We used to leave it to our writers-Sandburg, Farrell, Wright, Bellow-to define Chicago. And the Chicago they saw was a brawling, brawny place, a city of toil and sin with broken glass littering its alleys and seedy characters inhabiting its dark gangways.
But this is a modern age, and there’s money to be made-real money-in defining a city and its region, not with elegant turns of phrase but with insights into the purchasing patterns of its people.
There’s something unsettling about being rated, weighed, grouped and pigeonholed on the basis of what we buy: Am I my caffeine-free Diet Coke? Is my sister her summer home in Michigan? Are you your imported brie cheese?
Yet to be American is to buy. And, as social scientists and marketing analysts have found, Americans cluster together in neighborhoods based on the homes we buy-and much more.
People in Bensenville, for example, tend to shop at Sears and eat Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal, while residents of Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood are more likely to patronize Montgomery Ward and eat Kellogg’s All-Bran.
These groupings have been recognized before. But only with powerful computers have modern marketers, such as Alexandria, Va.-based Claritas Inc., whose research is used here, been able to refine their measurements to such an exquisitely detailed degree.
Still, there is a poetry to this as well.
Marketers call the sum of our purchases a lifestyle. But, in fact, it is the physical manifestation of our yearnings.
I yearn. I buy. I am.
HOW PLACE DEFINES US, OR DOES IT?
Think of infrared photos, taken by satellites orbiting hundreds of miles overhead in space, that show the vegetation patterns on the earth’s surface in shades of blue and pink.
Think of X-rays and CAT scans, and their interior views of the human body, bones outlined, soft tissues exposed.
Now look at the colorful map on the facing page and the ones on the following pages, and experience another startling, revealing, amazing new way of seeing and understanding the world in which we live.
These are maps of modern American tribes as they live in the Chicago metropolitan region, tribes bearing such odd-sounding names as Kids & Cul-de-Sacs, Latino America, Bohemian Mix, Towns & Gowns, and Country Squires.
If you know how to read these maps and how to match them up with millions of data stored in computers, they can tell you a lot, profound and trivial, about the tribes and their people:
Where are the chess players? The dog owners? The Spam eaters? The softball players? Who is most likely to go to a gambling casino? Who gets a lot of headaches? Where will you find car owners out in the driveway changing their oil? Who smokes cigars? Who owns a piano? Where are the married couples? Where are the singles?
More important, these maps say much about who we Americans are as a nation-about our energetic diversity and, paradoxically, our deeply felt desire to belong.
The maps at first appear to show a chaos across the landscape, tribes scattered willy-nilly in an orgy of separateness and individuality. But look more closely, and you find patterns of kinship and connection, some of them surprising.
Most Chicago-region whites, for example, knowing little about the city’s black South Side, conceive of it as a vast ghetto of poverty.
Yet, as the maps show, the Far South Side is populated by middle-class African-Americans who in outlook, education and spending habits are similar to the residents of middle-class white communities on the Southwest Side and Northwest Side and those in the heavily Hispanic suburb of Cicero.
And the stereotype of the suburbs as a sea of blandness? Forget it.
Not only are the suburbs a mosaic of more than two dozen tribes, but there are tribes that congregate in such semi-urban ways as to form second cities embedded in the suburban landscape.
Some second cities, such as Schaumburg and Joliet, are well-recognized. But others are unexpected: Calumet City and Lansing in southern Cook County, the Round Lake communities of Lake County, the Downers Grove-Westmont area in southeastern DuPage County.
The modern American tribes shown on the maps are hybrids. They aren’t based on race, ethnicity, wealth, age, education, religion, housing, marital status or population density, but on a combination of those factors, known as lifestyle.
And the chroniclers of these tribes aren’t anthropologists, sociologists or other social scientists from academia. They’re marketing analysts from Claritas Inc., an Alexandria, Va.-based firm.
