Crime in most of Chicagoland is somewhat higher than in recent previous years, and lower than it was when I moved back here in 2005.
That's certainly the case for McDonalds Corporate, which has its headquarters in the heavily-patrolled, maximally gentrified West Loop. Nobody who works in McDonalds HQ is worried about crime near their building.
Where crime in Chicago is a real problem is in the south and west sides of the city, where white people don't live. Those areas are playing out a slow motion mechanistic tragedy set in motion a century ago when they were redlined, sliced in half by the Dan Ryan, evacuated by white people, and disinvested. A map of Chicago violent crime is, roughly, a map of redlining.
The city can make no excuses for this. It's an ongoing human tragedy running at a scale that is hard to get your head around. At the same time, it's hard to take the CEO of McDonalds seriously, because the crime problem in Chicago is mostly segregated away from him and people like him (and me).
Can't take the CEO seriously because he isn't directly affected? That makes no sense. If course the CEo is mostly worried about his employees and customers. Didn't seem like he his to worried about himself. But that's ok, ignore him because he is safe?
And that fact that things started agree ago is a bit of a red herring. Because apparently (according to you) things were getting better, but lately they've gotten worse. So why have they gotten worse, recently? And what do we do to fix it?
> Can't take the CEO seriously because he isn't directly affected? That makes no sense.
Can’t take him sincerely. He states his motivation in the article but it’s easily buried in insincere fluff and more than enough victim blaming. It’s clear he wants corporate employees back in the office, and wants to frame crime as the reason for that not meeting his preferred expectations. But crime, which he speaks of the same as overdosing and homelessness “issues” are what he’s addressing, rather than actual reasons people don’t want to work in his corporate offices. And more importantly to me, rather than addressing the real suffering homeless people and addicts are experiencing and real solutions to help them.
> And more importantly to me, rather than addressing the real suffering homeless people and addicts are experiencing and real solutions to help them.
But why are you addressing your problems with what he’s addressing instead of addressing the real suffering homeless people and addicts are experiencing and real solutions to help them? /S
Though to be real, yes, he’s addressing the problems he’s experiencing and that’s perfectly fine, we all should. If you hold people to the standard that no one can sound the alarm unless they have found solutions to the root causes then the only thing that would happen would be that there would be silence around the issue.
As he mentioned first, McDonald's has 400 locations in Chicago, which I'm sure see much more crime than the HQ. For the HQ workers it's probably not only their workplace and home they would like to be safe but also the nightlife and tourist locations.
What do you want to hear? Have you ever been to the CBOT building at 11PM? I have, within the last couple weeks. The south Loop is and always has been a ghost town after business hours. There aren't restaurants there, just office buildings. The CBOT building in particular --- I had an office a block from there in the Monadnock building for around 10 years, and even in 2007 I'd have been nervous there super late at night.
It's a big city. People get mugged here. I'm not claiming otherwise.
But when people talk about out-of-control Chicago crime, they're talking about the shootings, 100%. This isn't San Francisco. There isn't a narrative about crime here where like, nobody can operate a Walgreens here because of organized shoplifting rings (I'm sure they exist!), or out-of-control homeless tent encampments and street drug use. The narrative here is gangs randomly and prolifically shooting people in gang squabbles.
And that narrative plays out in Lawndale, Austin, Garfield Park, Englewood, Grand Crossing, and Chatham, not Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Logan Square, and Bucktown.
Hah. You got me. You're right, Lakeview is a blighted hellscape, and not a rich white neighborhood where the median home price is over $500k in a city with absolutely no housing scarcity whatsoever. Remind me to wear a bulletproof vest next time I go to Delilahs.
You got me again; you're right, it's not a "white neighborhood". It's just a "not Black" neighborhood.
You get that I've, like, been to Lakeview a bunch, right? Like, I used to live there? My favorite bar in the world is there? I never know, when I'm talking to people on HN, if Chicago is an abstraction to them and they're just trying to pull facts out of Google or whatever.
Everywhere in the US maybe. I couldn't imagine normalizing this sort of behavior. Peace is definitely a huge blessing that many people take for granted.
Mostly... there are plenty of people getting robbed in the loop and Lincoln Park. I had an associate get carjacked and cops refused to follow the stolen car to avoid a chase.
I don't believe your friend†. I work downtown, as does my wife and son. I've been mugged (not carjacked, just mugged --- and not in the Loop!) and had the police catch the assailants within minutes. If I got carjacked, I have a very high degree of confidence in the police response I'd get. But if I was a Black teenager shot in Lawndale, I would have zero confidence.
† Except to the extent that the police won't give chase in Chicago, just like pretty much every other major city, since police chases were killing innocent bystanders on the regular before they were essentially banned everywhere.
