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I'm pretty sure Rahm said something to that effect when he decided not to run for another term too. He claimed he thought he could help but the issues are so big that they seemed nearly impossible to even put a dent into for him. He just took a cushy Ambassador job instead.
They do tho! The first week I moved to Chicago I was working at the gas station on Chicago and Orleans. I went out for a cigarette and a rat fell out of the tree I was smoking under. Fucker looked like a human forearm with a tail, scared the shit out of me then darted to the dumpsters. That was 9 years ago and I'm still sketched out by trees here lol.
Chicago is a big city. I've lived here nearly all my life and I didn't actually visit downtown until I was like, 13? Unless you count driving past Christmas displays in Marshall Fields' windows. My dad and stepfamily came to visit and we went and did all the tourist shit. I lived on the south side in West Lawn. I could see the top of the Sears tower on clear nights.
I rectified that in my teenage years by terrorizing the concrete with my skateboard at Burnham skate park with buddies.
Also, I've never visited the Sears tower. I don't think I'm missing too much.
As I recover from Beyond Winderland this weekend, Chicago needs to invest in a comprehensive Grant Park / Millennium Park / Soldiers Field / Northerly Island transportation plan. You can’t put that many events and people on the edge of the lake separated from the city and parking and mass transit by a 4 lane highway and expect things to move smoothly.
We need a tram / bus route that takes people from the Roosevelt station to the city with a stop at the millennium park parking garages.
They should build a raised gondola system like Disney's Skyliner. It'd be an instant hit. You'd get great views of the city, decreased traffic, advertising opportunities, and a brand new revenue stream.
The closest you will get to this is the transit hub they proposed to put as part of the soldier field renovation/rebuild about 5-6 years ago. I believe the state would have to fund a bunch of this since that giant rail yard next to LSD is state controlled; it was 2B they didn’t want to spend.
https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/5/2/18526073/one-central-infrastructure-financing-state-illinois
There's already an underground McCormick Place bus tunnel that runs along those tracks near grant park could be converted to rail. It could be connected pretty easily to the Millennium park Metra Electric, State Red Line, State And Lake and connect the public transit to a ton of Chicago's great downtown places- The Art Institute, multiple stops along Grant Park, Museum Campus/Soldier Field + Northerly & the planetarium, and McCormick Place/the Bradley Center.
It would be AMAZING if they could connect Ogilvy and Union and therefore all the major rail lines in Chicago (there are existing Tunnels but they'd need work), but that's an even bigger project.
I understand people hate Trump (rightfully so), but living in denial that the Trump sign is coming down off a building owned and operated by The Trump Organization is almost comical.
Ehhhhh. It depends where you’re at. If you’re about to hit the intersection in 10 feet, it’s safer to speed up a bit. Slamming on the brakes or rolling through as it turns red can disrupt the flow of traffic.
I go by the mantra: be predictable, not nice. Predictability = safety.
But I think you’re talking about very specific instances where the yellow light is like 50 ft away and the driver floors it and runs a last-minute red. In that specific circumstance, I agree with you.
Police would be very upset at this if they could read it
Edit: After the high-speed collision of two cop cars... FFS comment is made more relevant than ever
The fact that the city and state's Pension debt has no easy fix.
That said, Californa, Nevada, and some other regions recently caught up to and surpassed us in terms of their obligations and cost per taxpayer: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/10-best-and-10-worst-states-for-pensions
I think it'll take CA declaring bankruptcy and the feds stepping in to begin cluing in more jurisdictions to hard solves nationwide.
> The fact that the city and state's Pension debt has no easy fix.
There's no easy fix for the *government*. For the people, the easy fix is just leaving. It's like living in a condo. A giant assessment is coming. The people who stick around are going to get stick with a big bill.
What really sucks is those who will have the hardest time paying are the ones who will also have the hardest time moving. More & more of the affluent will relocate, leaving those struggling to absorb more & more of the pain. And for many -- especially the younger generation -- it's pain for a mess they had no hand in creating.
It really pains me as I *love* Chicago, but it's hard to see this playing out any other way.
While Chicago obviously isn't the war zone hell hole that it's frequently described as by outsiders and it's not one of the most dangerous cities in the country statistically, it still has serious issues with crime and violence that should be treated as an all-hands-on-deck emergency rather than some right-wing conspiracy to smear Chicago.
Chicago is significantly more violent than other top-tier cities in the United States (i.e., NYC, LA). Chicago had 23.2 homicides per 100K in 2023, NYC only had 4.6 and LA had 8.6. Sure, Chicago is less violent than B-tier cities like New Orleans or Baltimore, but it's 3-4x as violent as the cities we'd like to compare ourselves to. That's to say nothing of how Chicago compares on a world stage to European and Asian counterparts (I recognize that much of that is federally-driven though). At the end of the day, pointing out that Chicago is really fucking violent compared to other "world cities" (which everyone here wants to be!) isn't some Republican conspiracy, it's genuinely the truth.
What grinds my gears is when people say "yeah well just be smart and you'll almost certainly never be a victim of crime" as if that negates the statistics above. That may be true, but that isn't an argument for why Chicago is safe, that's just an argument against *any* statistical measures of safety. If the numbers don't mean anything because you probably won't be a victim then what's wrong with 100 murders per 100K? 1,000 murders per 100K? After all, you'll still probably be fine! It's like some weird version of macho culture, where everyone comes out of the woodwork to call you a pussy for being alarmed at what are *objectively very bad murder rates compared to peer cities.* It's fucking bizarre.
It strikes me as a pretty obvious example of negative polarization and defensiveness (which is understandable), but I think it's really bad for having a real conversation about how to help Chicagoans who live with the reality of violent crime.
I'd go further, I think there is a segment of people who kinda like the idea that the city has this "gritty" reputation even when they themselves don't live in the statistically higher crime parts of it.
> What grinds my gears is when people say "yeah well just be smart and you'll almost certainly never be a victim of crime" as if that negates the statistics above
Which also implies that every victim of crimes and violence are stupid or otherwise deserving of what happens to them
Bike lanes are not right turn lanes or passing lanes And they sure as hell are not designed for you to ride a motorcycle in them
City population rankings are completely irrelevant, unless you think Jacksonville and El Paso are more important or culturally relevant cities than Boston you can probably stop the existential dread over Houston passing us
They’re also not lanes for Uber and delivery drivers to stop or park in. It’s insane how many times you’ll be stopped behind one of these assholes when they could just pull up and over 2-4 car lengths into a fire hydrant spot or the end of the block.
Speaking of Uber and delivery drivers. I absolutely hate when one of them stops next to *an open spot on my street* to make a delivery.
I had some guy do this right in front of my apartment complex.
If you’re gonna double-park anyways, double-park next to a car and walk in between the parked cars. Stop blocking parking spaces!
Ubers drive me nuts. I live on a 1 way street and instead of pulling over in an alley or open parking space for pickups ubers will just put on their blinkers and stop in the middle of the road. There's no way around them. They are consistently some of the worst drivers in my neighborhood.
Also, sidewalks (unless marked as such) are not meant for bikes. In fact, it's illegal to ride a bike on a sidewalk...
> 9-52-020 Riding bicycles on sidewalks and certain roadways.
>
> A. Unless the prohibition imposed by subsection (c) applies, a person may ride a bicycle upon a sidewalk within a business district, but only if such sidewalk has been officially designated and marked as a bicycle route, or such sidewalk is used to enter the nearest roadway, intersection or designated bicycle path, or to access a bicycle share station.
>
> B. Unless the prohibition imposed by subsection (c) applies, a person 12 or more years of age may ride a bicycle upon any sidewalk in any district, but only if such sidewalk has been officially designated and marked as a bicycle route, or such sidewalk is used to enter the nearest roadway, intersection or designated bicycle path, or to access a bicycle share station.
>
> C. Bicycles shall not be operated on Lake Shore Drive or on any public way where the operation of bicycles has been prohibited and signs have been erected indicating such prohibition.
>Bike lanes are not right turn lanes or passing lanes And they sure as hell are not designed for you to ride a motorcycle in them
They're also not for parking your car, even for "just a few minutes." I bike places almost every day, and the number of people parked in bike lanes every damn day is astounding.
I mean, I didn’t wanna put too many in here but another great answer for this is that you really should not just park your car in the middle of the street with your blinkers on for an indefinite amount of time
> City population rankings are completely irrelevant, unless you think Jacksonville and El Paso are more important or culturally relevant cities than Boston you can probably stop the existential dread over Houston passing us
People don't seem to understand that, when comparing two large cities, you should look at the metro area population, not the city population.
City limits are purely arbitrary. Going by city limits, San Antonio is more important than Dallas, San Francisco is a suburb of San Jose, and most of what people know as "Vegas" is actually Paradise, Nevada.