In normal parlance, lifestyle is a vague term-and with good reason. It’s difficult to decide just what is a distinct style of living and even harder to describe it in a word or two. Yet that’s what Claritas has been doing since the 1970s.
Last year, after an analysis of the 1990 U.S. census and a correlation with data from opinion surveys and actual product purchases, Claritas unveiled the latest version of PRIZM (Potential Rating Index by ZIP Markets), its grouping of the U.S. population into 62 lifestyle tribes or, as the company calls them, clusters.
“Chicago, because of the size it is, is pretty representative of America-except the rural areas. And, if you get out into the rest of Illinois, you find those,” says Mike Mancini, director of corporate communications and marketing for Claritas.
The new groupings were eagerly anticipated by Michael J. Weiss, a Washington, D.C., free-lance writer who has made a cottage industry of writing about Claritas and its clusters. In 1988 he published “The Clustering of America” (HarperPerennial) and followed that up earlier this year with “Latitudes & Attitudes” (Little, Brown). A third book is in the works.
“Americans really have a hunger to find out how we live, who our neighbors are,” notes Weiss. “This data lets Americans know what their neighbors are doing three miles away or 3,000 miles away. We need this kind of information to find out how our country is changing .”
But Claritas doesn’t go through the costly and mathematically painstaking process of determining and constantly updating the tribal groupings of Americans out of curiosity. For the firm and its clients clustering is big business.
“The mass market of the post-World War II era is definitely over,” a Claritas publication proclaims, and, while that may overstate the case (consider McDonald’s) it’s clear that fewer products today are aimed at everyone.
Instead, the goal often is to fit a product, whether it be a dog food, a wristwatch or a political candidate, into a market niche. Thus, the producers of one brand of dog food will try to target their marketing to wealthy dog owners while another company will go after dog owners with more modest incomes.
But how do they do that? How do they find dog owners, period? And how do they tease out which ones are rich and which ones aren’t? Through Claritas or one of its competitors, that’s how.
By matching up its PRIZM clusters with information from other databases, Claritas can tell its clients that, among affluent American lifestyle tribes, the two with high dog ownership are Kids & Cul-de-Sacs and God’s Country while, among the middle-class clusters, the best bet is Shotguns & Pickups. And Claritas can show which ZIP codes or census tracts or blocks in the entire nation are characterized by these lifestyles.
Thus, armed with Claritas data, the upscale dog food company would target its advertising in the Chicago region to Kids & Cul-de-Sacs neighborhoods, such as in Tinley Park and Hoffman Estates, and God’s Country communities, such as Lemont or Fox River Grove.
The company with the cheaper dog food, however, would probably direct the main thrust of its marketing to some other more rural part of the U.S. because, of the 1,700-plus census tracts in the Chicago metropolitan region, only two are Shotguns & Pickups neighborhoods, both in far southern Will County.
The idea of clustering is as old as human society: “Birds of a feather flock together.” But it wasn’t until a half century ago that University of Chicago sociologists came up with a theory of human ecology based on the tendency of people with similar backgrounds, outlooks and experiences to live in the same neighborhoods.
On a general level, this tribal nature of humans always has been evident. When the waves of European immigrants arrived in Chicago in the final decades of the 19th Century and the early decades of the 20th, they settled in enclaves where their Old Country culture remained alive. And, of course, there have always been rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods-and neighborhoods in between.
But attempts to distinguish one community from another on the basis of their tribal characteristics tended to be rough approximations, having more to do with anecdotes, gut feelings and surface differences than with science.
Then, in 1971, Jonathan Robbin, a statistician and sociologist, established Claritas-named for the Latin word for “clarity”-and undertook the first computer-powered grouping of U.S. neighborhoods into clusters for the purpose of target marketing.
At first there were 40 clusters, based on demographic information collected in the 1970 U.S. census. In 1978 those clusters were linked to a mass of data from other sources showing product usage and opinions to comprise a new Claritas marketing product: PRIZM.
The 40 PRIZM clusters were adjusted after the 1980 census. Some were added and some dropped. They were again adjusted, and expanded to 62, after the 1990 national head count.
