Gun violence is a uniquely American problem. Last year, a total of 695 people — parents, children, siblings, spouses, neighbors and friends — were slain in Chicago. The vast majority were killed with guns. London, a city with more than three times as many people, had 109 homicides last year, and earlier this year, the London mayor told the BBC that the “level of violence remains too high.”
The harms of gun violence on Chicago’s families and neighborhoods persist in part because of the harm shootings impose on the local economy. While there’s been a lot of attention recently given to the problem of shoplifting, the data clearly shows that gun violence poses a far greater threat to Chicago’s desirability as a place to live, work and run a business. That drains the city of people, institutions and tax revenue that could have helped solve the problem.
Gun violence poses a particular challenge to Chicago because our city’s economic fundamentals have changed. Chicago originally became an economic powerhouse because of its location. Some 150 years ago when the national economy relied on boats and trains to transport goods, proximity to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River made Chicago the center of everything.
Between 1840 and 1910, the city grew from a village of 4,000 people to the nation’s second largest city. But today, trucks and the internet move economic value across the country. Factories have closed, farms are largely mechanized, and most jobs are in the service sector and can increasingly be performed anywhere. People are increasingly voting with their feet to flee the Rust Belt for the South and West. People and businesses are less tied to any one place than ever before.
Gun violence threatens to accelerate this trend and harm Chicago’s local economy in part by making it harder for businesses to attract and retain employees. A lot of attention has gone to the relocation decisions of big downtown companies like Boeing, Caterpillar and Citadel, but this is an issue for businesses of all sizes all across the city. For example, after a daytime shooting here in Hyde Park shattered the storefront glass of our local ice cream shop, Kilwin’s, every one of the store’s staff members requested a transfer to another location.
One small-business owner in Pilsen said she’s considering moving out of the city after the store was robbed and someone was carjacked nearby. As she told a reporter, “We can’t live like this. The city has become — I would even say, Gotham City is a little bit better, because you have Batman.”
Another way gun violence hurts the local economy is by driving away customers. Our University of Chicago colleague Steve Levitt and University of California at San Diego economist Julie Cullen estimate that every homicide reduces a city’s net population by 70 people. This helps explain why a city of 3.6 million people in 1950 has lost nearly a million residents in the years since.
Gun violence disproportionately drives population flight in those South and West Side neighborhoods where economic development is most needed. For example, between 2000 and 2020, neighborhoods with high rates of gun violence like Austin and Englewood lost 32% and 44% of their Black communities, respectively, due in large part to people’s concerns about safety. It’s hard to bring businesses in when customers are moving out.
Gun violence also makes it hard to strengthen the other key factor that residents and businesses regularly mention as a key driver of where they locate: public education. Growing up in a neighborhood where shootings are common makes it much harder for children to learn in school and also creates trauma and related challenges for children and their parents that make it harder in all sorts of ways to navigate daily life more generally.
The result of this population flight is fewer resources to help the city fund the sort of solutions that are urgently needed. By some estimates, Cook County is losing more than $1 billion a year in property taxes from vacant or abandoned property. A loss in workers, customers and businesses also deprives Chicago of help covering the costs of operating the city that we have to pay regardless of how many people live here — economists call them “fixed costs” — like the unfunded pension debt the city has accumulated of more than $35 billion. That comes out to tens of thousands of dollars per city resident. The more people leave Chicago, the higher the debt burden for everyone who’s still here. It’s even harder to attract and retain people in a city where taxes are going up just to pay off past debt rather than improve current city services.
The long-term fate of Chicago depends on our ability to confront the very real threat that gun violence poses of potentially pushing the city into a vicious spiral of population loss, business loss and economic decline. The passing of our wonderful friend and local civic leader (and former University of Chicago trustee) Jim Crown is a great loss to the city as we attempt to reach consensus on solutions and begin to make progress.
But for the future of our city, we must come together to do just that. Failure is not an option.
Roseanna Ander is the founding executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Meredith Stricker is the chief of staff of the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
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