Chicago

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About Four Housing Markets?

Pete Saunders — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

You know, prior to the Covid pandemic, there was a lot more discussion in the urbanist sphere about economic inequality and a lack of economic mobility in cities, and their influence on the rising unaffordability of the American housing market. After the pandemic, that kind of discussion dissipated and morphed into something much broader – affordability, and later, abundance – that didn’t carry the same race and class associations typically given to inequality and mobility concerns.

That’s fine for people seeking to broaden support for policy action on affordability. However, it doesn’t touch on the entirety of the affordability problem.

Last week, Crains Chicago Business reporter Dennis Rodkin wrote about metro Chicago’s two-tiered real estate market – one that’s booming for the wealthiest Chicagoans, and one that’s flat for virtually everyone else. Here’s a quote from the paywalled article:

“In the uppermost echelon of home prices, sales took only until early November to pass the record number of homes sold in a full year. And one sale among them, a Winnetka estate that sold for $31.25 million, was the highest-priced sale of an existing home ever in the Chicago metro area (other homes have been built new for more). Meanwhile, in the market for homes at all prices, the number of sales is running only slightly higher than even with 2024, a year that ended with the fewest homes sold since 2011.”

In Rodkin’s interview with Jena Radnay, an agent with @properties Christie’s International Real Estate on Chicago’s North Shore, Radnay said, “(North Shore buyers may be) doing well with their business, sold their companies and cashed out, gotten massive promotions,” invested well or inherited wealth, she says, “and they’re happy to pay what it takes for real estate up here where they know it’s a good investment.”

Rodkin also spoke with Anthony Simpkins, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services. The Chicago nonprofit focuses on financing homeownership in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, but Simpkins’ perspective on the housing market takes in the middle class as well. Simpkins’ take? “It’s no secret that housing has gotten too expensive for almost everyone.”

Rodkin’s basis for Chicago’s dual housing market comes from his comparison of home price growth with median income growth in the Chicago metro area, between 2014 and 2024. Rodkin’s analysis compared home price growth and median income growth over two periods, 2014-19 and 2019-24. The map below shows areas where home price growth exceeds median income growth (shades of red), and areas where home price growth is surpassed by median income growth (shades of blue):

Rodkin sums up his position in this quote below:

For the past year and a half, Chicago-area home prices have been rising faster than the national average and faster than in nearly every major US city, accelerating the local affordability crunch right alongside interest rates that have remained relatively high.

Rising prices and mortgage interest rates that are twice what they were a few years ago take a one-two punch at affordability, and uncertainty about future financial well-being amid mass layoffs and the creeping hegemony of AI makes the hit feel even harder. “As the cost of housing has gone up dramatically,” Simpkins says, “people are feeling more challenged with being able to keep good-paying employment.”

Honestly, I think Rodkin is making a valid point with his framing of the Chicago housing market. From a pure residential real estate sense, there appears to be a clear worsening of housing affordability, with wealthy buyers getting what they want and others struggling.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Chicago housing for sale, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

Chicago's Unbalanced Growth — And What It Teaches Us

Pete Saunders — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

A report came out from Crains Chicago Business (paywalled) that spoke to the uneven nature of development in Chicago. Ed Finkel, writer of the Crains article, noted that from January 1, 2023 to September 24, 2025, the City of Chicago Plan Commission approved 131 planned development projects representing 27,200 new dwelling units and $22.5 billion in investments. One Chicago neighborhood, the Near West Side, accounted for 36 of the 131 projects over that period – more than a quarter of all projects. Crains also noted that the Englewood neighborhood, on the South Side, saw only six planned development projects, producing a total of 98 new units. Englewood is a community in dire need of new investment of all types – housing, commercial development, infrastructure, even services. But the investment disparities are becoming too large to overlook.