Clustering the population for marketing purposes has become so successful and so much a part of the business routine that it’s no longer an American phenomenon. Claritas-like firms are now operating in nearly two dozen countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom and much of continental Europe. But the clusters found in other nations can be somewhat different from those in the U.S.
For example, Weiss says, “there’s no such thing as a universal yuppie. In Italy and Spain, there’s a lifestyle of young single men, upwardly mobile, who don’t leave home until they marry. So you have 25-year-old yuppie men whose mamas go out and buy their clothes.”
Its present success notwithstanding, the concept of Claritas clusters was at first a hard sell. For many companies and ad agencies, winning in the mass market was still the goal. Clustering seemed an arcane toy of dubious value.
Then came the nicknames.
Robin Page, a friend and colleague of Jonathan Robbin with a long career in marketing, is credited with taking the cluster groupings and transforming them from a bunch of numbers into something clients could readily understand. He did this by reducing each cluster to a two- or three-word nickname.
The richest of the rich neighborhoods-featuring Old Money families living in luxurious suburban mansions-were called Blue Blood Estates. The poorest of the poor were dubbed Public Assistance because a third of all residents there were on welfare.
In between were such modern American tribes as Gray Power (affluent seniors), Hispanic Mix (predominantly low-income urban Latinos) and Norma Rae-Ville (Southern mill town residents).
“The nicknames,” Page says, “simply vivified it. They took it out of the realm of something esoteric and into the realm of something people could develop mental images of.”
Yet it was a far-from-simple process. Page’s job was the seemingly impossible task of compressing hundreds of pages of data for each cluster into a nickname that was not only accurate but colorful as well.
“The naming of the clusters was a very personal thing,” Page says. “You might describe it as a process of synthesis.”
Page, who had left the company to establish his own consulting firm in Atlanta, was brought back to name the 62 clusters in the latest Claritas cluster version.
Claritas had to go through the naming process again because after each 10-year census the company completely re-clusters the nation. And each time it does, some tribes are found to have grown while others have shrunk. Some disappear while new ones emerge.
Among the missing clusters in the new system was one of the showcases of the 1980s version: Black Enterprise, a cluster dominated by young, affluent, well-educated African-Americans.
These were blacks who were living the American Dream, managers and professionals who were making it, and the greatest concentration of such neighborhoods was in Chicago, followed by Washington, New York, Detroit and Los Angeles.
But last year, when Claritas unveiled its new clusters, Black Enterprise was nowhere to be found. That was good news, according to Weiss.
“It means more African-Americans are living in upper-income cluster areas. They’ve assimilated into predominately white neighborhoods,” he says. “Some of the data suggest that affluent African-Americans have more in common with affluent whites than they do with poor or working class African-Americans.”
That’s the upside of the Black Enterprise disappearance. The downside is that many middle-class blacks lost ground to inflation during the 1980s, more ground even than their white counterparts, and are no longer as affluent as they once were.
Of the 40 names in the 1980 cluster system, 18 were dropped in the new version, but not always because the cluster had evaporated.
The Public Assistance name for the poorest of the clusters, acceptable in the 1970s, was dropped as too insensitive for the 1990s. It is now called Inner Cities.
Mancini acknowledges that Inner Cities might be viewed as simply another code word for African-American urban ghettos, but he says, “Well, that’s what it is. The inner-cities are by far the worst neighborhoods to be in, no matter who you are. It’s where the crime problems are. It’s where the guns and gangs are. They’re just not nice places.”
Another cluster that underwent a name change was Furs & Station Wagons, the third most affluent of the 40 clusters. The problem was that station wagons were no longer a status symbol to the wealthy, and, because of the anti-fur movement, neither were mink coats.
As a joke, some of Claritas’ analysts suggested christening the tribe Spandex & Mini-Vans. In a more serious vein, they came up with Cashmere & Country Clubs.
