The Coming Storm

At Crain’s Chicago Business Greg Hinz analyzes the census results for Chicago and sees trouble on the horizon:

If math is destiny, then a new set of numbers shows Chicago is in for a potential realignment of political power unlike anything it’s seen in decades.

I think what he found is pretty interesting and it comports well with what I have observed:

The story is the rise of the central area of Chicago as a booming population center in the past decade, the simultaneous decline of many African American neighborhoods (especially on the South Side) and Latino growth that appears to be occurring all over the place but does not appear as overwhelmingly concentrated as it has been in the past in neighborhoods such as Humboldt Park and Pilsen/Little Village.

Said another way “Hispanics” are not a cohesive interest group as blacks have been for the last 50 years. Here are some of the details:

Downtown, largely white wards have seen significant population growth. Latino growth is up, too, but more dispersed, while many Black-dominated wards on the South Side saw sizable drops.

Some may be inclined to try to dilute that by grabbing portions of that downtown population and shifting it to other, more outlying wards. Good luck with that. The next outlying wards with a combined population gain of roughly 19,000 residents all abut those downtown wards: the 4th, 43rd and 44th. As 27th Ward Ald. Walter Burnett puts it, “I’m not going to give up” Black residents in his ward to help build population of some people-short wards elsewhere. If anything goes, he adds, it will be part of his largely white east end, the portion of his ward that’s part of downtown.

Now, despite what Burnett said, I don’t yet have detailed demographic breakdowns ward by ward. But based on the 2000 census and later American Community Survey data, it’s clear that the only predominantly Black wards that gained people overall are either downtown (the 3rd and 27th) or on the reviving South Side lakefront (the 3rd, 4th and 5th). Interior wards, especially on the South Side, each lost thousands of people in the last decade. Most were intentionally kept smaller than average in the last remapping 10 years ago in an effort to help Black aldermen retain their numbers. It’s far from clear that can happen again.

That positions Latinos as the big potential winner this remap cycle.

and the Latino population is not concentrated but dispersed. Ray Lopez’s 15th Ward, the most Latino ward in the city which includes West Englewood, Brighton Park, Back of the Yards, and Gage Park, actually lost population while the Hispanic population in Chicago actually grew.

What will complicate matters is voter turnout. Even though the numbers of Hispanics have grown it doesn’t mean that the number of likely Hispanic voters has grown as well.