Opinion: Chicago Will Rise Again! (Manhattan, Atlanta: cul-de-sac, crime rates, buy)

[biggap]

Chicago is getting beat up by the national media, specially in regards to crime and political corruption. The corruption I cannot argue with. The city needs a total political cleanse from top to bottom! The crime, as bad as Chicago is these days, is a bit disproportionate, simply because there are many smaller cities with higher violent crime rates. I am not saying that nothing needs to change with crime, but come on, we are in the midst of a violent crime spike nationwide.

I believe once all of this political turmoil is over that has escalated since 2020, granted who knows when that will be, Chicago will begin to rise again. You may ask, ¨why?¨ All of these other cities like Atlanta, Denver, and Seattle are the ones truly growing! Well, here is my theory:

1) Chicago is a grand city with a downtown unmatched by basically any other in the US. I know about Manhattan, but here me out: The Loop has the best mix of business, transit, amenities, nightlife, scenery with the lakefront, and importantly, CLEANLINESS! People love Chicago for being so urban, but so clean.

2) Chicago has the infrastructure to withstand growth. There is a great mass transit system, and there is housing available. To grow, Chicago will not have to partake in some of the unsustainable growth habits of those West Coast and Sunbelt cities. Chicago will not depend on over-automotivizing, and it will not depend on building miles and miles of cul-de-sacs to grow.

3) The Great Lakes Area, including Chicagoland, will be one of the regions least effected by climate change. That is not to say it will be unscathed, but I think once wildfires, hurricanes, and droughts ravage other parts of the country, moving back to the Midwest will not look so unappealing.

Thoughts? It is time for Chicago to be optimistic! Tackle the crime, tackle the corruption, and show the city for all of its glory.

[Greencheese]

Your handwaving away of crime is literally the reason its a problem. Nobody cares that STL or Detroit has a higher per capita crime rate, they care about perceived safety. And the fact Chicago compares itself to those types of cities for crime but wants to be compared to London or NYC for other things is such a joke. Either Chicago needs to see itself as a global city and show that it IS a dangerous one by comparison or accept its a midwestern city and compare against those peers. You don't get to mix and max to make your shortcomings less obvious.

[Master Jay]

Good morning,

Greencheese, it looks to me like biggap IS recognizing issues of corruption and said the politics needs a complete cleansing. I imagine a part of that would be to be tougher on crime....

So biggap is acknowledging the crime, but pointing out positives of the city to not be purely focused on crime, given the positives the city itself still offers.

Or am I totally mis-reading everyone's viewpoints. I mean, I DID just wake up. Lol

[biggap]

Originally Posted by Greencheese

Your handwaving away of crime is literally the reason its a problem. Nobody cares that STL or Detroit has a higher per capita crime rate, they care about perceived safety. And the fact Chicago compares itself to those types of cities for crime but wants to be compared to London or NYC for other things is such a joke. Either Chicago needs to see itself as a global city and show that it IS a dangerous one by comparison or accept its a midwestern city and compare against those peers. You don't get to mix and max to make your shortcomings less obvious.

That is not true. What I said about crime, which I disagree with your characterization of it as so-called handwaving, did not cause the problem of crime in Chicago. I do not even live there. That was an absurd thing to say.

What I said about crime is that it is one of the things the city needs to get a hold of in order to return to prominence. That is not ¨handwaving.¨

[biggap]

Originally Posted by Master Jay

Good morning,

Greencheese, it looks to me like biggap IS recognizing issues of corruption and said the politics needs a complete cleansing. I imagine a part of that would be to be tougher on crime....

So biggap is acknowledging the crime, but pointing out positives of the city to not be purely focused on crime, given the positives the city itself still offers.

Or am I totally mis-reading everyone's viewpoints. I mean, I DID just wake up. Lol

You are right. I listed crime as one of the things holding the city back. I am not sure why he used that made up term ¨handwaving¨ to characterize my post.

[Josef K.]

I agree with some of what biggap has written here, especially this part:

Originally Posted by biggap

3) The Great Lakes Area, including Chicagoland, will be one of the regions least effected by climate change. That is not to say it will be unscathed, but I think once wildfires, hurricanes, and droughts ravage other parts of the country, moving back to the Midwest will not look so unappealing.