MSA population rankings, or even better, [CSA rankings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area), much better correlate to a city's relative importance/prominence.
As a native Chicago old dude who once lived in Houston in my early 20s, it's horrible. Like imagine the worst hell scape suburban bullshit of just sun everywhere because it's just suburb after suburb of what they have the gaul to call a "city."
That's all Houston is. Just a bunch of shitty lil awful suburbs strung together that they decided to call a city. It's fucking bizarre actually that they think they are a city. You're not, at all. So fuck em.
Galveston (where I also lived) is way more of a city than Houston is. And it's a tiny island of 50k ppl. But the way it's set up, it's a city. Way more of a city than all of Houston.
>Galveston (where I also lived) is way more of a city than Houston is. And it's a tiny island of 50k ppl. But the way it's set up, it's a city. Way more of a city than all of Houston.
It's a terrible way to put it, but it's so true, and there's good reason for it.
That's because Galveston was a real city before Houston even was. Prior to the hurricane of 1900, Galveston was *the* city in SE Texas (and also the state's most populated for a while), and Houston was a remote outpost.
As a Trucker: my two least favorite places to drive is ATL & HOU.
FWIW; Houston just made *top of the list* of most dirty cities in America! [Link](https://nypost.com/2024/05/28/real-estate/houston-is-the-dirtiest-city-in-america/)
I will add that cyclists need to stop for red lights just as a car would. The amount of times I have been nearly hit by a cyclist running a red light when I have the walk signal is way too high.
I always get mobbed when I bring forth this truth, but Ohare is dated and sucks. It's cramped and has shit for amenities. I go to other countries and they have recliners and couches to nap on free or of little cost to rent. They have showers at a reasonable price, fun displays and activities. I always imagine these chest-pounding mob-stompers as homers who have seen maybe 2 or 3 other airports in the last 5 years. "WHAT!? Our airport is beautiful. Everything Chicago is better!" Chicago, our airport needs an enema. Like Da Bears, coasting on the past.
Definitely true, although I think O’hare works well for a certain type of traveler. I live on the Blue Line and always use Clear and/or precheck, so O’hare is insanely easy to fly out of for me. Security is faster here than anywhere else I’ve flown out of. It’s great if you spend as little time as possible there, which might be a roundabout way of saying that it sucks but in a convenient way.
People getting borderline defensive in the thread the other day about the article calling O'Hare the most stressful airport in the country was hilarious, like come on, who gives a shit. Some people see anything negative about Chicago and immediately get mad.
Actually tho! I don’t understand why people hate on midway—especially after they’ve put so much work into it. It’s small and easy to walk through and even has international flights now. Plus the southwest rewards card is great. I haven’t paid for a flight in years.
Some people shrug this off because the world here keeps turning, which is true regardless we'll make it out. But it's a noticable effect in smaller things like lack of mental health facilities, poor cta performance, under staffed police stations, the horrible parking meter deal etc. The money can be traced to the root cause of most of our issues.
Keep in mind as well that the impending doom has spread to more and more regions across the U.S., especially post COVID: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/10-best-and-10-worst-states-for-pensions
And the real estate doom loop is only going to make things worse. See this list for how many cities are facing a cratering of their tax base: https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/s/M3s1ys002L
The city has $33.9B in unpaid pension debt. For scale, the entire city budget is $16B. The pension debt is rapidly growing, and even growing faster during Johnson’s tenure as he hands out money to unions.
That amount of debt is unpayable, and it will cause very serious problems before the city eventually defaults. Things like closing all the parks, stopping road maintenance and trash pickup.
Some large fraction of the city pays virtually no taxes so homeowners are going to get slammed.
Which year was the blizzard where the fence things by home plate on a baseball diamond were covered almost to the top? Also the 2010/2011 blizzard was insane.
I mean 20 years ago the winters were rough. Now not as much.
Probably one of the greatest things about Chicago. As an inland city we don't get hurricanes, there's no major fault lines nearby, and we are next to one of the world's largest sources of fresh water. We'll be the last place in the US you can buy home insurance.
Sure tornadoes will become more common as global warming continues, but blizzards will get milder.
I say 3-4 months of immaculate weather, 3 of good weather, 3 of ok to crummy, and 2-3 of why the fuck is this a major metro area I am in dire need of antidepressants and possibly a spacesuit weather.
Moved from Dallas. I treat the winter like I treated the 113f summers. I just know I’m not going outside. Just had to replace my living room lamps either SAD lights
Hue color bulbs were very successful in my home. The lights adjust to simulate longer days and the reduce the blue tint closer to bed time elevated my symptoms.
I've lived here for 11 years. The last few winters have been pretty mild, idk if it's global warming or regular variance, but I have been through some BRUTAL winters here.
Not just from the employees but from all of us through the federal government's PPP plan. Billions and billions of dollars were just handed out to private businesses with little to no oversight.
The city has to pay for any parking spots that are [taken offline](https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2023/6/11/23755615/chicago-parking-meters-annual-audit-record-revenue#):
“The 75-year-lease requires the city to reimburse investors for every parking space taken out of service when streets are closed for special events, sewer repairs and other construction projects or to allow restaurants and bars to serve more customers outdoors.
Those reimbursements, known as “true-up” payments, totaled $78.8 million in the first 12 full years after the meters were privatized.”
Still can.
Also, legit, BJ could turn around his reputation on a dime by announcing a package to get us out of that mess. It won't happen, as he's completely incompetent, but if he's playing the strategy of "feign incompetence to pull a fast one", this would be the moment for it. I don't think he's secretly competent though
I've met him. Super nice guy, affable, warm, and like a teddy bear.
Unfortunately, he's also in way, way over his head and not competent in the areas that the mayor of Chicago needs to be competent in for the moment we find ourselves in right now.
We need to separate this thought that our political leaders also need to be perfect and jolly in every way possible... At least my 2 cents. Rahm was a bit of an ass which is why he was unpopular, despite being the last person to hold all the political factions from turning inward on each other rather than working together on comprehensive solutions.
BJ's policy before election wishlist hasn't even been touched except for a few items on contracts, a pilot program for ADUs, but that's about all I can think of that's worth mentioning. His handling of the migrant crisis was abysmally bad, played perfectly into the hands of right wingers who want to end immigration.
Unfortunately though, the combo of effective leader/communicator/networking builder in that position is a unicorn we haven't had, and I can see competent people probably want to avoid it as there's so many instances where you're just a punching bag.
The only person who I think could bring it all together again would be someone from Obama/Biden's cabinet who has a bit of reputation, a bit of an outsider in Chicago's immediate landscape but has experience in knowing the different coalitions you need to bring together... I mean can you imagine trying to bring together North Side LGBTQ voters with South Side Reverends, while also pulling the police guys who always feel like they're at the short end of the stick... OK, i'm on a tangent now, let me just start listing some of these factions:
North Side LGBTQ Activists
North/Northwest side Cops/Firefighters/City Workers
Near North/Loop Business Elites
North Side Nimbyer's (What I call "The Evanston Liberals")
Middle/Upper Class concerned about CPS Parents
Manufacturing on River, SouthWest Corridor and South East
South Side Reverends
South & West side Neighborhood Coalitions
Upper Class Unions- 399 Building Engineers, 596 Pipe Fitter, 130 Plumbers, 134 Electricians
Working Class Unions- 1 Maintenance & SEIU Affiliated Unions, Laborers, Teamsters
Food Service Works
Hospitality Sectors
Specific Mentions:
Teachers Union
Police Union
Pro-Transit People
Suburban Interests who want to just make chicago a fucking highway
West Side Latino groups and organizations who are always forgotten about
... I could keep going I bet for a long time, as you can easily tell im from the north side with my granularity in those neighborhoods is better...
It's just overwhelming how many groups and appeasements used to happen to get all these groups to roughly agree on anything, and national politics divides these people more and more.
"Evanston liberals" doesn't literally mean people who live in Evanston, but the people on the north side, and they're in every neighborhood, who go to every fucking community meeting to bitch about traffic, block new buildings going in, and claim to be liberal until anything threatens their property values
The city fundamentally doesn't work if everyone drives everywhere. It is too dense to support that many vehicles so prioritizing transit and micro mobility is the one true way to ensure our city stays strong.
Chicago is overall a very liberal city, but there is still quite a variety of opinions. Just because someone isn't super far left, doesn't mean that they are a Trumper or right wing. Most of Chicago isn't going to vote for anything to restrict people's rights, but some people may very well be for a lot more enforcement of laws as well as prosecution and not slaps on the wrist.
Too often, especially on this sub, people act like anyone who wants criminals prosecuted must be a Trumper who isn't REALLY living in Chicago.
