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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

Former Chicagoan here. Grew up in Evanston and lived in Lakeview area for almost 20 years. We moved to a small town in Colorado a few years ago. Chicago is just constantly running against the wind. Violent crime is a game-changer (property crime is one thing, violent crime another), public schools are dysfunctional, taxes are bad and only getting worse, weather is terrible the majority of the year, and there's nothing particularly interesting to visit within a few hundred miles (though I've always loved western Michigan). Chicago has a culture that's gotten progressively uglier and makes a lot of people generally not want to live there. I could go on, and I'm not saying anything unique. It's just running against the wind and prevents Chicago from ever really taking off and reaching escape velocity. It would take a real unicorn to jumpstart things more.

Btw you ask any former Chicagoan and they'll say the same thing: their only regret was not moving sooner.

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This is the opinion I always hear - but, after a decade, never really understood. (no shade - you're definitely in the majority with this opinion!)

Crime is bad, but concentrated in some parts of the city. Sure, I can't leave my bike with a cheap lock, but I've also lived in some questionable areas and never had real issues - nor have 95%+ of people I know, about the same rate as friends in other major cities (Philly, DC, etc.)

Public schools are dysfunctional - yea, I guess I'm young, but isn't that similar in most major cities?

Taxes are bad - yes, but so is NY/SF. Getting worse - fair point. Agree there.

Weather - yea, fair. Sucks hard.

Travel - yes, nothing close - but it's also an airline hub for 2/3 major airlines, and it's easy to get $100 tix to cool places.

I guess I may have just been too young much of the time to "get it." But it has so many great things, too - the summers, the restaurants, the colleges, the neighborhood variety & subcultures.

I kinda just wish I could buy long-term Calls on Chicago.

The crime issue is debatable based on various stats, and I would tie partly into my general comment about the culture having become uglier, but to me it felt like violent crime was a smog cloud constantly over the city. Sure, the odds of something bad happening to me or my family was very low in the absolute, but it was off the charts relative to others places. The reports of shootings and carjackings and armed robberies in my neighborhood were disconcerting and we would alter our lives to help avoid stuff. Eventually, I looked at my wife and said, "You know, we don't have to live like this. This isn't normal. It's only normal here." It's weird when you're surrounded by it every day for decades, like anything else it becomes normalized.

CPS is uniquely dysfunctional with the number of times they strike. I had three kids in Coonley and the mood was constantly adversarial. The teachers see everyone as the enemy. It was pervasive and nasty and it spilled into the classroom. Like many other things it's become self-sorting. The good teachers mostly want to take a pay cut to go to a private school where the culture is different, and same for families that place a high value on education. The public system is the residual, and I'd say this is proven in various grim stats.

I really just think the culture is ugly, I don't know how else to say it. Everything felt negative, everyone was angry. Leaders (and the majority who elect them) de facto support and enable all this dysfunction because for various reasons it's now part of their ethos. It wasn't until we moved that I understood it, and I admit it's very difficult to articulate. I'm not saying Chicago is a hell hole, but the future of Chicago is at best stagnant to me...real estate values partly prove that. Migration stats, especially among high earners, should be deeply concerning to anyone involved. I haven't even touched on how financially screwed Illinois is.

The city just looks checkmated to me. This isn't Rochester but it's clearly in decline. When the companies start leaving is when people should start taking it really seriously, and we just had Caterpillar, Boeing, and now Citadel all bail, Citadel quite publicly. We can debate all sorts of things but the scoreboard here, the ultimate things which we'd use to measure a city's overall health and direction, is deeply and objectively troubling.

Former Chicago suburbs native. Once you have kids, you’re not willing to take them to the Bean on a weekend and end up in the middle of a shooting. Taxes are higher in NY or SF, but if you have kids, you’re not moving there anyway (I’d pick Des Moines, IA or somewhere safe in the Rust Belt first). The weather might get better with climate change, but probably not enough to make the winters tolerable. It can get very cold, and you might as well live in Canadian latitudes those times of the year. CPS quality is low and likely to not improve in the time my kids would rely on it.

