As the 20th Century draws to a close, Chicago is being transformed into a suburb of its suburbs, a second-class citizen in the metropolitan region it used to dominate.
Today, because of a four-decade-long Great Migration out of the city, Chicago is smaller, weaker and poorer than its suburbs.
And the strongest force behind that migration today-according to those leaving-is fear of crime.
Last year, at least 60,000 Chicagoans moved out of the city, taking with them a combined annual income of more than $1 billion, a yearlong Tribune study determined.
The irony of the Great Migration from Chicago, the study found, is that even today, when the city is much less than it once was, most of those who leave don’t want to go.
They feel pushed out-by crime, mainly, and by the poor schools, the noise, the congestion. And also by a sense that there is nothing that anyone-not themselves or city officials-can do to make city life better. They feel like exiles.
This population decline is important because it weakens a great city at the same time that Chicago needs all the strength it can muster to face a deepening morass of problems-the same problems that are fueling the exodus. And the weaker Chicago is, the more of an economic and social drag it will be on the rest of the metropolitan area and on the rest of the state.
Similar Great Migrations from major old-line U.S. cities have reconfigured the American landscape.
Over the past four decades, these migrations have been fueled by various versions of the American Dream. First, it was a new house, a two-car garage and a well-kept lawn. Later, it was the shopping bonanza of a suburban mall. Later still, it was a good job.
Today, safety is the new American Dream. And it’s the main reason for the exodus from Chicago.
Never before has violence been so prevalent in the city.
During the 1990s, Chicago’s violent-crime rate has averaged just under 31 murders, rapes, robberies and assaults per 1,000 residents each year. That’s more than three times the rate in the 1970s, and more than 50 percent higher than in the mid-1980s.
And the contrast with the rest of the six-county metropolitan region is even more severe: Chicagoans today are nine times more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than suburban residents.
Faced with such odds, many Chicagoans are choosing to leave. And the stories they tell put a human face on the numbers:
– Carolyn Gehrke moved to northwest suburban Mt. Prospect after gunfire erupted during a fight outside a dance at Gordon Technical High School, across the street from her apartment. “I was really scared,” she recalls. “I was hoping the guy wouldn’t start shooting some more.”
– Larnzell Harper Sr. and his wife headed for west suburban Broadview when drug dealers began operating outside their living room window in Woodlawn. For them, just driving home was a fearful experience. “In the alley, that’s where you’d really be cautious. You’d hurry and get inside the garage. You figured, once you got the garage door down behind you, you were safe,” Harper says.
– Wayne Sepcot took his family to Paducah, Ky., because Chicago’s murder rate kept going higher and higher. “Even though I lived on the Northwest Side, I felt that it was really only a matter of time that we’d be at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Sepcot says.
Seventy-seven percent of those who left Chicago for the suburbs last year cited the desire for a safer place to live as an extremely important or very important reason for leaving, a Tribune survey found. Nearly two-thirds of all movers gave that reason.
“It was very difficult to move from a house where all three of our children were born,” says Patricia Early, who left the Southwest Side neighborhood of Wrightwood for west suburban Brookfield. “Crime was rising. Our cars were stolen three times in four months. But the biggest factor was a rape of a 12-year-old girl behind our alley.
“I felt that, even though you can never guarantee your child’s safety, this was way too close to home. It was just the final straw.”
The Tribune survey involved nearly 3,000 people who moved out of Chicago last year. It was part of the yearlong study that focused on almost 16,000 households that left the city between April 1 and Oct. 31 of last year.
Although the search for safety was the most frequently cited reason for leaving, the decision of an individual family or household to move away is usually far from simple, the survey found. Often, it involves agonizing choices and difficult trade-offs that leave emotional scars.
The survey also determined that despite long-held assumptions, only 31 percent of the households that took part in last year’s exodus were families with children under the age of 19.
Among those families, the top two reasons for moving away, cited by four of every five people, were the city’s public school system and the search for safety. Often, distrust of the school system was not just fear of an inadequate education, but also fear of gangs and crime in the schools.
Between 1950 and 1990, Chicago suffered a net loss of 837,236 people, nearly a quarter of its population.
This loss occurred despite an in-migration that still continues. Last year, for example, when at least 60,000 Chicagoans migrated away, an undetermined but smaller number of people migrated to the city. And, as has always been the case in American cities, those who move in tend to be less affluent than those who move out.
One city government study estimated that, during the first half of the 1980s, the number of people who left the city each year out-numbered those moving in by about 23,000. The 1990 census seemed to bear out that estimate with a finding that Chicago lost 221,346 people over the previous decade, or about 22,000 a year.
Nevertheless, the emptying out of Chicago and the ramifications of that loss are difficult to grasp for those steeped in the city’s image as an international metropolis.
After all, Chicago still has the powerful LaSalle Street financial district and the shopping mecca of Michigan Avenue; conventions galore and a rich ethnic diversity; splendid architecture and wonderful restaurants; a tradition of close-knit neighborhoods and a growing concentration of wealth along the North Side lakefront. And it still has Lake Michigan and its unequaled shoreline parks.