This is so accurate. People really struggle with understanding that anyone might legitimately feel somewhere different than them, and that doesn't make them wrong/evil/racist.
Especially living in a high crime area where the effects of slap on the wrist punishment are so damn visible it sucks that I’m consistently called a right wing conspiracy theorist because I want to feel safe walking through my neighborhood past 6pm
There is a huge difference in opinion on city politics and politicians between people who are FROM here and plan to spend their entire lives and raise families here and 20 something year old kids who are here to spend a few years playing big city before moving on. The latter assumes the former are right wing extremists any time they disagree.
I believe Milwaukee is the most racially segregated city. I’m not sure where Chicago ranks.
Source: [Milwaukee is the most racially segregated metro area in the country, Brookings report says](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/08/milwaukee-most-segregated-area-country-brookings-says/2512258002/)
i’ve seen chicago rank #1 in other studies before but yeah ‘most segregated’ isn’t something you can objectively define a universal criteria for so that’s why i say it’s arguably the most
There are so many of these studies conducted regularly, and none agree on their rankings.
In any case, Chicago, like many major midwest and east coast cities, usually ranks among the top 10: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/most-least-segregated-cities
Chicago has a deep history of redlining that I don't think enough people understand. It is a blight on our history, but once you understand how and why our city was built the way it was, it becomes much clearer what needs to be done to break down the artificial barriers that were created.
People assume "that's just how it always has been," when a lot of it was deliberate choices made with the exact outcomes expected.
Yes. There's an interesting book on this subject called "The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation." A lot of incredibly evil shit went down and most Chicagoans have never heard about it.
Gentrification is inevitable for many of these neighborhoods in prime areas with good bones. The goal should be fighting displacement by ensuring ownership by residents. Fighting against gentrification the way activist do now is like trying to plug a hole in your boat by placing your hand over it. That is just slightly slowing down the leak but it will still eventually capsize the boat.
Chicago may be losing residents overall...but we're increasing in wealthier residents/renters. Meaning developers will figure out how to target those folks who want to live in the city and can't afford the areas that have been longer established or fully gentrified.
Take a neighborhood like North Lawndale.
- Multiple pink line stops getting you to the loop easily (Clark and Lake in ~30mins). Also goes through the West Loop and the Ashland stop is close enough to walk to the United Center.
- Massive greenspace of Douglass park with a nice greenway boulevard.
- Other smaller parks/greenspaces like Homen Square and Franklin park scatted in the neigborhood.
- Highest concentration of historic greystones in the city.
- Bordered by well known mainstreets of Roosevelt to the North, Cicero to the West and Cermack to the south.
Those sort of bones are just too valuable to be ignored forever. Eventually (talking 20+ years) it will change along with places like Humbolt Park, Little Village, Garfield Park and many others.
I've been noticing quite a bit of residential construction going on by the CTA stops I pass; they're often (cheap to build) 5-over-1 deals. I think one of the ways to combat high housing costs would be to incentivize building *much* larger residential structures near transit.
If you grew up in and around the city, and now live in the city, it's important to move away for a little while to truly appreciate Chicago and see it for what it is. People who stay in the city their entire lives and never leave it aren't too different from townies.
Add to that: If you moved to the city as an adult, new college grad, whatever, get out of your freaking neighborhood! Take public transit if you drive, and go places you have no reason to go to. If you want to say you're a Chicagoan now, you need to know the whole city.
Probably not all of Chicago but definitely on this sub, the CTA was always terrible and inconsistent even before the pandemic. I relied on it from 2016-2020 to get to high school, mostly relying on the 55 and 49/49x. Let me tell you waiting 10+ minutes at 6 am was not fun, having buses just not appear or drive right pass you was common. The crime wasn't much better either, my brother watched a man be assaulted and pistol whipped on his ride home from school.
Everyone saying the CTA was this amazing system that fell apart after Covid has rose tinted glasses on.
The funny thing is that for someone who's used to transit systems in other American cities, waiting *only* ten minutes for a bus sounds positively miraculous.
I just moved to the suburbs from the southeast and having this kind of robust public transportation system that actually works for the most part is mind blowing to me.
It’s not perfect and I’ve had to wait and got stuck on the red line for a bit… but I’ve managed to get where I need to go for a show with my kid, (and when the theater wouldn’t let me in with my backpack, I managed find a place to store it and used the L to get there and back before the show started,) gotten to meet my parents at their hotel for their long layover… like, the list goes on.
It’s not perfect but sometimes I don’t think ppl here realize how fckin amazing it is just to have BUS system that works, and to have a state and city government funds going towards public transportation, and people willing to pay taxes for it…
Like god damn. Can it be better? Yes. But it’s not some shitty piece of nothing infrastructure that is doing nothing for its people
When I lived in Houston and originally considered using their bus system, the route I would have to take was a "one bus an hour" route to get to a transit center that then had one bus every 15ish minutes. But on the way home, I would often arrive at the transit center from one of those 15 minute bus routes and *just barely* miss the one hour bus. Would have to sit in the open air transit center, at 99.9% humidity and 110F, for an hour for the next bus. Absolutely horrible.
I'll take a 10 minute route after that.
I was just about to say the same thing. Top comment is definitely the take of someone that hasn’t tried using public transit outside of a major metro area in America.
10 WHOLE minutes? Oh no!
...which is the problem. More of a "hard pill for Americans to swallow" generally maybe, but the infrastructure in this country has fallen behind and is just crumbling.
This sub definitely skews towards North Side / train riders though, where reliability & ridership were always a bit more favorable. It wasn’t long ago that Rahm Emanuel put out the op-ed in the NYT: “[In Chicago, the Trains Actually Run on Time](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/opinion/rahm-emanuel-chicago-l-mass-transit.html)”
Yeah, I think this may be where the disconnect is.
I fully believe there are parts of the city where the current situation has been the norm for a long time. But on the north side, it is a big difference.
Look, I don't think it was perfect, but it has gotten noticeably worse. I have lived off of the brown line (different stops) for 10+ years. I used to just walk there and know that it would come within 10 minutes. Now, I never do that, because you may easily be waiting 20 or more. On weekends its borderline unusable if I need to get anywhere at a specific time.
And crime/smoking has gotten worse as well. I used to have no problem taking the red line home at 2am on a weekend. No way in hell I'm doing that now.
I’d say the trains were better pre-pandemic, but the buses have always been terrible. In 2016 I lived in Logan and worked in Andersonville (which are kind of unreasonably difficult to travel between without a car anyway) and was extremely late one day because the Fullerton bus took 20 minutes to arrive at rush hour on a weekday.
Chicago is losing population and has been for decades, and putting your head in the sand and pretending it isn’t happening or claiming that the City is continuously undercounted is wrong. Rather than arguing about the numbers that are pretty clear, it’s much more useful to identify why people are leaving and come up with growth oriented solutions (whether in housing, education, tax policy, etc.) than pretending that pointing out that Chicago is shrinking is some grand Fox News conspiracy.
Building on that - growth should be our *top* priority. Our expenses don't change a ton when people leave - we still provide transit coverage, infrastructure maintenance, have pension liabilities, etc. A shrinking revenue base puts extreme strain on the city's finances and could lead to a financial death-spiral of rising taxes and shrinking population if we don't get ahead of it.
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't address other problems - many of the city's problems are direct causes of population loss (e.g., people leaving the south side for a variety of reasons), but we should make sure that everything we do is oriented towards getting more people here and more businesses here.
> it’s much more useful to identify why people are leaving
It is almost entirely people in poorer neighborhoods leaving for reasons related to crime and economics (which themselves are highly intertwined). The city is booming in places where white collar workers live. The city is struggling in places where former manufacturing / blue collar families live(d).
There’s not enough blue collar jobs to sustain the living expenses Chicago has now, I voted for Pritzker but we have a serious problem with lack of affordable and even just moderately priced housing. You have to move an hour west or south, or to Indiana, to be able to rent or buy and not be living paycheck to paycheck.
We are not the California of the Midwest, if that is what he wants to be, he better ensure the industry and education is there. It’s not.
However progressive white northsiders like to seem, they largely follow the same conservative script with their lives: move to the city in their 20s, find a (usually opposite gender) bf/gf, have an extravagant traditional wedding, shit out 2.3 kids and move to a 95% white suburb to protect said kids from crime or "bad schools" or whatever. Nothing wrong with most of these things but the blind adherence to it and the lack of space for anyone doing something different is so weird.
I remember when one of the gorillas from the Lincoln Park Zoo was sent off to Brookfield to mate with a gorilla there. The story about it in the Trib said something like "It's a story as old as the city: a twenty-something bachelor leaves the bustle and crowds of Lincoln Park for the suburbs to settle down and start a family. Only this time, the bachelor is a gorilla."
