Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I'm pretty sure Chicago metro has well-below-average crime rates overall. So it's unlikely that crime is a major factor in Chicago's (relative) stagnation.
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I don't know where chicagoland's overall crime rate stands vs. the national average, but when it comes to gun violence specifically, I believe we're ahead on that specific metric, and gun violence is the most scary type of crime that might actually influence a given individual's decision about where (or more likely where not) to live.
I would agree that gun violence isn't the primary factor in chicagoland's population stagnation, but it does play a small role in two ways:
First, because we always lead the nation in total shootings and homicides (and because right wing media and the former president love to shit all over chicago for it every chance they get) it does give the city a very big black eye in the national conscience, to the point where it probably does dissuade a certain percentage of people from ever even considering a move to the windy city in the first place. Chicago is not alone here, Detroit, St. Louis, and others also have similarly tarnished national images because of their extremely high rates of gun violence.
Second, chicago's gun violence is very highly concentrated within the world of the city's notorious black street gangs, and I've read enough articles about middle class black families leaving the Chicago area altogether to get their young black sons as far away as possible from the siren song of the street gangs to believe that chicago's gun violence does play some role in some black families' decision to not just leave the city, but to leave chicagoland altogether. Is it the primary driver? No, not by a long shot, but it's still there among the myriad different push-pull factors leading people through the chicagoland exit doors.
Chicago's extreme levels of gun violence take a HUGE toll on this city, and indeed even upon our metro area. From the thousands upon thousands of lives prematurely ended or forever altered (through injury and/or incarceration), to the trauma that ripples out to the families, friends, and neighbors of that first group, to the neighborhoods hollowed out by those fleeing the flying bullets, to the economic devastation wreaked when neighborhoods sink down into the poverty/violence/abandonment black hole, to the massive black eye the city must shamefully and deservedly wear for being one of the most, if not THE most, violent cities in the developed world, and so on.