Chicago could be great, but the effort required makes it a deep long dated out of the money call. Some deus ex machina intervention is going to be required to reduce crime, reduce the debt burden, and right size public services so a productive tax base will stay. Ideally, one works remotely for a Chicago firm and visits when the weather is good (between Memorial and Labor Day).

> Once you have kids, you’re not willing to take them to the Bean on a weekend and end up in the middle of a shooting

A (irresponsible) buddy of mine once drunkenly fell asleep by the bean, and was woken up by a nice homeless fellow who told him “hey man, can’t be sleeping here, the cops will fine you.” Wallet, phone, etc all still in his bag.

I lived across the street from the bean for 3 years. I’m more likely to get injured in a car wreck driving around the suburbs than a shooting by the Bean

You do you, we have different risk tolerances. It just isn’t worth it to me. I am not feeling lucky.

You are more likely to be shot in the Rust Belt than at the Bean, and it's not close.

Sure, we all have different risk tolerances, but if you're actively avoiding The Bean, I don't think risk tolerance can be the primary factor. What has led you to believe the area surrounding The Bean is so risky?

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/10/29/22751518/downtown-ch...

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1100339756/a-shooting-in-chic...

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/multiple-people-were-sh...

https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/06/02/chicago-had-971-shoo...

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/crime-chaos-downtown-ke...

https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Gun-Crimes-Heat... (Zoom in)

(I work remotely for an employer with offices in the Loop as well)

I am not going to wade into the crime chatter all over this thread, people have their own stories and barometers on that stuff.

But I cannot let Bean anecdotes slide without an alternate take. We take our kids (two under 10) down to the Bean/Millennium Park area 4-5 times a summer, without fear. It's a fantastic place for families. Super diverse, good exercise, breeze off the lake. The Bean + the fountains + Maggie Daley Park can be an awesome Saturday/Sunday afternoon.

> Once you have kids, you’re not willing to take them to the Bean on a weekend and end up in the middle of a shooting.

Despicable and shameful FUD. You'd have to win (lose) the statistical lottery for this trope to become true. Good riddance tbh, Chicago needs more people believing in the city than those who spew this tired and fear-machine driven narrative. Hope wherever you ended up is as cultured, cosmopolitan and rich in life as Chicago but I highly doubt it.

I absolutely encourage people who believe in the city to move there. It needs those people, and I wish them all the best, genuinely.

As a current (longtime) resident, I see comment threads like this and scratch my head wondering which sensationalized coverage led to the belief that the city is so dangerous "it needs people who believe in it to move there".

May I ask: which neighborhood(s) did you live in, and/or is there specific coverage or a precipitating event that made you lose faith?

Crime has increased in some areas, yes, but the reaction to those increases have been extreme, and do not seem proportional.

It's one thing when people who don't live here are just reacting to the news cycle, but I'm pretty curious to hear your perspective as someone who has lived here.

They mentioned elsewhere: Evanston and Lake View lmao

I've also lived in Chicago/Chicagoland >20 years. Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore. I have no idea what you mean by uglier culture.

Also, for anyone not from around here, Chicago has a significant crime delta between neighborhoods that, if one were to read about it, can only be thought of in terms of extreme racial injustice. 0: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/2013_Chi...

>Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore.

So you've spoken to a large number of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the neighborhoods most plagued by crime and know that they don't complain about it? It just has to be some derogatory classification of subgroup such as "old white people", As if the hundreds of murders per year were little more than something for them to whine about?

>Chicago has a significant crime delta between neighborhoods that, if one were to read about it, can only be thought of in terms of extreme racial injustice.

