Wed 13 May 2015

Filed under chicago

Continuing my quixotic tilt against policies which treat the "hot" areas in Chicago as if they're great examples of complete neighborhoods, I made more charts.

Earlier, I looked citywide at which neighborhoods are most atypical in terms of having a huge mass of young adults. Let's drill down a bit on a few of them.

graph of Lake View and Lincoln Park

Here's Lake View and Lincoln Park. You probably don't need me to point out that what was once a gently-rolling landscape of ages is now a desert with a single mountain.

graph of Logan Square and West
!Town

And here's Logan Square and West Town. Again, we see a similar pattern of change. These neighborhoods are more and more places where only young, childless adults want to live. Yes, they're "vibrant", yes, they're "desirable", but it is a limited sort of vibrancy, and a very narrow slice of the population that finds them desirable. And, look more closely at Logan Square: it's still "gentrifying", but is that gentrification really understood best as a change in the wealth of the population, or a transformation of the neighborhood age mix?

graph of Logan Square with notes

Note also that what makes these big peaks possible is a lot of transience. Transience relies on many factors outside of the neighborhood - places for people to come from, places for them to go, reasons for them to leave where they were, etc. If these factors change, what happens?

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Fri 08 May 2015

Filed under chicago

You may have read a recent interview in the Chicago Reader with Rich Bowen about the book he wrote in 1983 with Dick Fay: "Hot Dog Chicago: A Native's Dining Guide". I dunno, I didn't read the article until I started writing this post. I have an ex-library copy of …

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Sat 25 April 2015

Filed under chicago

graph of chicago hoods

Here's a cartogram of the change in the population of young adults, age 20-29, from 1950 to 2010, by community area. From 1950 to 2010, Chicago's population decreased by around 1 million people, but look: in some neighborhoods, the number of young adults actually increased, in some areas significantly!

This …

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Sat 04 April 2015

Filed under chicago

graph of chicago hoods

Children age 0-3 per child age 4-7, by community area. Boxes scaled by number of kids age 0-3. A score around 1.0 would indicate that infants stay and become school-age children, a score above that means there's a net outflow as babies age. Basically, this shows the neighborhoods where …

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