I'm sorry I'm trying to follow your argument here. Are you saying that because you have never been carjacked or mugged in the loop that it has never happened to anyone else? Or that because you had one rapid response by the police that all police responses are rapid?
I grew up in Chicago, many of my family and friends still live there. I would categorize your experience as both atypical and extremely privileged. You should hesitate before extrapolating.
I do not believe that someone got carjacked in the city of Chicago and CPD blew them off. That's all I'm saying. Do people get carjacked here? Absolutely, 100%.
I don't think I've ever heard someone proclaim such trust in the CPD.
The original comment just says the cops refused to chase... which you yourself acknowledge as likely in a child comment. If you believe that carjackings happen and that the police are unlikely to chase, I'm not sure what else there is to deny.
That is, other than the implicit challenge to the idea of an extremely safe gentrified Chicago. Violent crime doesn't only happen in Englewood. There's a pretty wide range of neighborhoods between Garfield Park and Edgebrook.
That's great, but it makes even less sense to accuse someone of lying about their experiences if it is something that should be reasonably expected. What a strange reaction.
"For all three crimes the department says it groups together as carjacking arrests, that’s a clearance rate of just 3.1% for incidents that have occurred so far this year."
The cars generally get recovered (they're used to commit further crimes, not so much chop-shopped), but the M.O. of a carjacker is to hand the car off quickly to an accomplice who didn't participate in the robbery, and from that person to someone else, which makes arresting the person who committed the actual armed robbery hard. I'm certainly not trying to tell you that Chicago reliably arrests carjackers.
You said you didn't believe OP's friend about being carjacked and the police not giving chase in a certain area. The clearance rate of carjackings and that chase rate are quite low. All that need to exist is a non-zero carjacking rate in that rate for what OP said to be true.
San Francisco also has a policy against car chases. I don't know how recent it is, but it's definitely a thing, now, presumably mostly among liberal coastal cities. (But maybe even broader to some extent?)
TL;DR: Pursuits are only authorized, if at all, in the case of violent felonies or when there's immediate risk to public safety. See section IV.
Moreover, even if a pursuit is authorized, the rules stipulate that they have to break off the chase if there's a risk to public safety. (This is also stated in the above order.) And as compared to years prior and oh-so-many-famous car chases in California, tolerance for the risks in car chases has plummeted. (If we're being cynical, mostly out of concern for the criminal, not the public; or at least concern regarding the ire of criminal rights advocates whenever a chase results in the death or injury of the suspect.) For example,
> Officers responded to a call Sunday evening of a Tenderloin robbery and auto theft, but were forced to end their pursuit when the suspects began driving the stolen vehicle in an erratic and dangerous manner.
You will find similar rules in virtually every major urban police department in the country. Police chases are empirically a terrible idea: they kill innocent people, routinely.
Sure, a Hollywood-style car chase is incredibly dangerous, and I never understood why they were tolerated as much as they were. (I mean, other than the obvious explanation that our culture of policing taught that effective policing required an indiscriminate and overwhelming show force and authority.) But some municipalities draw different lines such that once a suspect gets into a car, that's often the end of any pursuit, whether the suspect was even aware of being pursued.
People complain about, e.g., "chilling effects" on legitimate free speech rights stemming from policies designed to restrain unprotected speech. Well, all manner of policies can have "chilling effects", sweeping more broadly in practice than they were intended. Such effects are modulated by various norms. In San Francisco a growing chorus of people (across the political and social spectrum) are complaining about cops failing in an unprecedented manner to investigate, detain, arrest, or otherwise enforce laws as dictated by formal policies (i.e. excluding cases where city policy clearly required abstention), and to the extent it's true (some of it is demonstrably true), part of that is because the political culture in SF causes police to be excessively risk-averse regarding modern reform policies. If you follow seemingly inconspicuously, or your pursuit nominally meets policy but things go sideways, that's your job on the line, and cops enjoy much less deference administratively than in other cities--certainly the DA, but even the Mayor and Police Chief in SF are less tolerant of cops who create controversy, whether or not negligent.) The situation in Chicago might be similar to some extent, especially as of the past couple years.
The new equilibrium might still be preferable, or if not there may be ways to reach a better equilibrium without revisiting sins of the past, but this sub-thread began from you saying that you didn't believe a poster who claimed a police officer deliberately abstained from pursuing a suspect getting away by car. You apparently believed such events are so rare as to be fictitious. But they absolutely do occur, with increasing frequency, and in no small degree driven by changes in formal policy. Maybe the poster is being misleading, but on its face nothing about it seems implausible; quite the contrary.
I don't know what all of this is intended to communicate, but you can just Google <city> "motor vehicle pursuit policy" and compare Chicago to whatever major city you think handles this better.
