I’ve been working on the first post in my series on Chicago neighborhoods and I’ve been a bit surprised at how poor the available scholarship is. Most things are poorly documented, there’s lots of hearsay and speculation presented as facts, some things you find in print are just flat out wrong.
Thinking about this lead me to a realization of why I was so dissatified with my undergraduate education. My high school didn’t prepare me for college. It prepared me for grad school. When I entered college I already knew how to do independent research but I wasn’t expected to and I was surrounded by people who didn’t.
Not that you asked for help, but Richard Florida has some breakdowns on Chicago neighborhoods:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/02/class-divided-cities-chicago-edition/4306/
I find his creative class obsessions to be not very useful, but YMMV.
If you open up the larger version of the second graphic in that post, you’ll see a large, purple, vaguely triangular neighborhood, located in about the middle of the northern city border. That’s the Forest Glen community area, of which my neighborhood is a component.
IMO “creative class” is, shall we say, an over-simplification for the area.
His definition of “creative class” appears to include bankers, real estate brokers, insurance adjusters, professionals and para-professionals, funeral home directors, and basically anyone he thinks draws on knowledge or advanced education to solve problems. I think his category is specious and the name misleading, but I assume they still reflect differences in different parts of the city.
IOW, this is probably what the colors mean:
Purple — Households with college degrees predominate;
Red — Households with high school degrees predominate;
Blue — Households without high school degrees predominate.
I also wonder how much it depends on self-identification. For example, is somebody who earns a living as a waiter but who really wants to be an actor and identifies himself as an actor a member of the “creative class”? How about somebody who earns a living as a waiter but identifies himself as a waiter?
I think he draws from the census, which self-reports occupation, but I think Florida is the one interpreting which jobs are creative.
Heh. I always identify myself as “aspiring professional golfer.” Income from such? Zero.
Brings the statistics down.