is your own doing or 'not doing'? What life choices do you make? Do you smoke/drink/do drugs, are you obese, are you physically active?
These things affect both how long you live and also how rich you are at the time of your death. Yeah, I know it's a spiral and it's hard to break out (been there).
Still, nobody will do it instead of every individual, no matter how "social" the government is.
Have you never been influenced by your environment? Or are you just not seeing how it influences you?