In fact, I don’t have records of Chicago Plan Commission PUD approvals since 2023, but my gut tells me that perhaps Crains is overstating the amount of new development in Englewood, one of many South Side neighborhoods. Crains may be inadvertently including projects in adjacent neighborhoods like Auburn-Gresham, Chatham, Back of the Yards, Grand Crossing, and Washington Park. My experience in Chicago over the last 35 years in planning in Chicago is that there’s consistently been about 4-5 times more development taking place in Chicago’s favored north lakefront and its adjacent neighborhoods when compared to the South and West Side combined. The extent of development disparity in Chicago has been that wide, for that long.

For their part, former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and current mayor Brandon Johnson have done quite a bit to steer new development to the city’s oft-neglected neighborhoods. As mayor, Lightfoot created the Invest South/West program in 2019, designed to reverse historical disinvestment in ten communities on the South and West sides. A $750 million investment in the program by the City was used to leverage an additional $2.3 billion in additional investment, through corporate and philanthropic support. Mayor Johnson dropped the previous name but continued the programmatic effort; in June the mayor celebrated the opening of the Aspire Center for Workforce Innovation, located in a formerly closed elementary school on the West Side. The $40 million project got almost half of its funding from city and state sources. Crains also notes the recent industrial and commercial development taking place in the Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side.

Unfortunately, you could take all the investment in the South and West sides, representing about half of the city’s population and more than half of its physical footprint, and it would pale in comparison to what’s happening now, on the Near West Side, all by itself.

How does that change?

Neighborhood vitality is hard to maintain without economic opportunity

Finkel points out that five characteristics of neighborhood vitality make developers and investors want to develop in certain areas. He suggests that five vitality factors – existing population density, economic opportunity, access to services, quality public spaces and high levels of social cohesion – played a role in making the turnaround happen in other neighborhoods. And it’s clear that many South and West side neighborhoods took significant hits to their neighborhood vitality as the manufacturing jobs they depended on disappeared. Rapidly declining population reduces economic opportunity and social cohesion. Services begin to suffer; quality public spaces don’t get the investment they need. That causes more people to leave and deepen the downward spiral.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Ajay Suresh, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Is It Good Enough To Be A “Good Enough” City?

Pete Saunders — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

I hope you’re fine with another Chicago-centric indulgence. This one’s not about Operation Midway Blitz (more coming on that very soon), but I think you’ll still find it interesting.

I’ve heard various versions of this complaint about Chicago for years. Chicago’s got sort of a “jack of all trades, master of none” brand among American cities. I think Midwestern culture has something to do with that. The Midwest is known for down-to-earth, pragmatic and polite; we’re not known for calling attention to ourselves. What’s more, the industries does excel in are foundational, “backbone” industries that can offer lots of success but not a lot of glamour – food processing, logistics, air, rail and trucking transportation, commodities futures trading.

Anyway, a few days ago I saw a thread on X/Twitter that grabbed me. Here’s the original tweet:

Chicago’s integral to the American economy, but not in an especially visible way. I think to our advantage many times, and to our disadvantage. It allows us to do very well in grounded industries, as noted by some in the thread.

But I’d agree it works against us as the global economy is pulled along by cutting-edge industries as the OP noted – finance, art and fashion in New York, tech in San Francisco/Silicon Valley, media and entertainment in Los Angeles (I’d add education in Boston, and, as long as we can hold onto the title of the most dominant nation on the planet, Washington, DC for politics). For most of the 20^th century Detroit’s lead over the rest of the world in auto production made it stand out, but that’s certainly changed.

As for Chicago, I think it still leads the way in “backbone industries”, as noted above. Food processing is still a big part of Chicago’s economy; millions of tons of food products from across the Midwest still enter Chicago for processing. They leave here as packaged, frozen or canned goods for your consumption.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Hyde Park Skyline by Eric Allix Rogers, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Chicago Heat, Thirty Years Later

Pete Saunders — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:23:56 -0400

(Note: this is a post modified and updated from one written ten years ago on the 20th anniversary of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. I included some new reflections and context on that time. More than anything, however, I want to make clear that segregation and inequality benefits some people but also exacts deadly costs on others. Please take a look. -Pete)

Thirty years ago today, the intense heat in Chicago mercifully cooled down to a high of 94 degrees, signaling an end to one of the worst heat waves in the city’s history.

