Neighborhood Change in Chicago and Its Suburbs 1990-2019

Introduction

Chicago is the third largest city in the U.S. by population and its metro area also ranks third. Population change in the City of Chicago fell significantly in each decade of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, only to cycle back up in the 1990s, back down in the 2000s, and slightly back up again in the 2010s. During the 1990-2019 study period of this research many Chicago suburbs increased dramatically in population. Within the central city of Chicago some neighborhoods grew but many others declined. Yet population decline in metropolitan Chicago did not necessarily infer a decline in per capita income. This research examines neighborhood change in Chicago as measured by per capita income within Chicago’s neighborhoods and suburbs by analyzing the spatially varying effects of traditional demographic indicators, including race, ethnicity, education, and the foreign-born population.

Much of the remarkable growth around Chicago’s downtown has been driven by new construction rather than the in-migration/displacement process customarily associated with neighborhood change. Gentrification is understood to be a type of neighborhood change whereby higher-income and higher educated residents move into historically marginalized neighborhoods and in so doing replace former residents who are forced out for financial reasons. In addition to gentrification, the Chicago area has experienced large-scale change across its neighborhoods and suburbs during the past 30 years. Within the central city itself, the Voorhees Center (2014) identified large pockets of neighborhood ascent but its report was perhaps most notable for finding that “decline is more prevalent in the City of Chicago as a whole” (Voorhees Center, 2014).

The issues caused by Chicago’s neighborhood ascent and decline, as well as population loss, are multidimensional and these problems have affected the city’s minority population particularly hard. Gentrification has displaced many Hispanics and African-American from previously affordable neighborhoods, while severe population loss has forced the closure of many schools and has led to the reduction of other city services. The duality of these problems has led to accusations that policies instituted by the city serve as a “selective containment” of poor minorities, particularly inside the predominantly black communities of the South and West Side neighborhoods (Garcia, 2018). In addition, Chicago’s demolition of most public housing surrounding downtown has led to significant white population growth nearby (McDonald, 2017). As for Chicago’s suburbs, several observations are worth noting. First, like their central city counterpart, Chicago’s inner-ring suburbs continue to decline in both per capita income and population, thus producing similar problems. Second, “Chicago has a much larger Hispanic population than is typical for major northern metro areas in the USA” and many live in the poorer inner ring suburbs (McDonald, 2017).

In addition to empirically mapping neighborhood change in metro Chicago, this research partially extends upon the work of Farley et al. (1978) and Hwang and Sampson (2014) who describe how white residents prefer not to move into areas with a threshold level of minorities. This research contributes to the field of neighborhood change studies by investigating neighborhood change within the context of an entire metropolitan area, rather than a central city. The foundational underpinning for choosing the entire metropolitan area is provided by Davidson & Lees (2005) who note that neighborhood change happens not only in the central cities but in the suburbs as well.