Nonetheless, the transformation of Chicago from the broad-shouldered giant of the metropolitan region into a poor relation is well under way.
Chicago has only half as many people as the suburbs, and only a third as many factories. Its per-capita income is nearly 50 percent lower, and it has nearly 50 percent fewer jobs. Its poverty rate is four times higher.
And as Chicago shrinks, so does its political power-and its ability to determine its future.
Major-league cities
Remember the St. Louis Browns? What about the Boston Braves? The Washington Senators?
Those names sound foreign today. But in 1950, they represented members of the most exclusive and, in many ways, the most popular club in the U.S.: major league baseball.
In that year, there were 16 major league baseball teams in 10 cities, all of them in the north and east, closely connected by railroad lines.
These 10 major league cities were unquestioned commercial, cultural and financial strongholds, essential to the workings of daily American life. They were manufacturing giants that together accounted for 28 percent of all U.S. factories.
They had a combined population of 19,990,122. That represented 13 percent of all U.S residents, and equaled all the people in Denmark, Greece, Norway and Switzerland combined.
But by midcentury, the pent-up demand for the American Dream-long postponed by the worldwide Depression and then a second world war-had finally been unleashed. Huge waves of soldiers had returned from Europe and the Pacific intent on building a family and settling into a cozy single-family home with a thick lawn and an attached garage, far from the grit and smoke of factories.
For most, the search led to the suburbs, where land was plentiful and new housing developments were sprouting. And over the decades, as more and more people moved out of the city, they were followed by more and more businesses and plants.
Meanwhile, the manufacturing dominance of Chicago and the other major league cities was being further undercut by technological breakthroughs, such as improved air transportation and air conditioning, that opened up the Sun Belt and other U.S. regions, and by cheap labor in other parts of the world.
The result was a 40-year population decline in these 10 cities. Between 1950 and 1990, when the cities suffered a net loss of 4.4 million people, they also lost nearly two-thirds of their factories.
By contrast, the population nationwide rose by more than 64 percent over the same period, and the number of factories jumped by 53 percent.
As for the St. Louis Browns, they went to Baltimore and became the Orioles. The Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee, and then to Atlanta. The Washington Senators left for Minneapolis-St. Paul, and are now called the Twins.
Reinventing Chicago?
Chicago is not only shrinking; it’s also evolving into something quite different from what it was.
Mayor Richard M. Daley sees this population loss as a plus: “You’re going to have a smaller city, better quality of life. . . . The city will get smaller, and then reinvent itself. You’ll start planning it differently in a way. It’s going to be much smaller, which is good for us.”
Despite Daley’s optimism, there are many signs that a smaller Chicago won’t necessarily be better.
Chicago already is becoming a city of the very rich and very poor with a dangerously eroded tax base. Its middle class is losing ground to inflation and being squeezed out. There are neighborhoods that have nearly as many vacant lots and abandoned buildings as occupied structures. And a third of all Chicago children live in poverty.
Daley contends that Chicago will never suffer the fate of Detroit, a shrunken urban giant, so empty of productive businesses that wild animals-coyotes, pheasants-wander huge empty lots where factories and homes have been replaced by weeds and wildflowers.
He mentions Pittsburgh as a model-a city that has lost nearly half of its population since 1950 but has remained relatively strong.
In fact, there are similarities between Chicago and Pittsburgh. Both have per-capita incomes of nearly $13,000. Both have poverty rates of about 21 percent. (By contrast, the per-capita income in Detroit is just $9,443, and the poverty rate there is 32 percent.)
But there are differences as well between Chicago and Pittsburgh-and the main one is violent crime, defined as murders, rapes, robberies and assaults. In 1992, the violent crime rate in Pittsburgh was 12.2 per 1,000 residents. In Chicago, it was 2 1/2 times higher-30.3.
Not only was Chicago’s rate higher than Pittsburgh’s, it was higher than Detroit’s (25.7) and higher than any other large American city except Atlanta, Miami and St. Louis.
And, more to the point for Chicagoans, it was nine times higher than the violent crime rate in the rest of the six-county region, which was 3.2 per 1,000 residents in 1991.
Crime, of course, isn’t uniform throughout the city. Some areas are very dangerous; some are very safe.
In the Wentworth police district on the South Side and the Harrison district on the West Side, there were more than 80 violent crimes last year for every 1,000 residents.
By contrast, the violent crime rate in the Chicago Lawn district on the Southwest Side was 12.1. And in the Jefferson Park district on the Northwest Side, it was 4.8.
In fact, Jefferson Park’s rate was lower than two of the most popular suburbs for former Chicagoans: Oak Park (7.0) and Evanston (6.5).
Who’s leaving
Those moving away from Chicago are people the city can ill-afford to lose, and when they go they take their vigor, strength and stability. The Tribune survey found that they are:
– Affluent, boasting a per-capita income that’s 31 percent higher than the Chicago average.
– Young. Half are between the ages of 25 and 34.