But Page rejected that suggestion as too long and also inaccurate because the cluster, which in the new 62-group system ranked second in affluence, wasn’t even in the top five in country club membership.
“I was trying to describe these people in terms that truly represented them. These are very well-to-do, very successful people. It’s all that new money out there. They’re excited. They spend like crazy. They travel everywhere. These people are more interested in going to Europe than to a country club.”
The result: Winner’s Circle.
Not everyone, however, is a fan of the Claritas nicknames. Tom Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center, a polling group affiliated with the University of Chicago, says: “In what they do, they do a reasonably good and competent job. But they are way too cute by far.”
The nicknames, according to Smith, “give a false impression. They create this idea that the differences between some of these types are greater than they are.”
For obvious reasons, Claritas doesn’t spell out exactly how it differentiates one lifestyle tribe from another, and that leaves the process open to question. “In the academic community, there’s a lot of debate over how you should do these things,” Smith notes.
Claritas says creating the clusters is an art, and so is their use.
“This system does not classify individuals,” Mancini explains. “If you go into this thinking everybody who lives in Blue Blood Estates is going to have a fancy pen in his pocket, no, that’s not true. What it does, it increases your odds.”
The profile Claritas produces for a cluster indicate the preferences of the majority of the people living there. But few of the cluster’s residents will share all of those preferences, and some won’t share any.
The Claritas profile for the River City, U.S.A., cluster indicates that people in such neighborhoods are likely to own tropical fish.
So Bonnie Maguire, co-owner of the Trophy Store in the McHenry County town of Harvard, the only River City cluster census tract in the metropolitan region, is asked if her family has tropical fish.
“Yes,” she says, “my daughter Jacqui has a few.”
Does anyone in the family go freshwater fishing? “That’s where my husband, Dick, is right now. He’s fishing in a walleye tournament this weekend.”
Not everything in the profile, however, is a hit. For example, the Maguires don’t like instant mashed potatoes, they don’t watch “Full House,” and they don’t eat Spam.
And what about their car? Do they own a Buick? “No,” Bonnie Maguire says, “but Mom and Dad do, and so do Dick’s folks.”
Based on the Claritas numbers, you would expect to find a lot of Kellogg’s Froot Loops being sold in Chicago’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods. And, sure enough, sales of the sugar-coated cereal are so high that it’s often used as a sale item to attract customers to the Chatham Food Center at 327 E. 79th St. and other Centrella Stores on the South Side.
Similarly, Claritas has determined that the richest of the rich are among the biggest fans of murder mysteries. And, sure enough, there’s a book store that stocks only mysteries, thrillers and spy novels in the heart of the Chicago area’s greatest concentration of Blue Blood Estates neighborhoods: Scotland Yard Books in Winnetka.
“It’s the type of book that upscale, upper-class people like,” says owner Judy Duhl. “There’s the puzzle that’s in it. It takes a certain kind of mind that wants to beat the author to the solution. Also, a lot of mysteries-you learn something when you read them.
“And in this world of chaos, there’s order in mystery books. Good ends up on top usually.”
Still, because it’s based on data that can be several years old, the clustering by Claritas isn’t perfect, especially when it comes to neighborhoods undergoing radical changes, such as gentrification.
Consider census tract 3301 on Chicago’s Near South Side. For decades, this area-bounded on the north by Roosevelt Road, on the west by State Street, on the south by Cermak Road and on the east by the lakefront-was a working class section with a significant level of poverty.
As late as 1990, it had a median household income of $15,929 that was 40 percent below the average for Chicago. And its per capita income, $5,515, was nearly 60 percent under the citywide figure. So it’s no wonder that Claritas identified the tract as an Inner Cities neighborhood.
But visit the area now, and, except at the single-room-occupancy St. James Hotel at 1234 S. Wabash Ave., there are few poor people to be seen. Instead, in seedy building after seedy building, signs in windows advertise loft conversions.
