Chicago fell hard, bounced back strong, and now teeters between global greatness…and another swoon to the canvas.
What’s it going to be?
That question is raised, though not fully answered, in “Urban America: Growth, Crisis, and Rebirth” a new book by John F. McDonald, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Unlike a lot of urban studies, this work goes easy on the rhetoric and the anecdotes and lets the numbers do most of the talking. And what a story the digits tell.
Using data gleaned from the U. S. census, federal labor statistics, FBI crime reports, public health records and so forth, McDonald traces the fortunes of 29 of America’s largest cities from 1950 through 2000. He then uses more recent, and somewhat less complete, post-millennium data to make some modest forecasts about what’s happening now and what may happen next.
The good news for Chicagoans is that, while we fell as hard as any of the big cities on McDonald’s list during the ’60s and ’70s, we turned it around during the late 1980s and mounted the most dramatic comeback of all.
But we had a long way to come back. Chicago lost 17 percent of its population between 1970 and 1990. During that time, the poverty rate jumped to 21.6 percent from 14.4 percent. The average annual family income, measured in 2005 dollars, dove to $48,500 from $54,300. The murder rate jumped by 30 percent and the percentage of single-parent households nearly doubled to 41 percent from 22 percent.
All of which is familiar stuff to graying wonks such as myself, but try explaining Chicago circa 1980 to twentysomethings who think the Loop always has been surrounded by chic residential lofts and stylish places to eat.
The fall from post-war industrial Goliath to declining capital of the Rust Belt began well before 1970, of course. There was a push-pull phenomenon as white ethnics fled racially changing neighborhoods into the beckoning arms of fast-growing suburbia. The West Side riots of 1968 prompted a lot of employers to follow suit. The new expressways, the new federally insured mortgages, the new availability of elbow room at an affordable price all played a role.
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Many who fled didn’t stop at suburbia. Population growth across the six-county Chicago region, which had ballooned by 36 percent from 1950 to 1970, slowed to a crawl in the subsequent 20 years as breadwinners and newly minted college graduates took off to Sun-Belt boomtowns not stricken, as was Chicago, by the disappearance of good-paying industrial jobs.
Then came the turnaround. “The reversal for Chicago and the region during the ’90s was truly remarkable,” McDonald said in an interview. “Far more so than was the case for New York and the other Northeastern cities.”
Our population pulse quickened, with the region adding 12 percent and the city gaining population — albeit a modest 4 percent — for the first time since the 1940s. Employment rates and family incomes grew. Crime rates dropped, as did the so-called segregation index that measures racial isolation by census tract. The city’s stock of housing, which had been losing more than 5,000 dwelling units per year to abandonment and fire, did an about-face and grew by 11 percent. Only one key indicator failed to improve: Single-parent families stayed stuck at 41 percent.
McDonald posits reasons for the turnaround. Chicago joined New York and Los Angeles among “global cities” that specialize not in the manufacture of stuff but in the marketing and financing, insuring and accounting, lawyering and communicating that keeps stuff moving worldwide. Then there’s the massive infusion of hardworking Hispanic immigrants who moved into many of the neighborhoods formerly occupied by white ethnics. He also credits the federal welfare reform for reducing dependency, and expansion of the earned income tax credit for lowering poverty rates. And he gives a nod to Mayor Richard Daley’s crusade to turn Chicago into what some call “the most beautiful of post-industrial cities.”
But change is the only constant in urban trajectories, McDonald observes, and there is evidence that 21st Century Chicago could face another downslide.
The city’s employment base has been shrinking — down 7 percent — having yet to recover from the recession triggered by the 2001 terrorist attacks. Poverty rates are up, educational attainment down and the percent of single-parent families has finally budged — in the wrong direction, up to 45 percent. City population growth has gone slack.
“We are now living in a time of urban rebirth,” McDonald argues, “but it is also clear that the positive trends can be interrupted, and perhaps reversed.”
What to do? McDonald’s first advice is “develop a coherent economic development strategy for the region.” That includes completing the expansion of O’Hare International Airport and investing to relieve transportation bottlenecks on the ground, especially snags in intermodal freight service that threaten our supremacy in shipping. He also advises political leaders to keep “going hard” on education and public safety.
My advice? Be careful not to compare McDonald’s findings and “to-do” list with what’s been happening in Springfield with Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the legislature. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by uncontrollable sobbing.
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John McCarron teaches, consults and writes on urban affairs.