I've read some climatological reports, and the consensus is that the Great Lakes region will be one of the best places to live during this time of climate catastrophe. Yes lots of people are moving to Texas and Florida - but did you see what happened in Florida last week? Meanwhile, the last climate report I read said the single best place to live in the world in 2050 will be the state of Michigan. (Caveat: I have no idea how correct this is, but a lot of climate scientists seem to think so, and they know a lot more about the subject than I do.)

This is also on my mind because I just made a trip to Cleveland. Yes, it's a Rust Belt city that has been losing population for decades, but it's got what urbanists call "good bones." The same applies to a lot of older Rust Belt cities.

However, I concede that Greencheese's point has some merit. Crime is a worse problem now than it was pre-Covid, and to make matters worse, crime appears to be rising in areas previously considered safe. Already people I know are refusing to go into Chicago when before they had no problem doing so. If they can't get a handle on this problem, Chicago's future as a business and cultural center will suffer.

[Avondalist]

Of all the points made in the OP, I think the biggest miss is on corruption.

The Chicago Machine is a shell of what it used to be. Patronage is down, professionalism is up. Corruption in Chicago has been declining since Richard J left office. Illinois is another story, and corruption statewide got worse because of Madigan. It used to be that Chicago was super corrupt while Illinois was pretty well-run, as evidenced by its healthy bond ratings on the eve of Madigan's election. Now the city has cleaned itself up somewhat, and the state has gotten dirtier.

Madigan and Richard J are both gone now, and I think the page is turning on machine politics in Illinois. There's a lot of reform that needs to be done, but the trend line for the city is clear and the state is starting anew. Illinois will never be clean like Minnesota or Colorado or someplace like that. There's too much of a tradition of corruption. But it can be a place like New York where someone like Sheldon Silver exists without running the state finances into the ground. Small victories, eh?

Crime is the worst because it's a manageable problem. Right now the policies are wrong and making the underlying problem worse. This is the biggest area for course correction.

I don't buy the climate change refugee argument. People would rather live in warm, sunny place for a few decades and lose everything than live somewhere cold where they don't lose everything. People are short-sighted.

[personone]

I agree with most of this. Although I would put Political Corruption AND Crime at equal levels, and to be honest, I think that crime is the bigger issue.

Political corruption has been at the city’s core forever. What is driving people away from the city since 2020 has not been political corruption. It has been the brazen amounts of crime, which continues to increase and has noticeably spread to the downtown core and north side where it wasn’t nearly as visible, pre-2020.

Some of that is indirectly due to political corruption (i.e. having Kim Foxx and Lightfoot in office), so I can see putting them together. But the biggest Direct Problem that Chicago needs to solve is Crime.

[dcisive]

Sorry to poo on your parade, but consider for one thing, how long the city has been hampered by mismanagement, horrid political fools running the show. Note the statistical movements of crime say from the later 60's onward. It's never gone down, only UP. Your taxes are some of the worst in the entire country (accounting for the outflow of people living there). You can put on your rose-colored glasses as I suppose if you're planning on staying there you might as well limit your grief any way you can. Reminds me of the moving made during the middle of the depression in the early 30's. Their chant was "We're out of the red"! when they were anything BUT. If you were to look at REAL WORLD trends your assessment, it would be that of someone who's smoking the good stuff plenty.

[DaBears02]

Originally Posted by personone

I agree with most of this. Although I would put Political Corruption AND Crime at equal levels, and to be honest, I think that crime is the bigger issue.

Political corruption has been at the city’s core forever. What is driving people away from the city since 2020 has not been political corruption. It has been the brazen amounts of crime, which continues to increase and has noticeably spread to the downtown core and north side where it wasn’t nearly as visible, pre-2020.

Some of that is indirectly due to political corruption (i.e. having Kim Foxx and Lightfoot in office), so I can see putting them together. But the biggest Direct Problem that Chicago needs to solve is Crime.

Absolutely. Chicago has a nasty reputation for crime across the nation (whether it deserves it or not is a different story) and that perception will always hinder the city. Fixing crime would be key to making Chicago boom again.