Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
Chicago's MASSIVE inventory of legacy "missing middle" housing also helps out a lot too. 3-flats for miles and miles.
I feel like I still get the advantages of the "neighborhoodiness" of living on a SFH block, but with the necessary density to support a decent level of functional urbanism.
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Small multi-families are more often owned by small-time landlords than guys who own 100~ units. This means many of them are rented below market value.
Those incendiary "rent is too damn high" articles have no access to this data. They have no idea how much someone who owns a single rental property is renting the place for. There are people who have been living in the same small place for the past 15 years who are still paying the same rent they were paying the day they moved in.
I also think that Chicago has much better inter-neighborhood mobility by transit and car than cities like...Boston or even Los Angeles (Valley versus Mid-City versus sheer distance), where there is often just one way to get there from here, and so people who live in some neighborhoods realistically do not have access to jobs in another part of the metro.
A good example is...how many people who live in Brooklyn work in New Jersey? Or vice-verse? That's right, almost zero. People have to orient their housing around where they work and where they work around where they live to an extreme degree in some cities, but not to the same extent in Chicago. If you have fewer people in the process of moving to simply be closer to a new job, then there is less unused housing that is between occupants.