I vividly remember the day three days earlier when I experienced the single hottest day I ever felt, anywhere. That was when Chicago topped out at a very humid 106 degrees, with a heat index that made it feel like 125. I remember leaving Chicago's City Hall to walk outside, so I could feel what the terrible heat felt like.

I don’t know exactly why, but I decided to immerse myself in the heat, to take it all in. I walked the nearly two-mile journey from City Hall to Navy Pier on the lakefront, a place known for its cooling summer breezes off Lake Michigan. Meteorologists were already noting that no lake breeze was forming during this heat wave; in fact, there was no breeze at all. I remember looking at a still and silent Lake Michigan as if it was the world’s largest hot bath.

The humidity was absolutely oppressive. I’ve experienced 110+ degree temperatures during visits to Phoenix and Las Vegas before, but they simply do not compare with humid heat. I’ve experienced the stifling heat and humidity of the Deep South also. Without a doubt, 112 degrees in the desert is very hot. However the air retains a lightness to it. Humidity is heavy; it’s like adding weight on your back while trying to tolerate the heat.

Within a week's time, the cumulative effect of unrelenting heat and humidity led to more than 700 deaths in Chicago from heat strokes, dehydration and other heat-related illnesses., Almost all of them poor, without access to air conditioning in their homes or nearby, living in the most distressed neighborhoods in a city that was entirely unprepared to handle the onslaught. The vast majority of the heat-related deaths came from residents of the city's South and West sides. The 1995 Chicago heat wave is now known as one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, surpassed in the years since then only by Hurricane Katrina, though few have ever heard of it.

It was around this time that the notion of a bifurcated Chicago, one of deep economic and social differences between haves and have nots, began to solidify in my mind.

Chicago public radio station WBEZ’s Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons gathered some rememberances of the event, aired last week. For further understanding of the event, I'd highly recommend reading Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg. It’s mentioned in my recent list of books that influenced my perception of the Midwest.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Chicago had so many dead bodies piling up during its 1995 heat wave that the city recruited refrigerated trucks to handle the overflow. Source: npr.org

More on Cities and Distressed Neighborhoods

Pete Saunders — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

It’s time for me to follow up on the post I wrote ten days ago in response to fellow planner and Substacker Bill Fulton’s "garlic knot" cities concept.

Here’s a quick summary. Fulton notes in his article that there are metro areas across the country anchored by core cities that have solid and successful downtowns surrounded by quickly rising close-to-downtown neighborhoods and growing suburban areas further out. However, many have struggling neighborhoods in between the downtown and suburbs, either awaiting the boom that revitalized downtown or becoming recognized as a great alternative to suburbia. Here’s how he put it, after being reminded of this while spending time in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor:

“Not all of Baltimore, of course, is like this. Like many older rust belt cities that have lost population – Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland – the suburbs are still growing and the center is getting very strong, but the old city neighborhoods are in rough shape. A mile away from where I was enjoying a high-amenity experience, people are trapped in neighborhoods of extreme poverty.

We used to call places like Baltimore and Detroit “donut cities,’ because there was nothing left in the center. But after decades of both public and private revitalization efforts, they’re not really donuts anymore. Some time ago, the Christian urbanist (no, that’s not an oxymoron) Aaron Renn called them “The New Donut,” but that term doesn’t quite fit either.

Instead, I’d call them Garlic Knot Cities – very dense and satisfying in the center, but the center is small and doesn’t have much of substance surrounding it.”

It’s an astute observation, and one I’ve noted as well (without any cool name for it). I think it stands out as one of the most pressing issues of urban planning, policy and governance today, yet it’s almost never framed in this way. There are loud voices in cities advocating for new housing, so housing becomes more affordable. Meanwhile, the machinery that has supported the growth of suburbia continues to build more on the periphery of metro areas. Sun Belt metros, particularly in Texas and Florida, remain locked in on the suburban model. The middle neighborhoods, unfortunately, get left out of the discussion.

