Quote:
Originally Posted by yuriandrade
I wouldn't be pessimistic regarding Chicago based solely on what happened in the 2010's. Those things are cyclical. Chicago had a bad 1970's and 1980's and a great 1990's. Detroit, a horrible 1970's and 1980's and 1990's back on positive.
Obviously the US population will start to grow much slower or even decrease, but fortunes can change.
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I completely disagree with this.
Your example of the cyclical nature of growth is not right. Chicago has a bad 1970s, bad 1980s, good 1990s, bad 2000s, and bad 2010s. The way the 2020s have started off is bad too. The 1990s were the outlier because immigration from Mexico during the Clinton Administration reached an all time high and Chicago benefitted from that and the increase in household sizes when suburbanization was at its peak in the 1990s due to the Clinton administration's policies that made home ownership easier for all. Every major metro in the US benefitted in the 1990s, if your metro didn't put up a decent population boom in the 1990s then there was something wrong with your area.
Immigration in the US has been plummeting since 2006 and that process sped up in the 2010s to where people of Mexican origin are now going back to Mexico in droves. This has in turn sapped growth from areas that relied on immigration to grow and especially areas that were outside the US Southwest and relied on a large pipeline of Mexican immigrants.
Chicagoland:
1970: 7,882,640
1980: 8,052,917
1990: 8,181,939
2000: 9,098,316
2010: 9,461,105
2019: 9,458,539
Chicago barely grew at all in the 1970s and 1980s, it boomed in the 1990s because almost everywhere in the US boomed in the 1990s, it barely grew in the 2000s, declined slightly in the 2010s, and is starting the 2020s coming off a global pandemic with an even more reduced rate of immigration and the same issues that held it down in the 2010s still being there now.
Now cities must contend with a quickly aging population, less immigration, and more of the same outward migration situations. The 1990s were an aberration, not an example of the cyclical nature of growth where growth comes back strong after a few decades of slow growth. I doubt the US will ever have a decade like the 1990s ever again. The demos just aren't there for that to happen anymore.