Living standards of people throughout the Chicago area increased sharply amid the economic prosperity of the 1990s, with substantial gains in education, housing and income levels, according to comprehensive 2000 census data released Tuesday.
In 2000, residents of the metropolitan area were more likely to own a home, earn more money and own more than one car than in 1990, the data show. Even renters were likely to shell out less of their overall income to landlords, a finding that surprised affordable-housing advocates, who have loudly complained that the trend was heading in the opposite direction.
Prosperity didn’t come without a price, however. Though rents were less of a drain on many pocketbooks, mortgages ate up a bigger share of a homeowner’s income–a trend driven by a home-buying spree that pushed up prices. People might own more vehicles, but they also spent more time commuting to jobs farther from home, the survey showed.
While the glow of regional prosperity was widespread, it wasn’t universal. As Chicago and the collar counties made significant gains, older inner-ring suburbs in Cook County and some of DuPage County missed the boom. In fact, incomes in some of these areas failed to keep pace with inflation, and suburban Cook County gained 35,000 residents living below the poverty line.
Even so, census experts said the data told an impressive tale.
“You can’t help but look at this data and just think that it was a fantastic decade for this region as a whole,” said Max Dieber, research director of the non-profit Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission.
The bright face on the new data comes with one big cautionary note. It was collected at the close of a decade of unprecedented expansion and does not reflect the nation’s economic downturn that began to set in not long after.
Chicago and Will County in particular appeared to ride the crest of the 1990s wave.
Even with a tremendous influx of immigrants searching for jobs, the number of families living in poverty fell in both Chicago and the state as a whole–though in the suburbs, the numbers rose slightly. And income levels in the city rose 47 percent–or 9 percent in real terms after inflation is figured in. That’s compared with a 1 percent decrease in after-inflation income in the 1980s.
In Will County the median household income soared 51 percent, or 12 percent adjusted for inflation, to $62,238. The percentage of Will County residents with a college degree jumped from 18 to nearly 26 percent. Both are increases that outpaced all other counties in the area, as well as the city.
The information comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s first release of data from the long form, which was delivered to one in six households across the nation and delved into quality-of-life questions not included on the short form sent to most households.
The long form asked 53 questions about income, housing, education and other subjects. On Tuesday the bureau released some of this data for Illinois counties and cities, but it was not detailed enough to allow for analysis of individual Chicago neighborhoods. That information is expected to be released this summer.
Chicago vs. the state
Perhaps the most striking portrait found in the data was how much the Chicago area advanced economically while the rest of the state lagged behind. The Chicago area had more college graduates per capita, lower poverty rates and higher property values and incomes than the state as a whole.
“It’s just amazing when you look at us compared to the rest of the state,” said Marc Thomas, a senior planner with NIPC. “Every expensive home, every high salary, every expensive rent–they’re all here in our region. The divide is just enormous.”
Counties with the highest percentage of impoverished residents were far outside the Chicago area, mostly in southern Illinois.
But the numbers showed that Chicago’s metropolis continued expanding outward, with far reaches of Will, Kane and McHenry Counties beginning to resemble the demographics of long-developed areas.
For example, although most new immigrants settled in Chicago, Kane County experienced the largest percentage increase in new Latino residents, with more than 50,700 foreign-born Latinos living in Kane County in 2000. In fact, nearly 16 percent of that county’s population in 2000 was born outside the United States, the highest percentage of all the collar counties.
Commute time up
Chicago-area residents increasingly relied on a car for travel to work in the 1990s, the data showed.
Travel times to and from work went up, with the average commute increasing more than 3 minutes as more people drove to work alone than ever before–280,645.
Meanwhile, public transportation ridership decreased among city residents by more than 40,000. Experts theorized that as more jobs became available in outlying suburbs, some city residents were forced into their cars to make reverse commutes.
Perhaps not surprisingly, commute times jumped in some areas where residents have advocated for expanded highway systems. Travel times near Joliet and in northern Will County increased markedly, revealing the influx of residents into new subdivisions in communities such as New Lenox, Frankfort and Mokena.
Residents there have long been clamoring for an extension of Interstate Highway 355 from Bolingbrook to Interstate Highway 80 to alleviate morning and evening congestion.
“It is definitely Will County’s day in the sun,” said John Grueling, president of the Will County Center for Economic Development. “We are in the sweet spot of development in this region, but our challenge is trying to ensure continued growth in a way that maintains a certain quality of living.”
Commute times also rose substantially in the southern Cook County suburbs, where middle-class blacks have flocked over the last two decades.
“People have moved into those suburbs, but the problem is, economic opportunity and jobs have moved away from that part of the region, forcing people to drive to other parts of the region for work,” NIPC’s Dieber said.
Housing costs
While income levels jumped in the 1990s, mortgage costs rose precipitously as well.