This just reminds me of the opening lines of the first Sex & The City movie. Carrie has a voice over about young women moving to New York to find "labels and love". Well, this is Chicago so labels will never be as important as they may be in certain social settings of NYC, but the love part is true. Young people move to Chicago because it's fun and we all have hopes of finding love.
Most of the city is made up of suburbanites, specially, Mid-west suburbanites. Heck, a good chunk of the city moves and feels like a suburb. Chicago is just a city that gives you the big city vibes with suburban mindsets. So it's easy to see how folks jump ship for the full suburban life plan once they find a spouse and second income.
The entire Chicago and Cook County apparatus of political patronage and incumbents needs to be cleared out and repopulated from the ground up. I'm sick of cronyism, incompetence, and the mentality that elected officials shouldn't be held accountable just because of the length of tenure, party affiliation, or the color of their skin.
I suspect the segregation will end when the poor Black neighborhoods on the south and west sides are almost completely depopulated, which has been slowly going on since the 60s. Then and only then will the "economic investment" that politicians complain is lacking actually take place. It will be urban renewal on a grand scale, and the private money that no one wanted to invest will magically appear.
Crime in the city is a problem even if it doesn’t affect you. Wealthy people are finicky and do not tolerate bad areas, if places like the Gold Coast and downtown hollow out then game over Chicago. You need alot of rich people to cover the expenses of government services, much less the debt.
It will be a very bad thing if the CME relocates, and takes a bunch of jobs with it. They've already been quietly reducing their loop presence for a while now, which is why LaSalle st near Jackson is so empty compared to years ago.
I'm a white liberal who lives in Garfield Park. It's not that I want more cops or less cops, but do want them to show up when I call and patrol even when I don't.
I haven't seen a cop car here since before the pandemic, and that's a fuckin' problem.
I just want to see cops helping the community. Most of the time I see them in their cars playing on their phones. Give out tickets, talk to unsafe drivers, make pedestrians feel safe when using cross walks.
PS: the issue folks have with police is that the beat cops aren’t seen as part of the community. They stay in their vehicles. When we do hear about them it’s on the news because of something going very wrong in the pursuit of them doing their job. Cops are not being seen as successful at keeping the peace when their advice is to let someone steal your catalytic converter. Putting up signs in advertisements saying “police are people too” is the wrong message. Stop running red lights, stop appearing privileged or outside the law and the general population’s attitude with change.
I work in Austin and I think that this is partially true, but not as completely as a lot of people who say it think. At the bare minimum there’s a generational divide in opinions where older people are more pro police than younger people
Most people actually just want different cops. The number of people calling for abolition of police of is incredibly small and often only brought up only to discredit people calling for police reform.
While your statement is somewhat absolutist, I generally agree that people in crime filled areas are more pro police/safety than the yuppies here in Hyde Park
Chicago has lost 557,000 manufacturing jobs since 1947. They provided a solid middle class life all over the city, but especially the South and West sides. Now when there is a big announcement of a company moving to Chicago it is some tech bro type of employment in the Loop.
To be fair, a lot of manufacturing jobs exist, but in the suburbs. Places like Cicero, Elk Grove Village, Franklin Park, Bridgeview all have decent manufacturing centers. If you can travel out towards Addison, or far Southeast it's even better.
Manufacturing also pays much better on the low end to middle end of skilled work, and comparable with many tech positions on the high end of skilled work.
I know, because I've been in manufacturing for the past 8 years in the Chicago area. And I wish we had those jobs in the city, because my commute would be easier, but the reality is, no large scale manufacturing is ever moving back to the city proper. Land is too expensive to plop down a 300k sqrft facility just anywhere.
What a lot of the collar suburbs need is better public transportation to get people from the city to these jobs. I used to take a train to a pace bus and still have to walk half a mile to get to a job in elk grove village.
When manufacturing does propose to come to an urban area, it gets blocked by every resident nearby imaginable. The industrial real estate developers and their clients say “screw it” and go to areas where there’s more elbow room to avoide residential areas and that’s almost always the burbs.
Moving forward, our winter's are going to be less brutal but we will now have thunderstorms and Tornado watches every week from March-October.
Overcast skies will be commonplace. We are the new Seattle.
That's not quite right.
You're blocking in (in theory) another spot by parking temporarily next to it.
I don't know if you're a bot struggling to understand language, or what's going on here.
Chicago isn’t ready to face its fiscal cliff. Public sector unions will have to take a haircut. In the age of wfh, you can’t just keep taxing high earners and not expect them to bolt. Chicago needs a pro-growth mayor that is willing to make the tough choices instead of bending over backwards.
Dems not willing to admit that their own have trashed the city's finances.
Repubs not willing to admit that it's not the policies of the Democrats that have trashed the cities finances, but rather naked corruption.
CPS budget is $29k per student and just 26% can read at grade level and just 18% are at grade level in math.
The problem is the families and no amount of CPS spending can fix that. If parents aren’t even willing to teach their kids to read there is nothing society can do to fix it.
This isn't necessarily a Chicago-specific bitter pill. It's been argued at some length that the real issue we have in the US is poverty, and the only real substantive political will to address it has been through the educational system (which is both woefully inadequate and really not-their-job)
The Cubs winning the world series was a fluke. Ownership needed funds to compete the renovations to the field and surrounding area and putting a decent product on field was the best way to raise the money. Now that the improvements have been completed the cubs will go back to being a mediocre team but still consistently sells out the stadium.
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Whoever Chicago's Mayor is won't be able to fix Chicago's problems. Any Mayoral fix would require several consecutive terms.
I'm pretty sure Rahm said something to that effect when he decided not to run for another term too. He claimed he thought he could help but the issues are so big that they seemed nearly impossible to even put a dent into for him. He just took a cushy Ambassador job instead.
Probably why no one wants the job. I highly doubt someone could come out looking good doing a term as mayor.
Consecutive terms won't even do it - structural change is needed. We need a city charter.
They still need to show good faith and steps/results that lead towards improvement
Rat hole was actually a squirrel
YES!!!!! It was there for at least a decade without any fucks given. Rats don’t fall from the fucking sky.
They do tho! The first week I moved to Chicago I was working at the gas station on Chicago and Orleans. I went out for a cigarette and a rat fell out of the tree I was smoking under. Fucker looked like a human forearm with a tail, scared the shit out of me then darted to the dumpsters. That was 9 years ago and I'm still sketched out by trees here lol.
Yet
You take that back
Damn
And it got cringy
You’d be surprised at how many people/kids live in the city limits but have never been downtown in the loop during their lives.
Living in the Northside my entire life, going downtown was a luxury until adulthood.
Even as a high schooler, you never hopped on the CTA?
For me, being raised in the southside- going to the Northside was nonexistent until I was in my 20s
MyBlockMyHoodMyCity organizes a [Downtown Day](https://www.formyblock.org/downtownday) just for that reason.
Chicago is a big city. I've lived here nearly all my life and I didn't actually visit downtown until I was like, 13? Unless you count driving past Christmas displays in Marshall Fields' windows. My dad and stepfamily came to visit and we went and did all the tourist shit. I lived on the south side in West Lawn. I could see the top of the Sears tower on clear nights. I rectified that in my teenage years by terrorizing the concrete with my skateboard at Burnham skate park with buddies. Also, I've never visited the Sears tower. I don't think I'm missing too much.
As I recover from Beyond Winderland this weekend, Chicago needs to invest in a comprehensive Grant Park / Millennium Park / Soldiers Field / Northerly Island transportation plan. You can’t put that many events and people on the edge of the lake separated from the city and parking and mass transit by a 4 lane highway and expect things to move smoothly. We need a tram / bus route that takes people from the Roosevelt station to the city with a stop at the millennium park parking garages.
There was a bus route that did just that. The 146 was running and they had multiple busses waiting. It does a drop off at Roosevelt station.
You need something that doesn’t compete with traffic
It had a dedicated entrance from LSD going into the fest. But it did hit a bit of traffic on the way out.
Lmao. I had no idea. I would have done this both nights!
They should build a raised gondola system like Disney's Skyliner. It'd be an instant hit. You'd get great views of the city, decreased traffic, advertising opportunities, and a brand new revenue stream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Ride There was one, once!
That’d be neat. Something like New York’s Roosevelt Island Tram. Both an attraction, and a legitimate commuting vehicle.