"Only" in terms of racial injustice? So those violent crime numbers by neighborhood are entirely the fault of the aforementioned white people? The people actually committing them in these neighborhoods have no agency or fault in what they do to their own neighborhoods? This logic just keeps getting more twisted in the absurdities it has to push to sustain itself. Doubtless there is racial injustice in a U.S. city with a famously corrupt police/civil administration like Chicago, but in recent decades Chicago has had multiple black mayors and a large percentage of its government and police are staffed by African Americans or people of color in general. Yet they somehow have had no say or co-responsibility for anything that has remained problematic?

>So you've spoken to a large number of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the neighborhoods most plagued by crime and know that they don't complain about it? It just has to be some derogatory classification of subgroup such as "old white people", As if the hundreds of murders per year were little more than something for them to whine about?

Basically a strawman but whatever, I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View, two places I will call light on crime compared to South Side. OP is trying to describe Chicago as crime-ridden - when in actuality they would have never lived anywhere near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and are only operating on fear-mongering.

>Only" in terms of racial injustice? So those violent crime numbers by neighborhood are entirely the fault of the aforementioned white people? The people actually committing them in these neighborhoods have no agency or fault in what they do to their own neighborhoods?

Again, a strawman, but whatever. If you want to paint the problems of an entire area on someone/some group, then the government that dominates your local area is the best option.

>This logic just keeps getting more twisted in the absurdities it has to push to sustain itself.

When you twist everyone's words to misrepresent them and make them illogical, are you shocked that you get lemonade from lemons?

>Doubtless there is racial injustice in a U.S. city with a famously corrupt police/civil administration like Chicago, but in recent decades Chicago has had multiple black mayors and a large percentage of its government and police are staffed by African Americans or people of color in general

That's right, because there have been three black mayors since 1983 and because there is no more explicit policy of racism in the Chicago PD no policies that were formulated by racism, or economic impacts from racism exist anymore.

>OP is trying to describe Chicago as crime-ridden - when in actuality they would have never lived anywhere near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and are only operating on fear-mongering.

Besides being a pretty low-quality, racist comment overall (e.g., "I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View"), this specific bit of reasoning is particularly poorly-reasoned. Two things can be true: north-side Chicago can be crime ridden compared to other places and also it can have less crime than South-Side Chicago. The latter doesn't refute the former.

>Two things can be true: north-side Chicago can be crime ridden compared to other places and also it can have less crime than South-Side Chicago. The latter doesn't refute the former.

This doesn't appear to be responding to anything I said - I said they didn't live near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and thus couldn't accurately comment on it. Chicago, as an urban area, will have higher crime rates just by population rate - that doesn't actually mean they lived in a high crime area.

>Besides being a pretty low-quality, racist comment overall (e.g., "I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View"

I am white - if it's racist to point out how resoundingly white OPs bias and POV is then so be it. Go read that comment back, along with the culture comment and now living in rural Colorado - connect the dots or not. I know tons of white people that used to live here that no longer do because they don't feel it's "a nice place to live anymore."

> This doesn't appear to be responding to anything I said - I said they didn't live near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and thus couldn't accurately comment on it. Chicago, as an urban area, will have higher crime rates just by population rate - that doesn't actually mean they lived in a high crime area.

The parent didn't claim to live near "the epicenter of crime" nor does one need to live near the epicenter to find that crime is too high for their liking. Your comment was a non sequitur (responding to "crime is too high in Chicago" with "you don't live near the epicenter").

> I am white - if it's racist to point out how resoundingly white OPs bias and POV is then so be it. Go read that comment back, along with the culture comment and now living in rural Colorado - connect the dots or not. I know tons of white people that used to live here that no longer do because they don't feel it's "a nice place to live anymore."

Yes, I read the comment correctly the first time. Assuming someone's race and then assuming that the person's race impacts how they see the world is racism. Writing someone off because of their race is racism.

We're talking about quality of living issues for people in the tech industry, not social justice. The issue of crime was raised in the context of why someone would want to move away from Chicago, not as an invitation to reckon with the moral horror of it. This will be an entirely different (and less useful) thread if we embark on the tangent of American crime and its causes and responses.

