An American Suburb, 2018

[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by Sun Belt

I agree with this.

D.C. is not Chicago.

Not all gang ridden black 'hoods all gentrify into the next Starbucks, craft beer sippin' hipster hotspots. D.C. hoods had the behemoth federal government pumping out billions before, during and after the Great Recession. DC was flourishing while the rest of America suffered.

Well, that's not how any of this works.

Most gentrification occurs via private investment, not from billions of dollars spent by the Federal Government.

Truth is, DC will gentrify into black hoods mostly because there is no other choice. It is a compact city that lacks much by way of huge ethnic enclaves, unlike Chicago.

In Chicago, Hispanic communities will gentrify long before you will see the same happening in black areas. It's so stark that Pilsen, a fairly well situated hood, is gentrifying more quickly than Bronzeville, which occupies superior real estate. The former being Hispanic and the latter being mostly black is viewed by many to be the reason.

[Sun Belt]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

Well, that's not how any of this works.

Most gentrification occurs via private investment, not from billions of dollars spent by the Federal Government.

Truth is, DC will gentrify into black hoods mostly because there is no other choice. It is a compact city that lacks much by way of huge ethnic enclaves, unlike Chicago.

In Chicago, Hispanic communities will gentrify long before you will see the same happening in black areas. It's so stark that Pilsen, a fairly well situated hood, is gentrifying more quickly than Bronzeville, which occupies Superior real estate. The former being Hispanic and the latter being mostly black is viewed by many to be the reason.

You're right and we're saying the same thing. DC is the anomaly. So it's not a good template to follow. What happened in DC doesn't mean it'll apply to Chicago.

[softee]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Again, inaccurate and irrelevant. And again, I didn't bring up Mississauga. The claim was about new construction, not general ridership in suburbia.

Originally Posted by Crawford

And Dolton is already pretty dense/walkable (certainly moreso than, say, Mississauga or North York), the problem is that it absolutely sucks.

^ First mention of Mississauga in this thread.

Originally Posted by Crawford

Inaccurate and irrelevant. Toronto's transit ridership has been dropping, basically same as everywhere else in NA.

The TTC's ridership isn't dropping, it's just not growing. It's been holding steady at around 535 million annual trips since 2014.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

But you have the SAME THING in Canada!

Toronto suburbs are extremely segregated by race and ethnicity!

Yeah, in a Chinatown / Little Italy kind of way. It's not exactly the same thing. Newer immigrants like to stick together and stay in a more familiar bubble that feels like the old country. (They do that in the U.S. too; perfectly normal.)

What I find weird is to have old stock Americans self-segregate on such a scale from other old stock Americans that are virtually indistinguishable culturally.

(in other words - if 200+ years from now you still have Markham homogeneously full of people who are culturally 100% Typical Mainstream Canadian while looking ethnically Chinese, and Brampton homogeneously full of people who are culturally 100% Typical Mainstream Canadian while looking ethnically Indian, then yeah, I'll find that weird too.)

[Mister F]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

But you have the SAME THING in Canada!

Toronto suburbs are extremely segregated by race and ethnicity!

No we don't. While there's of course segregation, it's not like the segregation in the States. There's nowhere in the Toronto suburbs with 90+% of the population being a single ethnicity, not even Markham and Brampton. Canadian cities are typically not racially segregated to the same degree that American cities tend to be. This is well documented.

Originally Posted by Crawford

That's great, and irrelevent. We're talking new construction luxury towers, not average condos, which will obviously be occupied by average earners.

Just like you were the first to bring up Mississauga, you're the one trying to frame the discussion around the luxury market for some reason. The discussion is very much about average towers, not luxury:

Originally Posted by isaidso

That means selecting areas in these low density suburbs that will be built/re-built as high density nodes with a subway station underneath.
These clusters contain condos towers, office towers, retail, entertainment, etc. Suburbanites can then travel to their own mini-downtown for shopping, work, or they can choose to live in them too.

[10023]

Why would this place gentrify?

It’s not well located and the housing stock isn’t attractive or suitable to modern requirements. There are lots of neighborhoods with better “bones”, more convenient access to downtown, and extremely low prices that would gentrify first.

Chicago’s real problem is lack of money. There are so many things that you could do to promote gentrification in different areas with sufficient funding, from transit to beautification projects (like turning those useless parkways into something - see below).