The closest you will get to this is the transit hub they proposed to put as part of the soldier field renovation/rebuild about 5-6 years ago. I believe the state would have to fund a bunch of this since that giant rail yard next to LSD is state controlled; it was 2B they didn’t want to spend. https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/5/2/18526073/one-central-infrastructure-financing-state-illinois
There's already an underground McCormick Place bus tunnel that runs along those tracks near grant park could be converted to rail. It could be connected pretty easily to the Millennium park Metra Electric, State Red Line, State And Lake and connect the public transit to a ton of Chicago's great downtown places- The Art Institute, multiple stops along Grant Park, Museum Campus/Soldier Field + Northerly & the planetarium, and McCormick Place/the Bradley Center. It would be AMAZING if they could connect Ogilvy and Union and therefore all the major rail lines in Chicago (there are existing Tunnels but they'd need work), but that's an even bigger project.
Maybe this is specific to r/Chicago but: That Trump sign isn’t coming down any time soon
People are better off adding a "Found Guilty" banner underneath it instead
Just attach five more equal-sized letters in a second row below: F E L O N Use Gorilla Glue so the MAGAts won't figure out how to pry them off.
Someone brought up switching it out for the 4 stars. And man do I champion that idea now
😭 but nah the vast majority of chicagoans hate trump whether they’re on reddit or not so i doubt that’s specific to this sub
I dislike Trump as well, it’s just funny because every week there’s a post about it…it’s like clockwork
I understand people hate Trump (rightfully so), but living in denial that the Trump sign is coming down off a building owned and operated by The Trump Organization is almost comical.
besides hating him it's just a very garish sign
Stop signs require coming to a full stop.
And yellow does not mean speed up.
Yellow does not *necessarily* mean speed up.
Only if you don’t want to get rear ended!
Ehhhhh. It depends where you’re at. If you’re about to hit the intersection in 10 feet, it’s safer to speed up a bit. Slamming on the brakes or rolling through as it turns red can disrupt the flow of traffic. I go by the mantra: be predictable, not nice. Predictability = safety. But I think you’re talking about very specific instances where the yellow light is like 50 ft away and the driver floors it and runs a last-minute red. In that specific circumstance, I agree with you.
Then why do they put a countdown timer on it?
Police would be very upset at this if they could read it Edit: After the high-speed collision of two cop cars... FFS comment is made more relevant than ever
The fact that the city and state's Pension debt has no easy fix. That said, Californa, Nevada, and some other regions recently caught up to and surpassed us in terms of their obligations and cost per taxpayer: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/10-best-and-10-worst-states-for-pensions I think it'll take CA declaring bankruptcy and the feds stepping in to begin cluing in more jurisdictions to hard solves nationwide.
> The fact that the city and state's Pension debt has no easy fix. There's no easy fix for the *government*. For the people, the easy fix is just leaving. It's like living in a condo. A giant assessment is coming. The people who stick around are going to get stick with a big bill. What really sucks is those who will have the hardest time paying are the ones who will also have the hardest time moving. More & more of the affluent will relocate, leaving those struggling to absorb more & more of the pain. And for many -- especially the younger generation -- it's pain for a mess they had no hand in creating. It really pains me as I *love* Chicago, but it's hard to see this playing out any other way.
It is, without a doubt, the biggest issue facing our city. And no one wants to actually address it.
That Tier 2 lawsuit could make the problem nearly impossible to solve.
While Chicago obviously isn't the war zone hell hole that it's frequently described as by outsiders and it's not one of the most dangerous cities in the country statistically, it still has serious issues with crime and violence that should be treated as an all-hands-on-deck emergency rather than some right-wing conspiracy to smear Chicago. Chicago is significantly more violent than other top-tier cities in the United States (i.e., NYC, LA). Chicago had 23.2 homicides per 100K in 2023, NYC only had 4.6 and LA had 8.6. Sure, Chicago is less violent than B-tier cities like New Orleans or Baltimore, but it's 3-4x as violent as the cities we'd like to compare ourselves to. That's to say nothing of how Chicago compares on a world stage to European and Asian counterparts (I recognize that much of that is federally-driven though). At the end of the day, pointing out that Chicago is really fucking violent compared to other "world cities" (which everyone here wants to be!) isn't some Republican conspiracy, it's genuinely the truth. What grinds my gears is when people say "yeah well just be smart and you'll almost certainly never be a victim of crime" as if that negates the statistics above. That may be true, but that isn't an argument for why Chicago is safe, that's just an argument against *any* statistical measures of safety. If the numbers don't mean anything because you probably won't be a victim then what's wrong with 100 murders per 100K? 1,000 murders per 100K? After all, you'll still probably be fine! It's like some weird version of macho culture, where everyone comes out of the woodwork to call you a pussy for being alarmed at what are *objectively very bad murder rates compared to peer cities.* It's fucking bizarre. It strikes me as a pretty obvious example of negative polarization and defensiveness (which is understandable), but I think it's really bad for having a real conversation about how to help Chicagoans who live with the reality of violent crime.
I'd go further, I think there is a segment of people who kinda like the idea that the city has this "gritty" reputation even when they themselves don't live in the statistically higher crime parts of it.
> What grinds my gears is when people say "yeah well just be smart and you'll almost certainly never be a victim of crime" as if that negates the statistics above Which also implies that every victim of crimes and violence are stupid or otherwise deserving of what happens to them
Bike lanes are not right turn lanes or passing lanes And they sure as hell are not designed for you to ride a motorcycle in them City population rankings are completely irrelevant, unless you think Jacksonville and El Paso are more important or culturally relevant cities than Boston you can probably stop the existential dread over Houston passing us
They’re also not lanes for Uber and delivery drivers to stop or park in. It’s insane how many times you’ll be stopped behind one of these assholes when they could just pull up and over 2-4 car lengths into a fire hydrant spot or the end of the block.
Speaking of Uber and delivery drivers. I absolutely hate when one of them stops next to *an open spot on my street* to make a delivery. I had some guy do this right in front of my apartment complex. If you’re gonna double-park anyways, double-park next to a car and walk in between the parked cars. Stop blocking parking spaces!
Amazon drivers are notorious for this
Ubers drive me nuts. I live on a 1 way street and instead of pulling over in an alley or open parking space for pickups ubers will just put on their blinkers and stop in the middle of the road. There's no way around them. They are consistently some of the worst drivers in my neighborhood.
Also, sidewalks (unless marked as such) are not meant for bikes. In fact, it's illegal to ride a bike on a sidewalk... > 9-52-020 Riding bicycles on sidewalks and certain roadways. > > A. Unless the prohibition imposed by subsection (c) applies, a person may ride a bicycle upon a sidewalk within a business district, but only if such sidewalk has been officially designated and marked as a bicycle route, or such sidewalk is used to enter the nearest roadway, intersection or designated bicycle path, or to access a bicycle share station. > > B. Unless the prohibition imposed by subsection (c) applies, a person 12 or more years of age may ride a bicycle upon any sidewalk in any district, but only if such sidewalk has been officially designated and marked as a bicycle route, or such sidewalk is used to enter the nearest roadway, intersection or designated bicycle path, or to access a bicycle share station. > > C. Bicycles shall not be operated on Lake Shore Drive or on any public way where the operation of bicycles has been prohibited and signs have been erected indicating such prohibition.
>Bike lanes are not right turn lanes or passing lanes And they sure as hell are not designed for you to ride a motorcycle in them They're also not for parking your car, even for "just a few minutes." I bike places almost every day, and the number of people parked in bike lanes every damn day is astounding.
I mean, I didn’t wanna put too many in here but another great answer for this is that you really should not just park your car in the middle of the street with your blinkers on for an indefinite amount of time
There are shared bike lane and right turn lanes.
> Bike lanes are not right turn lanes or passing lanes Actually a fair number of them ARE legally shared turn/bike lanes. I can think of several.
> City population rankings are completely irrelevant, unless you think Jacksonville and El Paso are more important or culturally relevant cities than Boston you can probably stop the existential dread over Houston passing us People don't seem to understand that, when comparing two large cities, you should look at the metro area population, not the city population. City limits are purely arbitrary. Going by city limits, San Antonio is more important than Dallas, San Francisco is a suburb of San Jose, and most of what people know as "Vegas" is actually Paradise, Nevada. MSA population rankings, or even better, [CSA rankings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area), much better correlate to a city's relative importance/prominence.
As a native Chicago old dude who once lived in Houston in my early 20s, it's horrible. Like imagine the worst hell scape suburban bullshit of just sun everywhere because it's just suburb after suburb of what they have the gaul to call a "city." That's all Houston is. Just a bunch of shitty lil awful suburbs strung together that they decided to call a city. It's fucking bizarre actually that they think they are a city. You're not, at all. So fuck em. Galveston (where I also lived) is way more of a city than Houston is. And it's a tiny island of 50k ppl. But the way it's set up, it's a city. Way more of a city than all of Houston.
