Tag: City Journal

Chicago, Chicago, my kind of second-rate city

Chicago was the cat’s meow in the ’90s. Millennium Park and all that. “The Milan of the Midwest,” said Wash Post. No more, says Aaron M. Renn in City Journal.

. . . [D]espite the chorus of praise, its becoming evident that the city took a serious turn for the worse during the first decade of the new century. The gleaming towers, swank restaurants, and smart shops remain, but Chicago is experiencing a steep decline quite different from that of many other large cities. It is a deeply troubled place, one increasingly falling behind its large urban brethren and presenting a host of challenges for new mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Two hundred thousand people left town. It was the only one of the 15 biggest U.S. cities to lose anyone in the 2010 census. Cook County also lost people, one of only two to do so of the nation’s 15 largest counties. The other one? Detroit’s Wayne County. The Loop lost 18.6% of its private sector jobs. The city’s “real per-capita GDP ranks eighth out of the countrys ten largest metros,” says Renn.

I don’t remember reading anything like this in Chi newspapers. Can you imagine reading this?

Its easy to see how fiascoes like the parking-meter lease happen where civic culture is rotten and new ideas cant get a hearing. Chicagos location already isolates it somewhat from outside views. Combine that with the culture of clout, and you get a city thats too often an echo chamber of boosterism lacking a candid assessment of the challenges it faces.

Echo chamber of boosterism, yes. It’s in the papers every day, defensive, wagon-circling, self-protective. Second-rate indeed.

Renn? He’s an urban analyst, consultant, and publisher of the urban policy website The Urbanophile. Frankly, if he were Joe the Bartender, it wouldn’t matter, the points are so telling.

That toddlin’ town, where guns shoot people

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley
Tough on neighbors

A look at the city that works, from City Journal‘s Heather Mac Donald:

The Daley dynasty in Chicago may be giving way to the Obama-Emanuel political machine, but one thing remains constant in the Windy City: youth violence and a collective refusal to acknowledge its root cause. On the one-year anniversary of the beating death of a Chicago teen by his fellow students, Chicago remains in denial about the driving factor behind such mayhem: the disappearance of the black two-parent family.

Yes.  Daley fulminates.  It’s not his nature to be suave or smooth.  But it’s all about nagging crime victims and their neighbors to speak out while in danger to life and limb.

Or he bashes guns and by implication gun-owners — but couldn’t quite bash the 68–year-old woman who finally had enough and was scared to death and plugged a 12–year-old neighbor who broke her windows and cussed her out and threw bricks at her.  (Asked about her, he mocked “the media” and complained that it was not “on topic” of that day’s good-news press conference.  Go to 14:55 of this at WLS-AM.)

Sound and fury, your honor, signifying avoidance.

And who came out in defense of what one neighbor called “that bad little boy”?  His grandmother.  Who else, for probably a fatherless kid?

In every American city, the disproportionate black-illegitimacy rate is matched only by the disproportionate black crime rate. In Chicago, blacks, at least 35 percent of the population, commit 76 percent of all homicides; whites, about 28 percent of the population, commit 4 percent.

You can’t say that in a public forum, however, especially if you’re mayor.  No.  Strictly speaking, you can but won’t.

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