It is more or less simply the case that people who work in the tech industry, the kinds of people who are choosing whether to live in Chicago or Austin or Portland or San Francisco, are not living in the neighborhoods where it's unsafe to walk to school or to set foot in the park after sundown. Lawndale and Lakeview might as well be different cities.

There is bleed --- increasingly --- from rough neighborhoods to the wealthier ones, especially with respect to property crime, but also with robberies. But there are robberies all over San Francisco, too. If you're choosing between those two cities, violent crime is probably not a meaningful metric for you.

> So you've spoken to a large number of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the neighborhoods most plagued by crime and know that they don't complain about it?

Chicago is really segregated. It's very easy to forget that one's experience in an expensive, largely-white, progressive, north-side neighborhood isn't representative of the city as a whole. Moreover, if the only "diverse" people you speak with are those who have had good educations, landed well-paying jobs, moved to a nice north-side neighborhood, and so on, you might not realize that they aren't representative of "diverse" communities more broadly (particularly when the portrait painted by the media differs so much from reality). TL;DR--we have to be careful when we generalize about "what life is like in Chicago" because it's easy to extrapolate our own experiences onto tons of people who live in neighborhoods that don't remotely resemble our own (and I strongly suspect that's what's happening when the OP says "most of the people I hear complain about crime are old white people that don't live here any more").

> Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore.

Unless "old" is >29, there are plenty of people who still complain about crime in Chicago including many black people (black communities have been most impacted by the 2014-onward crime wave). But Chicago is a segregated city, so the cushier, largely white, progressive neighborhoods are more insulated from both crime and minority opinion about crime. There are definitely lots of Fox News listeners who complain about Chicago's crime (my father-in-law being among them), but while the Fox caricature might be inaccurate, crime is still very much an issue even to the "old" 30+ crowd of various races and ethnicities.

The Chicago crime narrative is mostly a bad-faith political football.

By the numbers, it's safer to be a professional in Chicago than it was at any point in the 1990s, where this wasn't part of the national conversation.

But a movement towards criminal justice reform (which started out bipartisan, with Koch support!) elected a bunch of high-profile reformist prosecutors and shifted everyone's attention towards police oversight at exactly the least congenial time, on the eve of a bunch of exogenous shocks (the pandemic, the economy, the full flowering of a disastrous anti-gang policing strategy) that juiced violent crime.

There's political hay to be made of the crime numbers (Chicago's are far from the worst of all the metro areas in the US, but we're such a large city that the decontextualized numbers are easy to sell on TV), and easy sides to take --- the defunders on one end, the "tough on crime" conservatives on the other, here to make the case that Chicago (and Philly and San Francisco) fucked up by electing reformist Democrats to prosecutor posts, and so now crime is the first word out of everyone's mouth when it comes to this city.

Notably, none of that attention has anything to do with improving the lot of the people who live in Lawndale or South Shore; the national conversation basically boils down to whether we should create National Guard cordons around these areas, or whether we should instead abolish the police departments in these neighborhoods. It's a joke, not a public policy debate.

We're not going to resolve any of it on this thread. It sounds callous to say this because it is callous, but it is also, non-normatively, the descriptive correct answer for professionals wondering about how crime in Chicago would effect them: if you don't live in the hardest neighborhoods in Chicago, it's unlikely to be meaningfully different from any other comparably dense urban area.

Yes, I fully agree that many people who criticize Chicago's crime are doing so in bad faith, but by the numbers Chicago's violent crime is climbing again after decades of decline. That there are bad faith people among critics of Chicago crime doesn't imply that we should ignore Chicago's very real crime problems, nor that all critics of Chicago crime are acting in bad faith.

> But a movement towards criminal justice reform (which started out bipartisan, with Koch support!) elected a bunch of high-profile reformist prosecutors and shifted everyone's attention towards police oversight at exactly the least congenial time, on the eve of a bunch of exogenous shocks (the pandemic, the economy, the full flowering of a disastrous anti-gang policing strategy) that juiced violent crime

Chicago's crime began surging back in 2014-2015, and I'm pretty sure the likes of Fox News were happy to talk about it back then (certainly I recall my father-in-law ranting about it around that time). The idea that they waited until there were confounding factors like the pandemic to talk about it probably has no bearing in truth, although I'm sure they boosted that topic again in 2020 and 2021 when Chicago homicides soared to ~30-year highs (as they did all over the country).