But the tax base in the southern half of the city and south suburbs doesn’t support it, and you can’t direct taxes from downtown and the north side to these areas without reversing the progress they’ve made. Americans have largely abandoned the northeast and moved south and west, and government policy and fiscal structures have encouraged this. That’s a large part of why American infrastructure is so poor - the new places don’t have it, and the legacy stuff has been abandoned.


(By parkways, I mean this - it’s a glorified highway median now, and it needs something to divide it from the street, pathways and better landscaping to be useful: https://goo.gl/maps/5aaXzyqe2mM2)

[chrisvfr800i]

Originally Posted by The North One

Oh course they do, those are symptoms of segregation and systematic oppression. Things that happen after the racist white people lose their shit and leave.

What a POS you are for making such a comment.

If crime is rising, what are "Racist Whites" supposed to do? Just stay there and let crime and violence wash over them and their families? If YOU were sitting on the bus and a thug gangbanger sat down next to you and acted thuggish, what would you do? Sit there and try to teach him to be a better bus rider...or get up and change seats?

"White Flight" was a rational response to a changing situation.

[goat314]

Originally Posted by chrisvfr800i

What a POS you are for making such a comment.

If crime is rising, what are "Racist Whites" supposed to do? Just stay there and let crime and violence wash over them and their families? If YOU were sitting on the bus and a thug gangbanger sat down next to you and acted thuggish, what would you do? Sit there and try to teach him to be a better bus rider...or get up and change seats?

"White Flight" was a rational response to a changing situation.

There is way too much academic research that proves otherwise. The first Afro-Americans that moved to white neighborhoods were either the same socioeconomic level or higher than their white counterparts. They were not committing crimes, just looking for better services and living conditions. Crime and social decline came after the massive disinvestment, when property values plummeted and impoverished individuals could afford to move in. I'm guessing you never heard of "redlining"? It was kind of a thing in the United States.

[skyscraperpage17]

Originally Posted by chrisvfr800i

What a POS you are for making such a comment.

If crime is rising, what are "Racist Whites" supposed to do? Just stay there and let crime and violence wash over them and their families? If YOU were sitting on the bus and a thug gangbanger sat down next to you and acted thuggish, what would you do? Sit there and try to teach him to be a better bus rider...or get up and change seats?

"White Flight" was a rational response to a changing situation.

lol.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by brian_b

Especially in the south suburbs of Chicago, municipal consolidation is really the only solution. These are very small cities that are running the full suite of services and they can't afford it anymore. Property taxes are extremely high compared to home values (as mentioned in the article, Dolton is nearly 4x that of Chicago) and much of the money is squandered by very poor management, not to mention corruption and graft.

The best thing that could happen to Dolton is to get annexed into Chicago, but I can't think of any reason that Chicago would want to do so. Perhaps that could lead to getting paid back their water money, I suppose.

Originally Posted by the urban politician

Chicago will never annex the lower income south burbs.

The best way for these communities to benefit from annexation is for them to annex each other. I can see a new city called South Chicago emerging, perhaps being Illinois' second largest city, and being majority black

Why don't Chicago and Cook County merge? In fact, I believe the US would greatly benefit turning counties into the last tier of administration. It would eliminate overlapping in several areas, saving lots of money.

[dc_denizen]

And putting lots of people out of work

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by goat314

[/B]

There is way too much academic research that proves otherwise. The first Afro-Americans that moved to white neighborhoods were either the same socioeconomic level or higher than their white counterparts. They were not committing crimes, just looking for better services and living conditions. Crime and social decline came after the massive disinvestment, when property values plummeted and impoverished individuals could afford to move in. I'm guessing you never heard of "redlining"? It was kind of a thing in the United States.

Although wildly inaccurate, it's a neat and easily digestible narrative. Hence, why so many people continue to believe it, when even a surface level look at the history of segregation in the U.S. would quickly disprove the theory.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by goat314

There is way too much academic research that proves otherwise. The first Afro-Americans that moved to white neighborhoods were either the same socioeconomic level or higher than their white counterparts. They were not committing crimes, just looking for better services and living conditions. Crime and social decline came after the massive disinvestment, when property values plummeted and impoverished individuals could afford to move in.