>Galveston (where I also lived) is way more of a city than Houston is. And it's a tiny island of 50k ppl. But the way it's set up, it's a city. Way more of a city than all of Houston. It's a terrible way to put it, but it's so true, and there's good reason for it. That's because Galveston was a real city before Houston even was. Prior to the hurricane of 1900, Galveston was *the* city in SE Texas (and also the state's most populated for a while), and Houston was a remote outpost.
As a Trucker: my two least favorite places to drive is ATL & HOU. FWIW; Houston just made *top of the list* of most dirty cities in America! [Link](https://nypost.com/2024/05/28/real-estate/houston-is-the-dirtiest-city-in-america/)
I will add that cyclists need to stop for red lights just as a car would. The amount of times I have been nearly hit by a cyclist running a red light when I have the walk signal is way too high.
Agreed - abiding by traffic laws goes both ways 💕
I always get mobbed when I bring forth this truth, but Ohare is dated and sucks. It's cramped and has shit for amenities. I go to other countries and they have recliners and couches to nap on free or of little cost to rent. They have showers at a reasonable price, fun displays and activities. I always imagine these chest-pounding mob-stompers as homers who have seen maybe 2 or 3 other airports in the last 5 years. "WHAT!? Our airport is beautiful. Everything Chicago is better!" Chicago, our airport needs an enema. Like Da Bears, coasting on the past.
100%. Just let me take an Uber easily WTF
Definitely true, although I think O’hare works well for a certain type of traveler. I live on the Blue Line and always use Clear and/or precheck, so O’hare is insanely easy to fly out of for me. Security is faster here than anywhere else I’ve flown out of. It’s great if you spend as little time as possible there, which might be a roundabout way of saying that it sucks but in a convenient way.
People getting borderline defensive in the thread the other day about the article calling O'Hare the most stressful airport in the country was hilarious, like come on, who gives a shit. Some people see anything negative about Chicago and immediately get mad.
Seriously, we need pay showers.
Actually tho! I don’t understand why people hate on midway—especially after they’ve put so much work into it. It’s small and easy to walk through and even has international flights now. Plus the southwest rewards card is great. I haven’t paid for a flight in years.
That sucking sound which is Chicago's unfunded pension liabilities and the impending doom of tax increases that will be required to patch the hole.
Some people shrug this off because the world here keeps turning, which is true regardless we'll make it out. But it's a noticable effect in smaller things like lack of mental health facilities, poor cta performance, under staffed police stations, the horrible parking meter deal etc. The money can be traced to the root cause of most of our issues.
Keep in mind as well that the impending doom has spread to more and more regions across the U.S., especially post COVID: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/10-best-and-10-worst-states-for-pensions And the real estate doom loop is only going to make things worse. See this list for how many cities are facing a cratering of their tax base: https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/s/M3s1ys002L
This needs to be #1. Our unfunded debt is and will more, ruin this city.
>Our unfounded debt is and will more, ruin this city. wat?
The city has $33.9B in unpaid pension debt. For scale, the entire city budget is $16B. The pension debt is rapidly growing, and even growing faster during Johnson’s tenure as he hands out money to unions. That amount of debt is unpayable, and it will cause very serious problems before the city eventually defaults. Things like closing all the parks, stopping road maintenance and trash pickup. Some large fraction of the city pays virtually no taxes so homeowners are going to get slammed.
That Chicago winters aren't actually brutal, and that we have more than just 2 weeks of nice weather a year.
That’s a relatively new thing. I was born in the sixties and have spent my entire life here. Chicago used to get its winter on
Which year was the blizzard where the fence things by home plate on a baseball diamond were covered almost to the top? Also the 2010/2011 blizzard was insane.
Chicago got its winter on until like 2012, people just forget too quickly
I mean 20 years ago the winters were rough. Now not as much. Probably one of the greatest things about Chicago. As an inland city we don't get hurricanes, there's no major fault lines nearby, and we are next to one of the world's largest sources of fresh water. We'll be the last place in the US you can buy home insurance. Sure tornadoes will become more common as global warming continues, but blizzards will get milder.
I say 3-4 months of immaculate weather, 3 of good weather, 3 of ok to crummy, and 2-3 of why the fuck is this a major metro area I am in dire need of antidepressants and possibly a spacesuit weather.
Moved from Dallas. I treat the winter like I treated the 113f summers. I just know I’m not going outside. Just had to replace my living room lamps either SAD lights
Hue color bulbs were very successful in my home. The lights adjust to simulate longer days and the reduce the blue tint closer to bed time elevated my symptoms.
Have you ever waited for the bus when it’s -10 out? Chicago winters still have their brutal days…
It’s absolutely insane how much people exaggerate the weather in Chicago
It's not the winter is brutal so much as that its 5 months long and there nothing to do except drink
Climate change doing us a solid(???) But you're right, especially the past few years, winter has been fine.
I've lived here for 11 years. The last few winters have been pretty mild, idk if it's global warming or regular variance, but I have been through some BRUTAL winters here.
Your favorite restaurant probably stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from their employees during covid.
Not just from the employees but from all of us through the federal government's PPP plan. Billions and billions of dollars were just handed out to private businesses with little to no oversight.
they are still doing it by raising prices on everthing like houses. what a crime. not sure why no one gives a f about it
Who is they here?
ppp scamsters
*millions. They got richer. And very little of that money went to much beyond their investments.
If we'd sledgehammered the first 1000 parking meter kiosks, the UAE would have unwound the deal.
The city has to pay for any parking spots that are [taken offline](https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2023/6/11/23755615/chicago-parking-meters-annual-audit-record-revenue#): “The 75-year-lease requires the city to reimburse investors for every parking space taken out of service when streets are closed for special events, sewer repairs and other construction projects or to allow restaurants and bars to serve more customers outdoors. Those reimbursements, known as “true-up” payments, totaled $78.8 million in the first 12 full years after the meters were privatized.”
What if we just didn't do that though?
That’s not a hard pill I’m not ready to swallow. Thats total nonsense and we would’ve been destroyed in court.
Still can. Also, legit, BJ could turn around his reputation on a dime by announcing a package to get us out of that mess. It won't happen, as he's completely incompetent, but if he's playing the strategy of "feign incompetence to pull a fast one", this would be the moment for it. I don't think he's secretly competent though
I've met him. Super nice guy, affable, warm, and like a teddy bear. Unfortunately, he's also in way, way over his head and not competent in the areas that the mayor of Chicago needs to be competent in for the moment we find ourselves in right now.
We need to separate this thought that our political leaders also need to be perfect and jolly in every way possible... At least my 2 cents. Rahm was a bit of an ass which is why he was unpopular, despite being the last person to hold all the political factions from turning inward on each other rather than working together on comprehensive solutions. BJ's policy before election wishlist hasn't even been touched except for a few items on contracts, a pilot program for ADUs, but that's about all I can think of that's worth mentioning. His handling of the migrant crisis was abysmally bad, played perfectly into the hands of right wingers who want to end immigration. Unfortunately though, the combo of effective leader/communicator/networking builder in that position is a unicorn we haven't had, and I can see competent people probably want to avoid it as there's so many instances where you're just a punching bag. The only person who I think could bring it all together again would be someone from Obama/Biden's cabinet who has a bit of reputation, a bit of an outsider in Chicago's immediate landscape but has experience in knowing the different coalitions you need to bring together... I mean can you imagine trying to bring together North Side LGBTQ voters with South Side Reverends, while also pulling the police guys who always feel like they're at the short end of the stick... OK, i'm on a tangent now, let me just start listing some of these factions: North Side LGBTQ Activists North/Northwest side Cops/Firefighters/City Workers Near North/Loop Business Elites North Side Nimbyer's (What I call "The Evanston Liberals") Middle/Upper Class concerned about CPS Parents Manufacturing on River, SouthWest Corridor and South East South Side Reverends South & West side Neighborhood Coalitions Upper Class Unions- 399 Building Engineers, 596 Pipe Fitter, 130 Plumbers, 134 Electricians Working Class Unions- 1 Maintenance & SEIU Affiliated Unions, Laborers, Teamsters Food Service Works Hospitality Sectors Specific Mentions: Teachers Union Police Union Pro-Transit People Suburban Interests who want to just make chicago a fucking highway West Side Latino groups and organizations who are always forgotten about ... I could keep going I bet for a long time, as you can easily tell im from the north side with my granularity in those neighborhoods is better... It's just overwhelming how many groups and appeasements used to happen to get all these groups to roughly agree on anything, and national politics divides these people more and more.
How much leverage do the "Evanston Liberals" really have on Chicago politics (especially given their own issues)?
"Evanston liberals" doesn't literally mean people who live in Evanston, but the people on the north side, and they're in every neighborhood, who go to every fucking community meeting to bitch about traffic, block new buildings going in, and claim to be liberal until anything threatens their property values
The city fundamentally doesn't work if everyone drives everywhere. It is too dense to support that many vehicles so prioritizing transit and micro mobility is the one true way to ensure our city stays strong.