Why is this? Mostly because that’s where a significant chunk of urban distress is housed in American cities. These are the areas noted for high crime, poor quality schools, abandoned or obsolete housing, limited access, lacking in amenities, few job opportunities and other ills that plague cities. Residents of these neighborhoods are often looking for the kind of substantial public investment that turned downtowns around, or the private investment that boosted neighborhoods that were once very similar to them into attractive hip hotspots.

But these neighborhoods inhabit a different space than the revitalized downtown and the still-growing suburbs. Back when the term “donut cities” did make sense, cities realized the importance of strengthening the center. In came the new stadiums, mixed-use developments, institutional expansions, and a new commercial ecosystem to support them. And it worked. As I mentioned earlier, the suburban model keeps chugging along, even in weak metro economies. Without the appeal of being a metro area’s showroom to the world, or a metro area’s next shiny new thing, those in between continue to lag.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: A residential street view of a neighborhood in South Dallas. Few people associate neighborhoods like this with Dallas, choosing to focus on its revitalizing interior or booming outskirts. But neighborhoods like this exist there, and a big part of the Metroplex’s success is hiding this view from outsiders. Source: google maps.

The Midwest Climate Critique is Bogus

Pete Saunders — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Every so often I see that someone makes the claim that people are leaving the Midwest because the weather sucks. That claim is bogus.

X poster Hunter (@StatisticUrban) made this claim in a tweet sent Monday:

“Nobody wants to hear this but one of the reasons the midwest is struggling is that the weather just sucks.

It's freezing cold, dark, and snowy in the winter, and hot and humid in the summer. The truly "nice" parts of the year are limited to a few weeks in the spring/fall.”

One parenthetic note, here: the OP’s location on X is given as the United Kingdom. Assuming they are from London, perhaps the best climate in an otherwise climate-challenged nation, I find it odd that someone from a place so cloudy, misty and perpetually cool would make this point. Nonetheless, London’s weather has not kept it from becoming one of the world’s premier global cities.

Let me say I don’t completely disagree with this person. The Midwest’s weather is not, uh, optimal. There are better places climate-wise. And that’s fine. However, it’s not the principal reason people leave the Midwest.

I’ve always maintained that there’s little difference in climate between Midwestern and Northeastern cities. I looked at climate data listed on the Wikipedia page of several cities, and here’s what I found. A quick one-on-one comparison between cities at similar latitudes makes the point. Here in this data comparison of the climates of Boston and Chicago, they’re essentially the same:

The climates of New York City and Indianapolis? The same:

Guess what? Comparing Washington, DC and St. Louis, they’re the same:

In every comparison, there’s virtually no difference in annual precipitation, annual snowfall, record high and record low temperatures, average annual relative humidity, or the amount of annual sunlight and cloudiness. Midwestern cities have slightly higher maximum temperatures and slightly lower minimum temperatures, due to their inland locations. Otherwise, at similar latitudes, the cities are quite comparable.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo source: Snow on Boston Common Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

The Shifting Geography of US Deep Tech

Nima Sanandaji — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A systematic mapping of where the world’s global leading companies in deep tech are located shows a massive lead for the USA – however the leading edge of particularly Santa Clara Valley shows signs of gradual normalization relative to the rest of the world.

The vast majority of globally leading deep tech companies are found in North America. North America has particularly strong dominance in the areas of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotic & communication, quantum & computing and pharmaceuticals. In these five fields of deep tech, around four out of five of the world-leading deep tech companies are found in North America.

In the USA alone, fully 61.6 percent of the globally leading deep tech companies are located. This is the finding of the Deep Tech Index, conducted annually by the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR) with the support of Nordic Capital, which maps and evaluates the global deep tech landscape.

However, while the latest data from the end of 2024 shows that close to two thirds of the world-leading deep tech companies are located in the USA, this is less than the previous year. At the end of 2023 fully 68.4 percent of the world-leading deep tech companies existed in the USA.