The percentage of homeowners in the region who devoted more than 35 percent of their income to housing costs was just more than 17 percent, up from 12 percent in 1990.
For renters, the news was surprisingly positive: Housing costs appeared to be more affordable.
The percentage of renters in the six-county Chicago area who devoted more than 35 percent of their income to rent fell from 31 percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 2000, the data showed.
Chicago continued to have the highest housing cost burden, with 21 percent of city homeowners paying more than 35 percent of their income toward a mortgage. Among renters in Chicago, 31 percent paid 35 percent of their income toward rent.
The regional rental figures left fair-housing advocates, who have decried a lack of affordable rental housing, scratching their heads.
“The numbers certainly don’t tell us what we thought we’d see,” said MarySue Barrett, president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a regional non-profit planning group.
Housing advocates suggested that people probably chose to buy a home in the 1990s for various reasons:
Rental costs had run so high during the 1980s that it was just as economical to pay a monthly mortgage as it was to pay rent. (Gross rents, adjusted for inflation, had risen an astonishing 21 percent regionwide during the 1980s.) Also, the federal government geared more financial incentives toward homeowners than renters to spur home sales.
Perhaps this is why the 1990s saw local rental costs flatten as home values soared. The increase in home values, for example, surpassed the increases in both income and rent, Dieber said.
Barrett argued that the numbers might not be all rosy. With higher incomes, more people decided to buy houses and condominiums. But there is also evidence in the census that the new homeowners are having a harder time paying for those homes.
“It’s great that more people own their homes and cars, but you have to ask yourself about the trade-off,” Barrett said. “If owning a home means struggling to pay the mortgage, struggling to pay the costs of transportation and a longer commute, is your quality of life really improving?”
To further make that point, Barrett said that although more people own homes, their dwellings are becoming slightly more crowded. In Chicago, 4.6 percent of all occupied housing units had more than 1.5 people per room in 2000, compared with 3.4 percent a decade before.
The smarter we are
In each county and the city, education levels rose.
DuPage County residents have the most schooling in the region, with 90 percent of the population over age 24 having a high school degree, compared with with 72 percent in Chicago.
DuPage County also ranked highest in the number of people with a bachelor’s degree or more (42 percent) and with a graduate degree (15 percent).
McHenry County residents have an interesting educational path: 89 percent graduated from high school, which ranks just below DuPage’s high for the region, but only 8 percent of McHenry County residents have attained a graduate degree, the lowest ranking in the region.
Germans prevail
Chicago has long been known for its ethnic European heritage, from its Irish mayors to its Polish corridor along North Milwaukee Avenue and into the north suburbs. But like the country as a whole, the region has more people who claim German heritage–nearly 16 percent–than any other European nationality, the census showed.
Many of those Germans were in the collar counties, with 35 percent of the people who selected an ancestry in McHenry County saying they were of German heritage.
The data also showed that the number of people of ethnic European ancestry continued to fall in the 1990s, even as the survey indicated continuing immigration from Europe.
For example, the number of people who considered themselves of Irish origin fell from about 1.07 million in 1990 to fewer than 968,400 in 2000, or 12 percent of the overall population. The same scenario can be seen for people who claimed Polish descent, whose numbers fell from 854,000 to about 820,500 in 2000, or 10 percent of the overall population.
Experts have two theories for the decline: People in these ethnic groups have intermarried at high rates, and residents of European descent whose families have lived here for many generations might be less inclined to identify a foreign ancestry.
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Europeans maintain big influence in area
Census data released Tuesday show large German, Irish and Polish populations still exist in the six-county area. The numbers of area residents of Hispanic and Asian ancestries were released last year.
SELECTED ANCESTRIES
By percent of area residents, with municipality with the largest percentage of each ancestry:
%%
ANCESTRY 6-COUNTY PCT. MUNICIPALITY PCT.
German 15.8 Union 53.8
Irish 12.0 Evergreen Park 39.6
Polish 10.1 Harwood Heights 37.4
Italian 7.2 Elmwood Park 28.7
English 4.8 Golf 24.6
Swedish 2.2 Elburn 11.8
Czech 1.6 Forest View 19.0
French 1.6 Pingree Grove 13.0
Russian 1.4 Highland Park 16.4
Norwegian 1.3 Maple Park 12.0
Dutch 1.2 Lansing 13.7
Greek 1.0 Lincolnwood 7.8
Scottish 1.0 Mettawa 7.7
Lithuanian 0.9 Hickory Hills 4.9
Scottish-Irish 0.8 Kenilworth 3.4
Sub-Saharan African 0.7 Olympia Fields 5.4
Arab 0.6 Bridgeview 7.2
%%
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission
Note: Percentages reflect number of people that consider themselves part of each ancestry. Respondents could choose more than one ancestry.
Chicago Tribune
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