And that is one reason why I left Chicago. Both city and state are corrupt. I remember receiving an automated ticket for running a stoplight on a date when I wasn't even in Chicago.
I skipped a toll station on the highway; which should be fine. A sign tells you that you can pay online within 7 days by searching your license plate. The next day I searched my license plate to pay what should have been $3-$4 in tolls and nothing came up. A month later I got a letter in the mail telling me that I owed the state around $100 for the tolls I "failed to pay" with nearly $90 assessed in late fees. The whole system is scummy.
Literal highway robbery.
On the online website, it says the search feature does not show the violations immediately and you should not rely on it.
"The optimal timeframe for a successful search is the second and third weeks following the missed toll. Many missed tolls will not appear until one week after they were incurred due to the need to review the images of the license plate."
Instead you should select the tolls you missed manually and then paying them. I have done this numerous time, noting the toll and time I missed and have never received a violation after I paid it online.
It's unfortunate that you had to pay a fine but you shouldn't blame the state for your errors.
And what's the technological reason behind there being a four week lag in the data being available? I can't think of a good one. I'm sure there's cell signal where the ANPR cameras are based.
If I was cynical, I'd go as far as to suggest the system is _engineered_ to encourage users to forget to check back at the correct time, even if they had attempted to pay at the first opportunity.
It's exactly the same as financial technology. Is there any technological reason why transactions shouldn't appear as soon as the authorisation takes place? No. It's poor because the incumbents can get away with it being poor.
A few years later I received a collections notice for $1,400 for ~$30 worth of tolls. (This was the first notice they'd sent me. No one could explain why.)
After spending hours on the phone with I-Pass the best they could do was reduce the fine to $300 while making the snarky offer that I could go to court if I didn't like it.
This was effectively a customer service issue (I was a valid customer in good standing), and I still wound up paying 10x the actual cost just to avoid missing work and traveling.
Later I came to know that the city of Chicago was undergoing a dubious parking privatization initiative round about then.
This was in the paper ticket era.
When I got a bill in the mail from the Toll Road Authority, all it took was a five minute phone call to clear it up. No paperwork or anything needed. The toll people said they'd confirm with the dealership and take care of everything.
I don't miss Houston. But I miss the people of Houston.
Reason its lost population since the 1950s is white flight and deindustrialization, but it's recovered better than any other industrial rust belt city.
The white collar business sector of the economy here is booming, so chicago is a complicated city with a complicated history
Wikipedia disagrees with you:
1980 3,005,072 −10.7%
1990 2,783,911 −7.4%
2000 2,896,016 4.0%
2010 2,695,598
The white collar business sector of the economy here is booming
Which is great for The Loop, and adjacent areas. But there are 50 neighborhoods in Chicago, and most are seeing population decline.
People moving to the burbs lower the city pop but raise the burb.
That said, I personally moved from Chicago to Indiana. Some stuff better, some stuff worse.
Pros: * Lower cost of living (think 3 bedroom house for 100k)
* Low tax rate (Chicago tax adds up)
* I can literally drive in my car to any chain store within 7 minutes. Chicago I could get to most stuff, but it was 30, 45, 60 minute drives.
* Can commute anywhere within about 20 minutes, Chicago it's not hard to get 60-90 minute commutes
* Decent state level programs to help startups (I found some decent programs from the state of Indiana to help!)
Cons: * Sometimes harder to find niche something. I.e. if you want to play board game X wit ha weekly meetup, I bet you can find 3 in Chicago. Here no one may play that thing. Or if you want to eat Vegan X... odds are it doesn't exist (but Chicago has 2+)
* Local community is still not ready to support startups. For example - The city claims to be tech friendly - but their programs are either for factories or farms. Not a factory or farm? City can't really help.
* Walkability sucks for most of the area. There are a few pockets, but not that many
* Smaller pool of applications for career motivated developer / other niche fields. I am sure I can get 1000 resumes for forklift driver, but I might only get 20 for Java developer.
My sense is that what's really going on is that working class families are being pushed out to the suburbs by affluent but childless people.