Santa Clara Valley, Los Angeles, Austin and Chicago are the leading robotic & communication tech regions. Santa Clara Valley, Boston as well as Vancouver in Canada are centers for quantum and computing development.

The share of global deep tech companies in North America has fallen by 5 percentage points since last year, representing a normalization process. Particularly the USA but also Canada remain dominant, but competition is on the rise.

Besides Santa Clara Valley, the USA also has numerous other world-leading deep tech companies. In Boston fully 6.4 percent of the world-leading deep tech companies are located. Also New York (6.0 percent), Los Angeles (3.8 percent), Chicago and Seattle (2.2 percent each), and Austin (1.8 percent) each host significant share of the world´s deep tech companies. These regions have more deep tech companies in them than most European countries individually, as comparison.

There are also numerous other deep tech companies spread throughout the USA outside the main hubs. Fully 18.8 percent of the world-leading deep tech companies exist in the USA outside of the main urban tech regions.

The share of US-based world-leading deep tech companies that exist in Santa Clara Valley has between the end of 2023 and the end of 2024 fallen from 35 to 33 percent. The share of all world-leading deep tech companies in the USA that are located outside the major urban hubs has also been reduced slightly, from 32 to 31 percent. At the same time the share in the other major urban hubs except Santa Clara Valley (Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and Austin) has grown from 33 to 36 percent.

Two different economic forces are influencing the development. The first is the advantages of specialization. Thomas Edison founded the world’s first industrial innovation laboratory in this valley 150 years ago, and it has since become the most significant region for development of new technologies. The capital, knowledge and entrepreneurship networks needed are in place in Santa Clara Valley, more than any place else in the world. Similarly, the USA is dominant as a nation, compared to the rest of the world.

Yet, the success brings higher costs, for Santa Clara Valley as well as the USA. There are ample talents around the world, at lower prices than the talents of the USA and particularly of the expensive main tech hubs. Current policies relating to trade and international talents is also likely to influence. The trend is that Europe which is second best in deep tech and willing to trade, is catching up somewhat to the USA. Institutional competition will also be significant gradually more from places such as India. Much of globally leading universities in technology and mathematics, as well as global technology firms, are strongly dependent on Indian students and researchers.

The USA retains its dominant leading position, particularly medium-sized regions such as Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. Yet the global competition is growing, hinting at gradual further normalization. Within the coming years, it is likely that we will pass a milestone where less than half of the global deep tech companies are situated in the USA, while no other single country can catch up all the rest of the world combines will do so within coming years. However, the USA can still remain dominant particularly in specific areas. Deep technology is closely linked to prosperity, lower unemployment and national security. Countries around the world need constructive policies to foster deep tech.

The deep tech index demonstrates that countries with a high density of deep tech firms per million adults typically enjoy robust property rights, low capital gains taxes, strong educational outcomes in PISA tests, and prestigious universities specializing in mathematics and engineering disciplines. Boosting universities remains a key challenge now, given the current development in the USA. It is important to remember that Europe and Asia each already have a higher number of the world´s 100 leading universities in mathematics and engineering, the competition is already underway.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Photo: cover of Deep Tech Index, 2025 edition.

A Case For The Great Lakes Region As America’s 12th Regional Culture

Pete Saunders — Sun, 25 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I love the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard. In it, he outlines the regional cultures of America and the impact that each has had on the development of the United States. I think it’s fascinating, mostly because I’m a firm believer in the Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue.” History tells us so much about what could possibly happen in the future.

But I think Woodard got one thing wrong in his book. There should be 12 American nations, not 11. The Great Lakes should be its own regional culture. Furthermore, it should be recognized as the first purely American culture in American history.

