June 24, 2008
Chicago: Model or Failure?
New Geography, a new site "devoted to analyzing and discussing the places where we live and work," is feature Chicago stories this week, and they're really interesting.
"Our focus on Chicago shows that this spirit of opportunistic boosterism has not been lost," according to one essay.
It is this more gilded, elegant Chicago – home of arguably the nation’s and even the world’s greatest collection of 20th Century high-rise structures – that foreshadows the current city. The success of Millennium Park, the powerful if now fading condo boom, the city's newfound celebratory culture (think Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama), its growth in fine restaurants, nightclubs and other entertainments has persuaded some observers like the University of Chicago's Terry Nichols Clark to declare that Chicago is indeed the model city of the future.
Well, not so fast. According to another essay, "By any traditional performance standards Chicago has failed."
Chicago’s political elite love to give speeches about the importance of public education, but not for their children. Mayor Daley sent his children to private schools. Deborah Lynch, the former head of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, sent her kids to private schools. America’s newest political superstar, Barack Obama, sends his kids to private schools. With the exodus of the rich from Chicago’s public schools, 69 percent of the children in the Chicago Public School system are poor.The horrible public schools, high taxes, and crime have driven families out of Chicago. The city’s job base cannot compete with anti-union places like Houston and Phoenix.
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The racial undertones in Steve Bartin's piece made it quite uncomfortable to read. In explaining the population surge in the 1990's and the state of education in Chicago, he seems to equate the white population as a positive and the Hispanic population as a negative. Maybe I'm uber sensitive, but does anyone else feel the same?
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I feel like it was a poorly constructed rant.
Anyway, I like the site A LOT.
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I felt the same - there was a definite undertone of white population is good, non-white bad. It was repugnant.
Chicago may have its problems but the guy in the second article obviously had a political ax to grind. I don't understand why he was holding up Houston as some kind of example Chicago should strive to given that Houston is one of the most polluted cities in the US. No thanks!
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Houston isn't even a city! Its a huge swath of land that is nearly 3 times the size of Chicago. You can walk nowhere, public transit is basically non-existent, and the neighborhoods are more Oak Brook than Ravenswood.
It is literally like combining Cook and the Collar Counties into one city and saying we are bigger than NYC! It would technically be true, but still.
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I think you all are reading the racial aspect of the analysis a bit too sensitively, and your reaction is the opposite of what I'd think. The point made is that white flight continues. Whites are leaving Chicago--and taking their substantial tax base with them--so that they can self-segregate in private or suburban enclaves. This leaves the burden of paying for the city on minority groups which, speaking as a whole, are less affluent. The point isn't that whites are good and hispanics bad, but that whites are wealthier than hispanics and are leaving the city with their wealth.
Interestingly, the article points out many flaws about the city that frequently find traction on this comment board. But that's the thing with Chicago. We'll happily run the place into the ground ourselves, but God forbid some outsider point out our flaws. I think the Second City has a severe inferiority complex.
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Actually, I think both are correct.
The moneyed classes enjoy the restaurants and shopping and gilded citylife because an underclass is there to provide it. I went to DePaul and it made me very aware of the racial and economic divide in this city to see every menial job staffed by blacks from poor neighborhoods. When I'd point out that we were getting all this "You're the future" talk while being served by an underclass people would just point out how "They're lucky to have good jobs with the school."
All the wealth of this city is made possible by the utter poverty on the south and west sides.
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This is an excellent discussion, but I wanted to add a few comments:
"...but God forbid some outsider point out our flaws. Bartin is not an outsider -- he is a Chicagoan.
"...given that Houston is one of the most polluted cities in the US." I'm ambivalent about commenting on this, but, in all fairness, Houston made the "most polluted in the US by ozone", but not "particle pollution" -- not being an environmental scientist, I have not idea what that means, but, I found this interesting to know. No US city made the top ten most polluted cities in the world.
I agree with Matty -- I like this site A LOT. However, I don't think Bartin's rant was all that bad, just unusually biased towards negative "publicity" (not sure if that's the correct word to use here).
Where I can agree that on a fiscal basis (i.e., retail tax rate, rental unit pricing, housing starts/pricing) is unfavorably increasing, oddly the unemployment rate in Illinois is 9/10 of a basis point unfavorable as compared to the national rate (sorry, not sure of the Chicago specific number). In a city where Bartin claims that "...tens of thousands of jobs in the futures industry [have been lost]", I think this is hyperbole merely for effect rather than fact.
I thoroughly enjoy THESE kinds of comments/discussions, and this is the reason I read Chicagoist.com.
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Absolutely. His argument is basically that because floor trading is going away, that "tens of thousands of jobs" have or will be "shed". As anyone with even the tiniest thread of a clue knows, the folks doing the yelling in the pits represent a tiny fraction of the industry -- and once that function is gone, they'll undoubtedly have other (still profitable) roles to play in the industry. "Tens of thousands" of jobs will just vanish? Yeah, no. Nuh-uh. Complete fiction.
While I don't necessarily disagree with many of his other points, it's that kind of plainly embarrassing dilettantism that leads me to question his credibility overall (it's "anti-union" sentiment that makes Huston or Phoenix more attractive? Uh-huh. Suuuuure it is...) and leads me to believe his points are based more in ideologically-influenced assumptions and guesses than, you know, facts.
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Oh, and a cursory examination of his blog, makes it abundantly clear that Mr. Bartin's writings are nothing more than the typical half-digested demagogic pablum routinely vomited into the public forum by so many other partisan shills and doctrinaire ideologues. Worthless tripe, the lot of it.
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it's "anti-union" sentiment that makes Huston or Phoenix more attractive? Uh-huh. Suuuuure it is..
Yeah any praise of Houston as a whole should set off idealogue alarm bells. It's lack of urban planning and regulation (almost no zoning codes) is always praised by libertarian types. The irony being that it's unlivibility is proof that such policies are a failure. It'll be interesting to watch cities with Houston's *just keep spreading out and out* growth model crash and burn as oil keeps rising and rising.
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Haha,
He praises Las Vegas and Orlando as models of what proper cities should be. What a completely ridiculous, disingenuous, and factually creative bullshit piece. I suppose if you didn't know anything about *anything* it'd be pretty compelling.
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The other aspect that would be amusing were it not so shockingly doltish is the fact that those are all areas that have been absolutely decimated by foreclosures and plummeting home values. That they're what Mr. Bartin apparently considers the beau ideals of urban society speaks volumes to his clear and fundamental lack of any understanding of the topic.
Methinks he should stick to "Internet sales" and leave examinations of cities' "traditional performance standards" to people who have a passing knowledge of the topic -- or are at least vaguely in touch with reality -- lest he continue to so thoroughly embarrass himself.
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"The moneyed classes enjoy the restaurants and shopping and gilded citylife because an underclass is there to provide it."
This is how it has always been, and always will be. There will always be garbagemen. There will always be day laborers who fix the things the rich people break. This isn't necessarily bad.
Where it becomes bad is when these folks have no opportunity for advancement, which was lost during the switch from manufacturing to service. By and large, service jobs have a glass ceiling for most workers.
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I'd call them glass cages actually, not too put too fine a point on it.
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Agreed. The reality is that there are plenty of folks who want those kinds of jobs, irrespective of how we may perceive the pay or "status" associated with them. The insistence that there's something problematic about that is just another way of looking down one's nose at people.
You're absolutely right that it's ensuring that people who do want to have those higher-paying, higher "status" jobs have a legitimate shot at getting them that matters. And what Mr. Bartin does manage to get right is his noting that the CPS isn't doing a good job of doing that (though he does vastly and disingenuously oversimplify the reasons why).