In my neighborhood, they're building new high-end condo and apartment buildings left and right, but at the same time over 90% of kids in our school qualify as low income, and enrollment is decreasing rapidly. The playground across the street used to be full of kids all summer, but that's changing. The families on my block have steadily been moving out, because people are getting priced out.
When a family of 5 moves out in response to a rent hike, and is replaced by a couple 20somethings with financial sector jobs, that's a net population change of -3. But it's not because people are falling over themselves to get out of the city.
A lot of people will roll their eyes at this notion, insisting that companies don't leave cities because of corruption, but it happens.
I worked for a company that left Chicago for Seattle around 2009 for two reasons: Taxes, and the fear of growing large enough to be shaken down by the local pols.
Pedantry aside, if parent's answer is "someplace other than Chicago", then they're probably better off. That place has been a cesspool of corruption, both state and city, since I was a kid; and I'm not young.
For instance, I recently learned that Pennsylvania has a problem with corrupt DA's the same as Wisconsin does. Now I know. Now I lament the situation of people in Pennsylvania. But all that said, I'm from Wisconsin, so I'm a little more concerned about the bent DA's we have here.
Maybe the original comment was posted by someone from Chicago? In which case, why would he care about corruption elsewhere? For instance, why would he care that people in Wisconsin are out 4 to 5 billion bucks for a Foxconn factory? Yes, he may lament our situation. He might even get a little upset by it when he hears about it on the news...
but in the end, Chicago is his concern, not some local-yokels in up in Fond du Lac, Cambria or Superior.
Whereas for me, it's infuriating maybe in the same way that all the parking tickets people are talking about seem to infuriate people from Chicago.
And it’s going to get worse. You would be going against basic arithmetic to say the cash flow situations of states like IL/NJ/CT/KY won’t lead to more and more corruption, barring any unforeseen wealth from natural resources bailing them out.
(Although I suppose Kansas is already long part the "getting worse" part. They've got serious financial issues.)
That said, I do think that moorhosj is right. Moving somewhere and expecting there to be no corruption is a bit of a fool's errand. I could move away from Wisconsin. Lots of people do, even a lot of childhood friends. Here's the thing though, there really is no other place that will allow me completely corruption free living. Maybe they don't steal as much from you when you're in Nebraska or Washington state as they do when you're in Wisconsin, but I find it difficult to believe that no corruption at all is happening in other places.
(And the laments of my childhood friends who have moved, kind of validate that view for me.)
Please name the cities with comparable career opportunities and higher standard of living.
Chicago is good for many careers, but for how much longer, and how much are people willing to deal with Chicago's weather? It does have a huge source of fresh water though, so that is definitely a plus. But while growth is happening mostly in the West and South:
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimate...
Who knows, maybe the pros of Chicago outweigh the cons if you're in commodities trading or whatnot, but for many in the top 20%, I don't think they would suffer career wise in many other places where the tax burdens aren't so severe.
All of these cities, except Atlanta, are considerably more expensive than Chicago. Worth noting that Atlanta has 486k residents and Chicago has 2.7 million.
==Chicago is good for many careers, but for how much longer==
I think your perspective is a little outdated. Cost-of-living growth in Seattle, San Fran and NYC has made Chicago a much more attractive destination for tech companies:
"Data from real estate firm CBRE shows that Chicago was the second most popular destination for companies based in the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston and New York to open new office space, behind only Austin." [1]
Don't forget the world-renowned universities graduating boatloads of CS majors:
"One out of 10 computer science degrees in the nation comes from Illinois colleges and universities, according to the index. California is the only state that churns out more." [2]
==and how much are people willing to deal with Chicago's weather?==
But Boston and Minneapolis make your list? If anything, climate change will make Chicago more attractive over the next 30 years.
==or many in the top 20%, I don't think they would suffer career wise in many other places where the tax burdens aren't so severe. ==
The fastest growing demographic in Chicago is households making over $100k. The region is also quickly growing higher income levels:
"Cook County, which includes the county seat of Chicago, is home to the No. 1 and No. 7 fastest-growing concentrations of $200,000-plus households." [3]
I certainly have a bias towards Chicago, but your points just don't really bear out in the data.