Here are the eleven nations as identified by Woodard:

Yankeedom (New England and the upper Midwest). Settled by English Puritans, they valued education and communal decision-making.
New Netherland (the greater New York metropolitan area). Founded by the Dutch in the 1600s, this nation has maintained a multicultural and commercial perspective since being established.
Midlands (stretching from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains of Nebraska and Kansas, widening as it moves westward). Established first by English Quakers and later the Pennsylvania Dutch, it’s been a “go along to get along” kind of region for most of its existence.
Tidewater (the Chesapeake Bay area). Founded by English who were perhaps most sympathetic to the British Crown, it’s where the plantation economy got its start.
Greater Appalachia (starting in central Pennsylvania and West Virginia and extending southwestward into Arkansas, Oklahoma and north Texas). Settled by Scots-Irish immigrants, who were accustomed to difficult terrain, the region might be the most ruggedly individualist of them all.
Deep South (the lowlands just south of the Appalachian Mountains). Tidewater might be where the plantation economy got its start, but the Deep South took it to another level. Probably the most hierarchical region as a result.
New France (in the U.S., mostly southern Louisiana; in Canada, the most populated parts of Quebec). Not much of this is left in America today, but Cajun culture has left an indelible imprint on the nation.
El Norte (the length of the U.S./Mexico border, extending into southern California). Founded by Spanish Catholic missionaries, once part of Mexico. An influx of settlers from the Deep South and Appalachian nations turned it into a unique transitional region.
Far West (generally the area in the U.S. between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains). The settlers of the Deep South, Midlands and Yankeedom who wanted more land and just to be left alone moved here.
The Left Coast (central California up through the Bay Area, beyond Portland and Seattle, and continuing into southeastern Alaska). Probably owes its northern orientation to being founded by New Englanders and the Midlands. But the influence of El Norte and Greater Appalachia is also felt.
First Nations (the parts of Canada south of the Arctic Circle that include the northern portions of the Prairie Provinces, northern Ontario and northern Quebec). The First Nations influence is much stronger in Canada but can still be felt in the northern Great Lakes.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Michigan City lighthouse by Matt Morse, via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Get Your Rust Belt Education, Right Here

Pete Saunders — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

During its run, I absolutely loved the HBO series The Wire. It was a fascinating show that provided deep insight into the institutional corrosion that felled post-industrial cities like Baltimore. Each season featured institutions – the sad ubiquity of the illegal drug trade; Baltimore’s port system, and the union desperately trying to remain relevant; government bureaucracy and corruption; troubled public school systems; and the declining influence and resources of the newspaper print industry – trying to make the city better, or simply make a way to survive.

Baltimore is not a city I include in my focus group of Rust Belt cities, but it’s undeniably Rust Belt in its experience. And The Wire spoke to what happens in cities where the foundational economy disappears and nothing enters to replace it, far better than any show I’ve seen.

A lot of people who care about cities saw the series full of metaphors, an opportunity to dig deep into the problems of the inner city without getting too close to them. It was an intellectual journey, or worse yet, lurid entertainment. The Wire’s viewers generally weren’t exposed to the issues of the show’s characters, unless they lived in similar conditions in a similar city. Viewers could watch drug deals and drug hits from the security of their living room, or ponder the moral complexities of political corruption without paying a direct cost. For many, watching The Wire was like watching a trainwreck slowly unfold from a safe distance, or riding a wild rollercoaster ride with the certainty that they would never be thrown out.

Many television shows aim to reach the kind of blunt authenticity displayed in the The Wire, but never reach it. Much of The Wire’s authenticity is attributed to David Simon and Ed Burns. Simon was the creator, executive producer, head writer and showrunner of The Wire, with Burns being Simon’s his long-time collaborator in writing and production. Burns, a Vietnam War vet, got a first-hand look at Baltimore’s streets as a detective in the Baltimore Police Department. Upon retirement he later taught 7^th and 8^th grade students in the Baltimore City Public Schools. Simon gained this authenticity from his years working the city desk for the Baltimore Sun.

Rust Belt Reporter, the wonderful memoir by former Detroit Free Press journalist John Gallagher, reminds us that we need more writers who can accurately depict this aspect of the American urban experience.