> Notably, none of that attention has anything to do with improving the lot of the people who live in Lawndale or South Shore;

In fairness, it's not like the conditions of people in those neighborhoods abruptly fell off in 2014 such that it would explain the surge in violent homicides. If you're interested in reversing the surge (which is probably where most of the opportunity lies, assuming that if something can drive crime to surge so dramatically/quickly, that perhaps it can be similarly made to decline dramatically/quickly), you're probably going to look at the causes of the surge rather than investing more in education in those communities in the hopes that it will yield a positive return in ~10 years.

Like most of the rest of the country, property crime and violent crime are on the rise in Chicago. But index crimes in Chicago are far below where they were at any point in the 1990s. The full context isn't just "crime is up", but also "up from where".

And yes, there were changes that have explanatory power over the increase in gang homicides on the south and west sides; a string of them, in fact. The atomization of the large "institutional" Chicago gangs, the disinvestment and flight from the roughest neighborhoods to suburbs in the south and west, and, yes, the way CPD managed the problem, "flooding the zone" in whatever the most recent hot-spot while leaving other problematic areas to fester. A lot of this is Chicago's fault.

But it has not at all much to do with the quality of life for professionals in the city. For most families that live in Portage Park, South Shore might as well be in Indiana.

> But index crimes in Chicago are far below where they were at any point in the 1990s. The full context isn't just "crime is up", but also "up from where".

That context isn't helpful for someone who is considering where to live. I don't care what crime rates were in a city 30 years ago, I care how a given city's crime rates compare to other places today (and possibly in the foreseeable future).

> But it has not at all much to do with the quality of life for professionals in the city.

I take your point that, in a segregated city like Chicago, the north-side crime rates are going to be a lot lower than the city average, but I'm pretty sure rates are rising in virtually all neighborhoods.

Yes, and that's what I'm telling you: that the "rising crime rate" story tells you nothing at all about what it's like to live here, because crime is rising from historic lows, and the headline crimes are gang-related and largely confined to neighborhoods you won't live in --- something you can see pretty clearly from the different rates of increase of homicide (the quintessential gang crime) and violent crime overall (still near all-time lows).

You came to this discussion with a data point that clearly isn't meaningful. You don't even need empirical data to see that; logic is enough to tell you that you can't deduce quality of life from "crime is up". Up from where? But, to be helpful, I've provided that context for you.

It seems like you misunderstood my argument. Based on:

> You came to this discussion with a data point that clearly isn't meaningful. You don't even need empirical data to see that; logic is enough to tell you that you can't deduce quality of life from "crime is up".

... it seems like you think I'm arguing "rates are up over the last decade and thus quality of life must be bad overall". My argument is that crime rates are high overall (tenth worst of the top 100 big cities) and on a worsening trajectory. The near-term trajectory (i.e., the last ~decade) is important because we don't live in a city from moment to moment, but we will likely be in a city for 5 or more years. I also don't purport to claim that crime rates tell you everything about a place's quality of life, in case that wasn't clear. Yes, it is unlikely that a professional will live in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago, but they're also less likely to live in the worst neighborhoods in any other city they might move to.

You could credibly argue that Chicago's more segregated nature means more variation in crime rates between the worst and the best neighborhoods, which I completely believe (and consequently I also consider more qualitative assessments of cities in addition to a strictly numerical approach considering the dearth of data).

Ok! You're probably right and we're probably just talking past each other.