– Well-educated. Two of every three of the adults is a college graduate.
– Longtime Chicagoans. More than half of those who left in 1992 had lived in the city for at least 10 years, and fully a third for 25 years or more.
If they’ve moved to the suburbs, odds are 2 to 1 that they’re married and that they’ve bought a house. (Half of all renters who move to the suburbs are doing so to buy a home.)
In the 1960s and 1970s, the exodus of Chicagoans to the suburbs was labeled “white flight” because its impetus was, to a greater or lesser degree, the movement of blacks into formerly all-white communities.
Neighborhoods are still changing in Chicago, although at a much slower pace and without sparking as much bitterness. And the change in a community today isn’t always racial in nature, since the new group could just as likely be Eastern European.
The movement out of Chicago remains overwhelmingly white. What’s different today is that blacks and Hispanics are leaving as well in ever-larger numbers. Indeed, during the 1980s, Chicago’s African-American population fell by more than 113,000, while the number of black suburbanites rose by 103,000.
Moving to the suburbs, however, is no guarantee that blacks will have the opportunity of finding a more integrated community. Three of every four who left Chicago last year ended up in areas with large concentrations of African-Americans.
`We loved the city,’ but . . .
The decision to move out of Chicago is for most people a choice of intricate complexity. It involves the weighing of a unique combination of financial, practical and emotional factors, often over many months, sometimes over years.
That’s how it was for Nancy Daum and Eric Lundahl.
“We loved the city,” says Nancy, a 33-year-old former marketing executive. “We liked the diversity. We liked the entertainment and restaurants and nightlife. There was always something going on.”
But crime was a worry, even though neither Eric nor Nancy had ever been crime victims.
“Chicago’s becoming an increasingly violent place, and it is pretty sad when you say you’ve been `lucky’ because you haven’t been the victim of a crime,” Nancy says.
It was something the couple put up with-until they learned that Nancy was pregnant. “The birth of our son caused us to leave. If we hadn’t had a child, I don’t think we would have moved out,” Nancy says.
For six years, the couple lived in a five-room condominium in a large building on a relatively quiet corner of the bustling, fashionable Lake View neighborhood. It was a good place for young, energetic newlyweds, a few blocks east of Wrigley Field, a block west of Lincoln Park.
“You could walk from the condo, and it would be so diverse, and you could find any kind of restaurant you wanted,” says Eric, a 35-year-old attorney. In the park, they would sunbathe, jog and barbecue.
“We even tried smelt fishing one year,” Nancy recalls.
Life wasn’t perfect. Each month, Nancy and Eric had to shell out $90 for a garage parking space a block away from their building, and $281 in condominium assessments-none of which was tax-deductible. They had to put up with the ever-thicker crowds on the neighborhood’s sidewalks and the park’s running paths. And there were the car alarms that went off at all hours of the day or night.
Then Nancy learned she was pregnant, and the couple began searching in earnest for a new home, finally buying a three-bedroom ranch house in the sleepy western suburb of La Grange Park in June 1992, just two months before the birth of their son, Grant.
“We had a lot of reservations about city life,” Nancy says. “The biggest thing was the schools. It sort of seems like everything in the Chicago public school system is headed in the wrong direction. If we had moved in Chicago, I felt we were going to have to move five years later when Grant came of school age.”
Twenty-five percent of the households that moved out of Chicago last year came from the chic North Side lakefront, the 10-square-mile area extending along the shoreline between the Loop and Montrose Avenue. It is the wealthiest part of Chicago, with a per-capita income ($38,355) that is three times the city average.
When lakefront residents move out, they often leave the Chicago area entirely. In 1992, half moved away from the metropolitan region while the other half went to the suburbs.
That’s not true for the rest of the city. Last year, only 24 percent of those leaving the Northwest Side also left the metropolitan region, and 22 percent of those from the Southwest Side.
Overall, the movement out of Chicago has long been a movement to suburbia. Last year, the suburbs were the destination of nearly two of every three former Chicago households.
Relatively few ex-Chicagoans, however, settle in the suburban boom areas of Du Page County and far northwest Cook County.
In an apparent effort to avoid an overdose of culture shock, most find homes in older, nearby suburbs that have much of the look and feel of Chicago.
In fact, the Tribune study determined that there are eight major gateways to the suburbs that are linked closely to particular city neighborhoods and draw a high percentage of movers from those communities: Oak Park, Evanston, Skokie, Des Plaines, Cicero, Oak Lawn, Dolton and Calumet City.
A year after moving to La Grange Park, Nancy Daum and Eric Lundahl are still adjusting.
They like having a back yard where Grant, now 1, will be able to play, and they like all the discount stores in the area. They like the safety and the security of their subdivision. And they like having a garage and driveway.
Yet Nancy says: “It was such a hard decision, and even now we think: Should we have stayed? Did we do the right thing?
“When the Bulls won their second championship, we had just moved here. The night they won, there was only one person outside, banging pots and pans together. It was pathetic. And I thought: Oh my God, what did we do?”
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Next: The stories of those who left.
