North versus South

Up until a few weeks ago, my experiences in the city of Chicago were almost solely confined to Hyde Park, Midway Airport, and the bus ride between them. True, I had ventured downtown several times, I had been to Chinatown, Pilsen, and this random Polish enclave on the northwest side once each, but my knowledge of this city was realistically very limited. Nevertheless, my impression of Chicago was necessarily constructed from these few data. It seemed like a very working-class city with mediocre food and an average selection of activities outside of museums and cultural experiences in interesting ethnic enclaves. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There are fewer distractions in this sort of environment. But I didn't find it to be an especially exciting urban environment either.

Unsurprisingly, this impression of Chicago is very incorrect. I had the excellent experience of visiting the city with my mother for a few days before I returned to school this year. We stayed in a prime location off Michigan Avenue. While the Disneyland-like inanity of Michigan Avenue and it's capitalistic mania became irritating after about five minutes, the areas just north are wonderful. Venturing just north into Lincoln Park, Belmont, and Wicker Park, for example, revealed neighborhoods so radically different from those on the south side that I could hardly believe I was in the city where I had lived for the past year. Unlike the hodgepodge collection of Currency Exchanges, sketchy trinket shops, and Harold's Chicken Shacks that constitute the south-side economic engine, there was a wonderful array of good restaurants (even cheap ones!), coffee shops, bookstores, theatres, etc. I should not complain to much about Hyde Park, for it is certainly a cut above the rest of the south side, but it suffers from having mediocre food that is slightly overpriced, and a lack of certain necessities (e.g. a decent grocery story: the Co-Op does not count).

Moreover, the urban climate of the parts of the north side I visited was radically different from the south side. The density of people on the street and urban development is far higher. The development and infrastructure showed signs of having been permanently maintained. We walked through Lincoln Park, which was lovely. It has a wonderfully-maintained and free public zoo, a conservatory, and many other features. Though gentrification has rapidly occurred in parts of the south side, the detritus of decades of ghettoization and disinvestment still remain.

The natural question to ask is why this enormous discrepancy exists between the two halves of the city. In its infrastructure and layout, Chicago is an extraordinarily monocentric city, implying that it should have some sort of radial symmetry in its development (Paul Krugman wrote that it was the most monocentric city in the US). The answer is, of course, obvious. The prolific industry and the stockyards south of downtown drew poor black workers to the area during the great migration, and various racist policies led to ghettos, etc., etc. It is all very well-documented.

But the interesting thing is: there are no more factories, the stockyards are gone, and the projects--which once supplied the area with a steady source of violent crime--have largely been demolished. Without these depressing forces, the south side is not so different from the north side. Proximity to downtown and the lake is the same. Access to public transportation is the same. In other words, many of the determinants of property values and population density are the same in the north and south. While the neighborhood amenities (e.g. schools, businesses, etc.) in the south are still significantly inferior to the north, these factors are largely determined by the wealth of the area's inhabitants. Thus, there exists a positive feedback effect on property value a neighborhood's "niceness" as its wealth increases. So, now that the depressing forces have diminished, perhaps the inner south side will not remain so different from the north side for long. True, there may end up being more distractions, but as long as the U of C doesn't become like it's cousin to the north, it might improve the collective welfare of the school and all of the south side.