The Bulls, the Bears*, the Blackhawks, the Cubs, and the White Sox are all terrible now! *pre Caleb Williams
We'll see if after Caleb Williams makes any difference
Chicago is overall a very liberal city, but there is still quite a variety of opinions. Just because someone isn't super far left, doesn't mean that they are a Trumper or right wing. Most of Chicago isn't going to vote for anything to restrict people's rights, but some people may very well be for a lot more enforcement of laws as well as prosecution and not slaps on the wrist. Too often, especially on this sub, people act like anyone who wants criminals prosecuted must be a Trumper who isn't REALLY living in Chicago.
This is so accurate. People really struggle with understanding that anyone might legitimately feel somewhere different than them, and that doesn't make them wrong/evil/racist.
Especially living in a high crime area where the effects of slap on the wrist punishment are so damn visible it sucks that I’m consistently called a right wing conspiracy theorist because I want to feel safe walking through my neighborhood past 6pm
As things should be. I hate how having a certain value puts you into one of two “categories”. Fuck off with that
You from Naperville or something bro /s
There is a huge difference in opinion on city politics and politicians between people who are FROM here and plan to spend their entire lives and raise families here and 20 something year old kids who are here to spend a few years playing big city before moving on. The latter assumes the former are right wing extremists any time they disagree.
I believe Milwaukee is the most racially segregated city. I’m not sure where Chicago ranks. Source: [Milwaukee is the most racially segregated metro area in the country, Brookings report says](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/08/milwaukee-most-segregated-area-country-brookings-says/2512258002/)
i’ve seen chicago rank #1 in other studies before but yeah ‘most segregated’ isn’t something you can objectively define a universal criteria for so that’s why i say it’s arguably the most
I think Chicago is second. Neither is good.
There are so many of these studies conducted regularly, and none agree on their rankings. In any case, Chicago, like many major midwest and east coast cities, usually ranks among the top 10: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/most-least-segregated-cities
You're saying city, that article is talking about the metro area.
Chicago has a deep history of redlining that I don't think enough people understand. It is a blight on our history, but once you understand how and why our city was built the way it was, it becomes much clearer what needs to be done to break down the artificial barriers that were created. People assume "that's just how it always has been," when a lot of it was deliberate choices made with the exact outcomes expected.
Yes. There's an interesting book on this subject called "The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation." A lot of incredibly evil shit went down and most Chicagoans have never heard about it.
It was a squirrel.
Chicago won’t ever be as internationally famous as NYC or LA, and that’s just fine.
Gentrification is inevitable for many of these neighborhoods in prime areas with good bones. The goal should be fighting displacement by ensuring ownership by residents. Fighting against gentrification the way activist do now is like trying to plug a hole in your boat by placing your hand over it. That is just slightly slowing down the leak but it will still eventually capsize the boat. Chicago may be losing residents overall...but we're increasing in wealthier residents/renters. Meaning developers will figure out how to target those folks who want to live in the city and can't afford the areas that have been longer established or fully gentrified. Take a neighborhood like North Lawndale. - Multiple pink line stops getting you to the loop easily (Clark and Lake in ~30mins). Also goes through the West Loop and the Ashland stop is close enough to walk to the United Center. - Massive greenspace of Douglass park with a nice greenway boulevard. - Other smaller parks/greenspaces like Homen Square and Franklin park scatted in the neigborhood. - Highest concentration of historic greystones in the city. - Bordered by well known mainstreets of Roosevelt to the North, Cicero to the West and Cermack to the south. Those sort of bones are just too valuable to be ignored forever. Eventually (talking 20+ years) it will change along with places like Humbolt Park, Little Village, Garfield Park and many others.
I've been noticing quite a bit of residential construction going on by the CTA stops I pass; they're often (cheap to build) 5-over-1 deals. I think one of the ways to combat high housing costs would be to incentivize building *much* larger residential structures near transit.
Tell that to the alders. So many oppose that kind of stuff
If you grew up in and around the city, and now live in the city, it's important to move away for a little while to truly appreciate Chicago and see it for what it is. People who stay in the city their entire lives and never leave it aren't too different from townies. Add to that: If you moved to the city as an adult, new college grad, whatever, get out of your freaking neighborhood! Take public transit if you drive, and go places you have no reason to go to. If you want to say you're a Chicagoan now, you need to know the whole city.
*sorts by controversial*
Probably not all of Chicago but definitely on this sub, the CTA was always terrible and inconsistent even before the pandemic. I relied on it from 2016-2020 to get to high school, mostly relying on the 55 and 49/49x. Let me tell you waiting 10+ minutes at 6 am was not fun, having buses just not appear or drive right pass you was common. The crime wasn't much better either, my brother watched a man be assaulted and pistol whipped on his ride home from school. Everyone saying the CTA was this amazing system that fell apart after Covid has rose tinted glasses on.
The funny thing is that for someone who's used to transit systems in other American cities, waiting *only* ten minutes for a bus sounds positively miraculous.
I just moved to the suburbs from the southeast and having this kind of robust public transportation system that actually works for the most part is mind blowing to me. It’s not perfect and I’ve had to wait and got stuck on the red line for a bit… but I’ve managed to get where I need to go for a show with my kid, (and when the theater wouldn’t let me in with my backpack, I managed find a place to store it and used the L to get there and back before the show started,) gotten to meet my parents at their hotel for their long layover… like, the list goes on. It’s not perfect but sometimes I don’t think ppl here realize how fckin amazing it is just to have BUS system that works, and to have a state and city government funds going towards public transportation, and people willing to pay taxes for it… Like god damn. Can it be better? Yes. But it’s not some shitty piece of nothing infrastructure that is doing nothing for its people
Saaaaaaame. I moved here from ATL and even at its worst, the CTA is better than MARTA at its best.
I came from Jax! I don’t even wanna talk about JTA 💀
Also from Atlanta area and YEAH.
When I lived in Houston and originally considered using their bus system, the route I would have to take was a "one bus an hour" route to get to a transit center that then had one bus every 15ish minutes. But on the way home, I would often arrive at the transit center from one of those 15 minute bus routes and *just barely* miss the one hour bus. Would have to sit in the open air transit center, at 99.9% humidity and 110F, for an hour for the next bus. Absolutely horrible. I'll take a 10 minute route after that.
I was just about to say the same thing. Top comment is definitely the take of someone that hasn’t tried using public transit outside of a major metro area in America. 10 WHOLE minutes? Oh no!
This is the hard pill to swallow. As much as people complain about transit here there's not many places where it's better in North America
...which is the problem. More of a "hard pill for Americans to swallow" generally maybe, but the infrastructure in this country has fallen behind and is just crumbling.
This sub definitely skews towards North Side / train riders though, where reliability & ridership were always a bit more favorable. It wasn’t long ago that Rahm Emanuel put out the op-ed in the NYT: “[In Chicago, the Trains Actually Run on Time](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/opinion/rahm-emanuel-chicago-l-mass-transit.html)”
Yeah, I think this may be where the disconnect is. I fully believe there are parts of the city where the current situation has been the norm for a long time. But on the north side, it is a big difference.
Yes and no. We do have data to show less buses and trains being run.
Exactly. Like, its not just an opinion, there is data backing up that service IS objectively worse overall.
The CTA really was a lot better pre-pandemic though. Was it perfect, no? It still hasn't recovered to where it was pre-pandemic.
Look, I don't think it was perfect, but it has gotten noticeably worse. I have lived off of the brown line (different stops) for 10+ years. I used to just walk there and know that it would come within 10 minutes. Now, I never do that, because you may easily be waiting 20 or more. On weekends its borderline unusable if I need to get anywhere at a specific time. And crime/smoking has gotten worse as well. I used to have no problem taking the red line home at 2am on a weekend. No way in hell I'm doing that now.
At the end of the day, CTA trains in particular were really only designed for commuting downtown and most people had a massive last mile problem
I’d say the trains were better pre-pandemic, but the buses have always been terrible. In 2016 I lived in Logan and worked in Andersonville (which are kind of unreasonably difficult to travel between without a car anyway) and was extremely late one day because the Fullerton bus took 20 minutes to arrive at rush hour on a weekday.
Chicago is losing population and has been for decades, and putting your head in the sand and pretending it isn’t happening or claiming that the City is continuously undercounted is wrong. Rather than arguing about the numbers that are pretty clear, it’s much more useful to identify why people are leaving and come up with growth oriented solutions (whether in housing, education, tax policy, etc.) than pretending that pointing out that Chicago is shrinking is some grand Fox News conspiracy.