On the east side of the tract, the first luxurious row houses of the $3 billion Central Station development have risen, looking like a suburban subdivision dropped whole into the city in the middle of the night.
And, since December 1993, in a row house that real estate records show he purchased for $410,000, lives Chicago’s First Citizen, Mayor Richard M. Daley and his family. Chances are good that the area won’t remain an Inner Cities neighborhood in the Claritas roster much longer. Yet, there are other sorts of imperfections inherent in the clustering process that aren’t so easily fixed.
These tribal designations by Claritas refer to the general personality of a neighborhood. But some residents and, in some cases, large numbers of residents may lean a completely different way.
This is especially true in those neighborhoods that have “Mix” as part of their name. By definition, these are communities where the tribal character embraces diversity, whether of income, race, sexual orientation or all of the above. Thus, it’s an enjoyment of difference that makes the people of such areas stand out-that is the similarity they share.
There’s also the fact that, for all their flashy nicknames, these tribes are computer constructs. They were created in cyberspace by the laws of logic and the formulas of demographers. Their composition wasn’t put to a vote. No attempt was made to experience the actual, physical, on-the-street look and feel of the neighborhoods.
“These numbers cannot capture a shady street or a friendly neighborhood or a place where people talk over fences in the back yard,” says Weiss. “They can’t capture what’s really the soul of so many neighborhoods: how a neighborhood looks, whether the lawns are well-kept, whether the people are friendly.”
So the data are limited but nonetheless fascinating.
The Chicago that Claritas has found in its numbers is a metropolitan region of sharp economic and social contrasts. Half of all households in the region fall into just ten clusters. These are the tribal clusters at the core of the metropolitan region’s identity.
The two at the top couldn’t be more different. The tribe with the greatest number of households (185,000) is also one of the richest, Kids & Cul-de-Sacs, while the cluster in second place, nearly as populous with 182,000 households, is the heavily African-American Inner Cities, the poorest.
There are two other clusters in the top ten with strong race and ethnic identification. Ranking third is Latino America, a middle-class Hispanic grouping with 163,000 households, while Mid-City Mix, a predominantly black middle-class cluster with 127,000 households, is in sixth.
Despite the drain of manufacturing jobs over the last two decades, the region still has many of the most affluent sort of blue-collar workers. So Blue-Chip Blues (137,000 households) is the region’s fourth most populous cluster .
The fifth, with 133,000 households, is Bohemian Mix, a lifestyle tribe noted for enjoying the rough edges of city neighborhoods and made up mainly of recent college graduates, still single, just starting to make their way in the world.
By contrast, in seventh place is Old Yankee Rows (118,000 households), a cluster of empty-nest middle-class families, concentrated on Chicago’s Southwest and Northwest Sides and in the western suburb of Berwyn.
Rounding out the top ten are three more well-to-do, suburban lifestyle clusters: Winner’s Circle (106,000 households), Upward Bound (95,000) and Pools & Patios (94,000).
A final note: clustering is based on the people who live in neighborhoods. The idea is that people want to live near others like themselves.
While the character of a neighborhood, such as census tract 3301 on the Near South Side, can shift, usually it doesn’t. What happens more often is that particular people in a community change.
The Lincoln Park and Lake View neighborhoods in Chicago, for example, are magnets for young single professionals. But, as these people get older, marry and have children, they tend to move out. And when they do, other young single professionals move in to take their place.
So the tribes of these communities tend to remain constant, even as members come and go.
This puts a different spin on the oft-repeated adage that Claritas employees draw from their data: You are where you live.
Actually, it should be: You are where you live-until you move.
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What would you like to know?
Where are the smokers in the Chicago area? Who owns swimming pools? Who drives motorcycles? Who uses the high-priced spread? These are questions we couldn’t answer today, so we’ll explore them in an upcoming issue.
Write and tell us what you want to know. And don’t worry about seeming too esoteric or too silly. We’re already planning to examine everything from dogs and cats to Spam.
Mail your ideas to: Maps, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Room 532, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.