Even without needing actual research, it's obvious that what you describe is the correct sequence of events (good people move away, THEN crime moves into the cheaper, less desirable neighborhood) rather than the other way around.

Crime would not have taken hold in those neighborhoods if there hadn't been white flight in the first place.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by chrisvfr800i

If crime is rising, what are "Racist Whites" supposed to do?

Move away, but that's only valid _if_ crime is actually rising.

If it's only a perception, yet everyone still moves out and abandons the neighborhood, then perception becomes reality, but it caused it. It's similar to how a completely unfounded rumor that a given bank is about to go bankrupt may well actually singlehandedly cause a perfectly healthy bank to go bankrupt.

[dc_denizen]

For decades those areas that ethnic whites vacated were good (black) neighborhoods with a strong tax base

South side Chicago and Detroit, back in the 1980s, were solid middle class to a large extent.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by lio45

Move away, but that's only valid _if_ crime is actually rising.

If it's only a perception, yet everyone still moves out and abandons the neighborhood, then perception becomes reality, but it caused it. It's similar to how a completely unfounded rumor that a given bank is about to go bankrupt may well actually singlehandedly cause a perfectly healthy bank to go bankrupt.

Also... how exactly do communities change over so quickly? How does it happen that housing is suddenly available for hundreds of thousands of residents in a city to relocate so quickly? Cheap money from the federal government, in the form of low cost mortgages, played the single biggest role in white flight. Exclusion of black families from accessing that low cost financing created the "chocolate cities."

[SkahHigh]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

I guess that's people taking the Pace bus to the Red Line terminal. At least the bus is mostly express from Dolton, but it would be more useful if it were more frequent.

The Metra Electric commuter rail stops in adjacent Riverdale, with morning expresses reaching the Loop in about half an hour. But the problem is that the types of people living in Dolton probably don't work 9-5 office jobs in the Loop but rather industrial or retail jobs in scattered locations that are not necessarily transit accessible at all.

If all of Calumet/Thornton township merged it would be a city of about 188k in 53 square miles, which would be much more reasonable to provide services for. Although some towns are split between townships and I imagine e.g. that the portion of Homewood in Thornton wouldn't want to join.

Exactly. I didn't know there were 135 different cities in Cook County. There are 17 cities in Thornton Township alone. That's... a lot.

It's a formula that benefits the wealthy suburbs of the North Shore but completely f*cks over the poorer southern suburbs.

Chicagoland needs to somehow create bigger entities which will in turn provide their own services, whether it be water, policing, fire protection and transit. With more organization and more funds, you can do a lot for these citizens. Too many different municipal entities leads to small town politics and turf wars.

I don't want to bring Canada too much into this because the context is much different, but the whole province of Quebec went a municipal reorganization from 2000 to 2006 which ended up benefitting a lot of cities. On the Island of Montreal, there used to be 22 suburbs plus the city of Montreal, each with their own services. Some wealthier cities de-merged in 2006 after being forcibly merged to Montreal in 2002, but the Agglomeration of Montreal remains, providing police, fire and public transit, so there are no such inequalities between cities and suburbs. Now, there are 13 suburbs on Montreal Island, but they all share services with the city of Montreal.

I believe doing the same with some Chicago suburbs would do a lot, like it did for many poorer Montreal areas that used to be independent (Verdun, Lasalle, Montreal-North).

For example, a newly formed city of Thornton could be able to organize a transit agency that better suits the reality of it's residents and offer frequent service to Metra and the El at Dan Ryan, as well as provide better policing than with the four-officer shift in Dolton... Same goes for fire protection.

[SIGSEGV]

I have mixed feelings about Chicago merging with Cook County. Annexing areas inside of 294 and S of Golf Rd would mostly make sense, but outside that it gets far too suburban outside of some of the towns along the Metra.

[DePaul Bunyan]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Why don't Chicago and Cook County merge? In fact, I believe the US would greatly benefit turning counties into the last tier of administration. It would eliminate overlapping in several areas, saving lots of money.

There are too many insiders benefiting from overlapping services, redundancy, patronage, etc. Not to mention the public sector unions would absolutely not be keen on streamlined government services.

[10023]

The problem is that the areas that would be beneficial for Chicago to annex don’t want to be annexed, and the ones that would want to be annexed would be a drain on public services. So it’s a non-starter unless the state forces amalgamation somehow, which isn’t going to happen.