Chicago and the Chicago metropolitan area, known around here as “Chicagoland” or “the collar counties”, has lost more population than any other U. S. city and area. Via the Chicago Tribune:
By almost every metric, Illinois’ population is sharply declining, largely because residents are fleeing the state. The Tribune surveyed dozens of former residents who’ve left within the last five years, and each offered their own list of reasons for doing so. Common reasons include high taxes, the state budget stalemate, crime, the unemployment rate and the weather. Census data released Thursday suggest the root of the problem is in the Chicago metropolitan area, which in 2015 saw its first population decline since at least 1990.
Chicago’s metropolitan statistical area, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, includes the city and suburbs and extends into Wisconsin and Indiana.
The Chicago area lost an estimated 6,263 residents in 2015 — the greatest loss of any metropolitan area in the country. That puts the region’s population at 9.5 million.
Why are we losing population?
The main factors in Chicago’s population dip are diminished immigration, the aging of the Mexican immigrant population that bolstered the city throughout the 1990s as well as an exodus of African-Americans, experts say.
More than any other city, Chicago has depended on Mexican immigrants to balance the sluggish growth of its native-born population, said Rob Paral, a Chicago-based demographer who advises nonprofits and community groups. During the 1990s, immigration accounted for most of Chicago’s population growth. The number of Mexican immigrants rose by 117,000 in Chicago that decade, according to data gathered by Paral’s firm, Rob Paral and Associates.
After 2007, falling Mexican-born populations became a trend across the country’s major metropolitan areas. But most of those cities were able to make up for the loss with the growth of their native populations, Paral said. Chicago couldn’t.
The homicide rate and bad publicity aren’t helping, either. The city’s black population has been declining for more than a decade and its Hispanic population has peaked.
I’ve read some defenses of Chicago and Illinois on the grounds that we’re losing fewer residents per 100,000 population than some other places, i.e. that our losses just seem bigger. However, taxes aren’t levied per 100K and spending isn’t determined per 100K. From my perspective all of this means that there will be fewer Chicagoans and fewer Illinoisans to bear a rapidly increasing burden of spending and commitment for future spending.
Think twice about building more schools and expanding those roads.
The obvious solution, as quoted in the article, is to focus on economic growth. People don’t come to Illinois for the climate or the scenery. They come here for opportunity. They come here to work. Without those the future is bleak.
I was wondering whether you were seeing the effects in real estate prices. I checked on a specific real estate price – my old house in Evanston. We bought it for 875k in 1998 and sold it for 1,125k in 2003. It sold again in 2014 for 1,160k. We made a lot of improvements so it’s not as if we banked a quarter mil profit. But it seems whoever followed us made improvements as well but from 2003 to 2014 the price went up just 35k. Someone took a beating.
That was a 4 bedroom, 3.5 bath, 4000 plus sq ft and seemed so expensive to us then at 875k. The house I’m currently renting for $6000 a month would sell for 1.8 and is almost exactly half the size with a great view but no yard and no upgrades.
The IL state income tax would be a bonanza for me – I could buy that house at its current price, and pay the property tax, for the difference in state income tax rates. Free house! It’s all relative. What’s outrageous to an Illinoisan looks like the Dollar Store to a Californian.
The more mobile your job the less inclined you are to freeze 7 months out of the year, swelter 4 months and pray for a month of decent spring or fall in between. (Chicago won’t give you both a nice spring and a nice fall – that would be spoiling people.) Falling RE prices, low taxes, great restaurants (Alinea!) it ought to attract, but if you’re mobile enough to relocate you’re mobile enough to not to need to chip frozen dog shit out of your yard in a 30 mile an hour wind.
Clearly the Blackhawks are the only thing preventing mass exodus……
Have been busy recently downsizing/moving the Chicago area home and prepping for more time in the Naples home. I won’t miss Jan and Feb in Chicago. I won’t miss the rapidly declining and shell of its 80s and 90s former self. I see no evidence of the city and state to reverse course. And based on Daves earlier post on the pensions here, it looks like cataclysm is not out of the question. It’s a damned shame. All I need now is to figure out how to get Blackhawks games in south Florida.
Not to be nasty, but is there a point in having a metropolitan Chicago of 10,000,000 or so souls? Why should the place be immune to the forces which diminished Cleveland and Detroit and other rustbelt cities in the past several decades? Manufacturing workforces are shrinking throughout the world. Agriculture’s largely been mechanized and shoved into factory farms. The publishing business doesn’t need Chicago. NYC is willing to take over the whole country’s banking needs — and both political parties are happy with that. Is Chicago making contribution to the arts anymore, in films or music or painting or standup comedy or whatever? What makes Chicago unique anymore? Why does the world actually need it?
Really, standing back, what it seems cities are needed for is to school children, to let folks congregate in churches and synagogues and mosques, to herd together for policing and fire protection and sporting events, to elect politicians. Activities which seem economical when provided for a mass of population, but which in principle could be performed just as well for a widely dispersed population in a multitude of smaller communities.
Sigh! I dunno. Something’s going on. We seem to be hollowing out the center of the country, and I don’t think the process is anywhere near complete. And I don’t think those of us who remember much about The Way It Used To Be are going to be especially happy about whatever takes its place,
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