As the book’s title suggests, Gallagher’s journalism career is almost entirely centered on Rust Belt cities. He starts as a young reporter with the City News Bureau in Chicago in the 1970’s, before moving on to newspaper gigs in Rochester, NY, and later in nearby Syracuse. However, the bulk of Gallagher’s career was spent in Detroit, where he worked for the Detroit Free Press for 32 years before retiring in 2019. This was the job that gave him as he said “the catbird seat over America’s greatest urban story – the rise, fall, and rise again of a great American city,” and led to most poignant and meaningful writing of his career.

It’s odd how much of Gallagher’s career touches on themes brought to the screen in The Wire. He’d covered drug-related murders; he’d written on United Auto Workers and Teamsters union negotiations with Detroit’s Big Three automakers, and even on his own union experience as part of a devastating newspaper strike; he’d published investigative stories exploring local government corruption. If anyone were to write the Motor City version of The Wire, Gallagher would have the cred to do it.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: courtesy Pete Saunders.

The Expansion of the "Citadel of Affluence"

Pete Saunders — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 20:28:38 -0500

I’ll state this right from the outset. This is not a take-down. I’m expressing a point of view that differs from conventional urbanism wisdom. Please keep that in my mind as you read on.

Back in 2014, I wrote an article for my earlier blog entitled Two Chicagos, Defined. In the article, I described Chicago’s troubling expansion of inequality at many different levels – income, educational attainment, employment, housing costs, crime, transit access, job access, and so much more. I found that the gap was widening, at the metro level (where I focused my initial analysis) and at the city level as well. In the end, I found three distinct Chicagos that were worth noting: 1) a growing “Super Global” Chicago concentrated in the city’s downtown, north lakefront and near south lakefront neighborhoods that was affluent, highly educated and largely white; 2) an “Average Chicago” that was less affluent, less highly educated, containing more people of color and experiencing a sense of instability; and 3) a “Rust Belt Chicago” that was significantly lagging the other two segments on every level. I concluded that article with this statement:

“In reality I see the "Two Chicagos" meme as overplayed. Chicago may be better understood in thirds -- one-third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit.”

At the time, that statement caused a huge reaction on Twitter, positively and negatively. There were many supportive reactions from people who seemed to understand that Chicago’s deep divides were widening and hardening, and got the general point that the city needed to be more beneficial to more of its residents. Some of the reactions were visceral; many Chicagoans could not fathom a comparison of Chicago with Detroit, a city understood by many to be well below Chicago’s stature. In fact, friend and fellow Substack writer Aaron Renn told me that the quote had reached former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and was discussed during an interview he had with him. He hated it.

But that underscores a misunderstanding about both Chicago and Detroit. Detroit is not the completely collapsed urban dystopia that many imagine it to be; there is a rapidly revitalizing downtown, and great neighborhoods that are getting stronger. However, there is poverty and crime, and neighborhoods that sit on an uncertain precipice. Similarly, Chicago is more than its beautiful skyline, fantastic lakefront neighborhoods and the strong post-industrial economy that supports that part of the city’s growth. Chicago is also the city well known for its legacy of government patronage and political corruption, and reviled for its own high violent crime.

What’s this got to do with anything, you say?

Well, on Wednesday, Yonah Freemark of the nonprofit thinktank Urban Institute commented on the Institute's Urban Wire blog that zoning restrictions and the nature of housing demand in Chicago has split the city in three – an affluent, high-demand central area and lakefront with lots of housing construction, an affluent and middle class, high-demand North and Northwest Side with little housing construction, and a low-income, low-demand West, Southwest and West sides that’s actually losing housing units and people.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Kelly Lacy, via Pexels in Public Domain.

Chicago

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About *Four* Housing Markets?

Chicago's Unbalanced Growth — And What It Teaches Us

Is It Good Enough To Be A “Good Enough” City?

Chicago Heat, Thirty Years Later

More on Cities and Distressed Neighborhoods

The Midwest Climate Critique is Bogus

The Shifting Geography of US Deep Tech

A Case For The Great Lakes Region As America’s 12th Regional Culture

Get Your Rust Belt Education, Right Here

The Expansion of the "Citadel of Affluence"

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About Four Housing Markets?