[1] https://www.americaninno.com/chicago/inno-news-chicago/despi...
[2] http://www.govtech.com/education/news/-Illinois-Second-Only-...
[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/americans-earning-ov...
I'd defy you to show me another actual city (def: "owning a car is optional") in the US where my money goes anywhere near as far despite the high taxes and corruption. Do that and I'll move, but until then I'm going to sit tight and enjoy my deep dish pizza.
I guess you don't own a Burger King :)
Reference: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-al...
After Chicago, I went north into Wisconsin, which was fine at the time. From there, I went south, to a state which still reminds me of downstate Illinois, but without the political counterweight of a major metropolis to rein in the dumb ideas. And whenever visiting Wisconsin now, it seems like they're becoming just as bad.
Rust belt states are rusting. As the factories go, the vicious and predatory all backstab each other in an attempt to get first gnaw at the bones and offal. The endemic levels of corruption were only sustainable over widespread economic prosperity, but that's gone. People with steadily declining real purchasing power since 1980 have less to steal or swindle, are far quicker to bleed dry, and quicker to quibble over their remaining pennies.
Federal leadership could probably turn the rust belt around, if that were a priority, but, well, you know... if a Democratic president with political roots in Chicago couldn't or wouldn't do it, there's not much of a chance of it happening now.
I couldn't agree more. I strongly believe there should be a Marshall Plan for the Rust Belt. It should probably be a part of the Green New Deal, especially if climate change will impact migration patterns.
If you look at the most violent cities in the country, it is dominated by Rust Belt cities (Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cleveland). If we are looking for a national emergency, this might qualify.
Funny enough, most Rust Belt states are net payers to the Federal Government [1]. Illinois, the "corrupt state" everyone wants to rail on, is one of the least dependent on Federal money in the entire country. They get $0.75 back for every dollar of taxes sent to the Feds [2]. For comparison, Mississippi gets $2.02 for every dollar in Federal taxes.
Please explain how they would be "taking money from other taxpayers" under this plan?
[1] https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...
[2] https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/ftsbs-timeseries...
There's plenty of economic activity still there, enough to support a new government. But that can't govern if 105% of its budget is still going to pay off the contracts and covenants put in place by the old, corrupt government. Illinois has already proven willing to send its own governors to prison, so imagine what could be accomplished without the constraint that the investigation has to end before it traces all the way back to the investigators.
What is this based on?
Why isn't the solution to use federal investigators to determine why certain states aren't paying enough taxes to cover their costs? That sounds kind of "corrupt" to me.
The places that spend more taxes than they remit are either too poor to pay more tax, or they have relentlessly selfish representatives that won't vote yes on anything unless it also includes a job for their district. It's pretty easy to tell the difference.
This isn't true at all. California, Texas, New York and Illinois are 4 of the 6 largest states by population and all of them pay more in taxes then they receive back from the government.
==they have relentlessly selfish representatives that won't vote yes on anything unless it also includes a job for their district.==
Is this not a form of corruption?
The evidence that the Rust Belt states are the most corrupt is... where, again?
Also used to make what is considered a very obvious rebuttal to the original argument.
I've lived in IL decades ago, nobody started sentences with "I mean" unless they were clarifying what they last said.
People have started doing it here in CA as well, it's not unique to IL and it's not a long-established pattern.
As far as I can tell, it's basically the new "uhhh" people would use to stall as they organize their thoughts. What surprises me is how habitual it has become, to the extent that people now start written sentences with "I mean" when they're not clarifying anything at all.
* I'd say if there's a new one, it's the annoying "So" prefix. Mark Zuckerberg says it a lot. Common on HN as well. And the usage I'm referring to, like "I mean", is when it doesn't call back to anything and could be removed without consequence.
One of my IL buddies moved out here a years ago and has started saying it recently after a starting new startup job he shares with a bunch of millenials. He never used to do it, now half his sentences start with a long drawn out "I meeeaaaaan," and it makes me want to gouge my eyes out whenever we socialize. Grown man in his 40s starting half his sentences with something equivalent to "Uhhhhhhhhhhh", no pass, FML.