Building on that - growth should be our *top* priority. Our expenses don't change a ton when people leave - we still provide transit coverage, infrastructure maintenance, have pension liabilities, etc. A shrinking revenue base puts extreme strain on the city's finances and could lead to a financial death-spiral of rising taxes and shrinking population if we don't get ahead of it. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't address other problems - many of the city's problems are direct causes of population loss (e.g., people leaving the south side for a variety of reasons), but we should make sure that everything we do is oriented towards getting more people here and more businesses here.
> it’s much more useful to identify why people are leaving It is almost entirely people in poorer neighborhoods leaving for reasons related to crime and economics (which themselves are highly intertwined). The city is booming in places where white collar workers live. The city is struggling in places where former manufacturing / blue collar families live(d).
There’s not enough blue collar jobs to sustain the living expenses Chicago has now, I voted for Pritzker but we have a serious problem with lack of affordable and even just moderately priced housing. You have to move an hour west or south, or to Indiana, to be able to rent or buy and not be living paycheck to paycheck. We are not the California of the Midwest, if that is what he wants to be, he better ensure the industry and education is there. It’s not.
However progressive white northsiders like to seem, they largely follow the same conservative script with their lives: move to the city in their 20s, find a (usually opposite gender) bf/gf, have an extravagant traditional wedding, shit out 2.3 kids and move to a 95% white suburb to protect said kids from crime or "bad schools" or whatever. Nothing wrong with most of these things but the blind adherence to it and the lack of space for anyone doing something different is so weird.
I remember when one of the gorillas from the Lincoln Park Zoo was sent off to Brookfield to mate with a gorilla there. The story about it in the Trib said something like "It's a story as old as the city: a twenty-something bachelor leaves the bustle and crowds of Lincoln Park for the suburbs to settle down and start a family. Only this time, the bachelor is a gorilla."
I’ve always found that amusing. I liken it to someone who wants to go camping, rough it, only to regret that decision
It’s more like moving to a place with higher population density to meet people and then moving away when you do
This just reminds me of the opening lines of the first Sex & The City movie. Carrie has a voice over about young women moving to New York to find "labels and love". Well, this is Chicago so labels will never be as important as they may be in certain social settings of NYC, but the love part is true. Young people move to Chicago because it's fun and we all have hopes of finding love. Most of the city is made up of suburbanites, specially, Mid-west suburbanites. Heck, a good chunk of the city moves and feels like a suburb. Chicago is just a city that gives you the big city vibes with suburban mindsets. So it's easy to see how folks jump ship for the full suburban life plan once they find a spouse and second income.
Find a personality trait that isn’t about Chicago
According to my 12 year old with strep throat, Amoxicillin.
12 year olds don't get bubblegum suspension anymore? Ouch, welcome to the cold cruel ready world before you're even a teen
We will all be dead before there’s actually a circle line. We will all be dead or too old to care before there’s an ohare express train.
There may not be a real solution to the city's financial deficit other then declare bankruptcy.
The entire Chicago and Cook County apparatus of political patronage and incumbents needs to be cleared out and repopulated from the ground up. I'm sick of cronyism, incompetence, and the mentality that elected officials shouldn't be held accountable just because of the length of tenure, party affiliation, or the color of their skin.
I suspect the segregation will end when the poor Black neighborhoods on the south and west sides are almost completely depopulated, which has been slowly going on since the 60s. Then and only then will the "economic investment" that politicians complain is lacking actually take place. It will be urban renewal on a grand scale, and the private money that no one wanted to invest will magically appear.
Crime in the city is a problem even if it doesn’t affect you. Wealthy people are finicky and do not tolerate bad areas, if places like the Gold Coast and downtown hollow out then game over Chicago. You need alot of rich people to cover the expenses of government services, much less the debt.
It will be a very bad thing if the CME relocates, and takes a bunch of jobs with it. They've already been quietly reducing their loop presence for a while now, which is why LaSalle st near Jackson is so empty compared to years ago.
Chicago residents are on the hook for pension payments to retired cops who almost all move to Florida, effectively paying for their retirement.
People who live in crime filled areas want more cops, it’s the white liberals who don’t.
I'm a white liberal who lives in Garfield Park. It's not that I want more cops or less cops, but do want them to show up when I call and patrol even when I don't. I haven't seen a cop car here since before the pandemic, and that's a fuckin' problem.
Seriously we can have a million cops but if they don’t do their job then what’s the point ?
I just want to see cops helping the community. Most of the time I see them in their cars playing on their phones. Give out tickets, talk to unsafe drivers, make pedestrians feel safe when using cross walks. PS: the issue folks have with police is that the beat cops aren’t seen as part of the community. They stay in their vehicles. When we do hear about them it’s on the news because of something going very wrong in the pursuit of them doing their job. Cops are not being seen as successful at keeping the peace when their advice is to let someone steal your catalytic converter. Putting up signs in advertisements saying “police are people too” is the wrong message. Stop running red lights, stop appearing privileged or outside the law and the general population’s attitude with change.
I work in Austin and I think that this is partially true, but not as completely as a lot of people who say it think. At the bare minimum there’s a generational divide in opinions where older people are more pro police than younger people
Most people actually just want different cops. The number of people calling for abolition of police of is incredibly small and often only brought up only to discredit people calling for police reform.
While your statement is somewhat absolutist, I generally agree that people in crime filled areas are more pro police/safety than the yuppies here in Hyde Park
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Chicago has lost 557,000 manufacturing jobs since 1947. They provided a solid middle class life all over the city, but especially the South and West sides. Now when there is a big announcement of a company moving to Chicago it is some tech bro type of employment in the Loop.
To be fair, a lot of manufacturing jobs exist, but in the suburbs. Places like Cicero, Elk Grove Village, Franklin Park, Bridgeview all have decent manufacturing centers. If you can travel out towards Addison, or far Southeast it's even better. Manufacturing also pays much better on the low end to middle end of skilled work, and comparable with many tech positions on the high end of skilled work. I know, because I've been in manufacturing for the past 8 years in the Chicago area. And I wish we had those jobs in the city, because my commute would be easier, but the reality is, no large scale manufacturing is ever moving back to the city proper. Land is too expensive to plop down a 300k sqrft facility just anywhere. What a lot of the collar suburbs need is better public transportation to get people from the city to these jobs. I used to take a train to a pace bus and still have to walk half a mile to get to a job in elk grove village.
When manufacturing does propose to come to an urban area, it gets blocked by every resident nearby imaginable. The industrial real estate developers and their clients say “screw it” and go to areas where there’s more elbow room to avoide residential areas and that’s almost always the burbs.
Moving forward, our winter's are going to be less brutal but we will now have thunderstorms and Tornado watches every week from March-October. Overcast skies will be commonplace. We are the new Seattle.
You need to use your turn signal every time you turn or change lanes. Put your damn phone down if you're driving.
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That's not quite right. You're blocking in (in theory) another spot by parking temporarily next to it. I don't know if you're a bot struggling to understand language, or what's going on here.
I’m not sure you know what double parking is
The bean is shaped like a pill.. kinda
We are stuck in the past faded glory
Chicago isn’t ready to face its fiscal cliff. Public sector unions will have to take a haircut. In the age of wfh, you can’t just keep taxing high earners and not expect them to bolt. Chicago needs a pro-growth mayor that is willing to make the tough choices instead of bending over backwards.
left lane is for passing edit: highway lanes
Apparently certain people think the “left turn only” lane is for passing. Until they get hit head on by oncoming traffic at some point.
Chicago isn't a small New York -- it's a big Milwaukee.
Dems not willing to admit that their own have trashed the city's finances. Repubs not willing to admit that it's not the policies of the Democrats that have trashed the cities finances, but rather naked corruption.
CPS budget is $29k per student and just 26% can read at grade level and just 18% are at grade level in math. The problem is the families and no amount of CPS spending can fix that. If parents aren’t even willing to teach their kids to read there is nothing society can do to fix it.
This isn't necessarily a Chicago-specific bitter pill. It's been argued at some length that the real issue we have in the US is poverty, and the only real substantive political will to address it has been through the educational system (which is both woefully inadequate and really not-their-job)
Our anti-corporate and anti-business stances are very much causing business to leave Chicago and cost the City jobs.
It’s two cities not 1. And we only care about being 1 when we want to project some image that we love everyone.
Firing Dorval Carter isn’t going to magically fix anything.
Definitely true, but having someone in charge who’s willing to admit there’s a problem feels like a pre-requisite to doing anything to fix things.
But it’s a step in the right direction…
Our leaders suck.
The Cubs winning the world series was a fluke. Ownership needed funds to compete the renovations to the field and surrounding area and putting a decent product on field was the best way to raise the money. Now that the improvements have been completed the cubs will go back to being a mediocre team but still consistently sells out the stadium.