No worries, I'm sure I contributed to the confusion in some way. :)

"bad faith" yet every relevant stat which you'd measure the health of a city, arguably the largest one being population gain/loss, is going the wrong way. So the whole argument about this being some sort of made-up political narrative is just provably wrong. Crime stats, population loss, budget deficit, credit rating, school strikes, school truancy, school poverty line, property values...I could go on. Take your pick. The scoreboard says Chicago is losing, this isn't some political conspiracy.

I don’t mean to downplay Chicago’s crime problem, which is very bad, but if you’re not a gang member and you don’t live on the south side your odds of getting murdered in lakeview are literally orders of magnitude lower than your chances of dying in a car crash in rural Colorado where you have to drive long distances to get anywhere and everyone has a pointlessly huge truck optimized for inflicting maximum carnage in an accident.

When you go from a dense, transit friendly city where people drive less to a rural auto-oriented one, your odds of dying an untimely and violent death go up dramatically, even if the latter has much less crime.

I grew up in Beverly, on the south side of Chicago, and moved to Lakeview when I was 18.

I moved from Chicago to San Francisco (I lived at 7th and Folsom), and then back again, regretting only that I hadn't moved back sooner. Then a company I started got funded and I got hauled back to San Francisco (this time in Noe Valley), where I stayed for another couple years, before moving back to the midwest (Ann Arbor), regretting only that I put up with San Francisco for as long as I did. We lived in Ann Arbor for 4 years before moving back to Chicago and putting down roots.

I had vastly bigger problems with crime in San Francisco than I did in Chicago.

I've only heard about the public school problems in San Francisco; my kids public school here has extraordinarily well-compensated teachers who ran a pretty competent college-prep playbook that got both of my kids into hardcore STEM majors (the boy's a biochemist now, the girl is out in Utah doing geology field work).

The weather was literally the first thing I missed about Chicago.

I don't know what "culture" means to you, but one of the first things I noticed about SFBA was that none of the touring bands I followed ever played there (a track record of closing every music venue in the city for like a decade couldn't have helped, a story you'll find well told at Jamie Zawinski's blog), and last call at the bars was, like, 11PM. Does culture mean museums? Check. Public art and architecture? Check. A theater scene? Check.

I'm sure Colorado is lovely and don't begrudge you your preferences. I don't think it's at all true that if you "ask any former Chicagoan" you're going to get agreement on all these points, or even most of them. If you'd said you grew up in Evanston and then lived in Kenwood, or Humboldt Park, the violent crime thing would be easier to take seriously --- but you lived in Evanston and Lakeview, which means that as far as violent crime exposure goes, you might as well have lived in Glenview. Chicago has a violent crime problem, but it's a deeply racist violent crime problem (not just demographically, with crime endemic to regions of the city that were de jure segregated until the 1970s, but literally racially: violent crime will follow you across the city border into the suburbs, but only if you're Black and have Black friends on the other side of the border).

I'm a startup operator in Chicago, and we do not have a good startup scene. Don't let me be taken as saying there's no tradeoffs to being here. You don't come to Chicago because it's going to be a game-changing win for your startup.

> A theater scene? Check.

Oh my god do I miss the theater scene. My new city has some big name venues, but just can't compare to the local productions

last call at the bars was, like, 11PM

Alcohol sales in CA have ended at 2am since, like, the repeal of Prohibition. You just went to the wrong speakeasy!

Really? You encountered a bunch of violent crime in Lakeview?

The unusable schools and taxation are way bigger issues, and the everyday corruption through which the city rips off citizens is despicable (much of it revolving around their vehicles). The special tax it imposed on Netflix and similar services stands as a particularly egregious embarrassment.

But the complaints about the weather are tired, overblown BS. If you don't want to experience real seasons, don't live in a seasonal area. The "oh it's so cold" one is particularly bogus, since bouts of extreme cold are typically short (and getting shorter) followed by 45-degree F periods all winter long.

Chicago is slowly dying by self imposed policies. Cue in guy shoving stick into bicycle wheel then holding shin meme. Chicago is a great city and everything you mentioned is completely avoidable. But again, its shoving a stick into its own wheel, quite intentfully at that.

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