I thought he was mostly saying the stores themselves are unsafe for workers and customers, and the perception of Chicago being dangerous makes people not want to work at corporate. Plus the never-ending tax increases and general denigration of private business from the Mayor (although common in many major cities) which pushed out many other corporate headquarters for Miami and Austin.
> “We have violent crime that’s happening in our restaurants … we’re seeing homelessness issues in our restaurants. We’re having drug overdoses that are happening in our restaurants,” he said. “So we see in our restaurants, every single day, what’s happening in society at large.”
> “It’s more difficult today for me to convince a promising McDonald’s executive to relocate to Chicago from one of our other offices than it was just a few years ago,” he said. “It’s more difficult for me to recruit a new employee to McDonald’s, to join us in Chicago than it was in the past.”
> And when it comes to returning to the office, he said, “one of the things that I hear from our employees [is] … ‘I’m not sure it’s safe to come downtown.’”
> Kempczinski pointed to several high-profile corporate departures from the city, including Boeing, Caterpilllar and Citadel, which all recently announced plans to relocate their headquarters. He said that mayors and governors from other cities and states have reached out to McDonald’s to consider doing the same.
If misperceptions of Chicago are making it harder for McDonalds to recruit, he's not helping the situation by amplifying them.
Certainly, violent crime is happening in McDonalds restaurants. There are McDonalds all over the place in the south and west sides of Chicago. I'm sure homelessness is a problem in all their restaurants. Note that he brought that up, because it's a tell: Chicago's crime problem has zero to do with homelessness (that might not be the case in other cities, but it isn't here.)
If you don't have an actual solution for the impacts of redlining in Chicago, you don't have a crime solution. Chicago has tried everything short of that. It's broken up the major gangs; we got a nightmare of tiny little idiot gangs. It's flooded the zone in Englewood and Austin; you can suppress crime for a time, but it just squeezes into other neighborhoods.
It's worse than he makes it seem in Lawndale, where nobody who works at McDonalds HQ lives, and it's much, much better than he makes it seem in the West Loop, where McDonalds HQ is.
> It's worse than he makes it seem in Lawndale, where nobody who works at McDonalds HQ lives,
What does HQ have to do with his comments that the restaurants are dangerous?
> empczinski said that McDonald's (MCD) restaurants in the city are suffering,
> "We have violent crime that's happening in our restaurants ... we're seeing homelessness issues in our restaurants. We're having drug overdoses that are happening in our restaurants," he said. "So we see in our restaurants, every single day, what's happening in society at large."
Sounds like he's addressing more than HQ in his assertions.
This reads more like a list of America’s social problems than something specific to Chicago. It’s ironic that a big corporation complains about it, reminds me of tech companies criticising SF govt about the consequences of inequality in SF.
> Where crime in Chicago is a real problem is in the south and west sides of the city, where white people don't live. Those areas are playing out a slow motion mechanistic tragedy set in motion a century ago when they were redlined, sliced in half by the Dan Ryan, evacuated by white people, and disinvested. A map of Chicago violent crime is, roughly, a map of redlining.
Let's grant these are the sole and entire reasons for crime. This historical analysis is entirely and fully correct.
What does it imply, going forward? What is the solution?
It strongly implies that being tougher on crime --- and I'm no defunder --- isn't the solution, most especially because that's been repeatedly tried and there's a plausible argument that it made things worse.
As an outsider, I suspect the lack of meaningful accountability for police allows them to be both excessively violent and not actually any good at preventing crime. It's a notoriously corrupt city: https://news.wttw.com/2022/05/11/three-peat-chicago-ranks-no... . Of course, the McDonald's CEO isn't going to call out this kind of crime, even though it's arguably responsible for allowing the other kind of crime.
I don't think I can offer any solutions other than the long grinding work of local politics. There are solutions available (e.g. Glasgow's long notorious gang problem was addressed by the Violence Reduction Unit, which offers a successful strategy), but probably not the will to use them. Like Russia, you can't win a war if the first priority of too many administrators is stealing from the system.
I think this maybe an example of an increasingly common scenario in life. We like to envision for any given problem that there are good solutions, and that there are bad solutions. And so if one solution is provably bad, then surely an alternative must be better. But in reality, there are often just bad solutions and worse solutions. The point I make with this is that attacking the failings of one solution doesn't really say anything about the alternative.
It's often interesting how much wisdom there is tucked away in simple, old, folky sayings that one only appreciates much later. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire."
Policing is only one part of the equation and I doubt that violent gangs can be broken up without resorting to tough measures. The trick is that this needs to be combined with social policies to disincentivize repeat offenders and to prevent youths from starting at all by having ample economic opportunities.And there are other measures like decriminalizing drugs which can reduce the economic profit of crime.
I worry that this is simply cover for people who don't want to pay for policing and incarceration any more. Essentially abandoning the many innocent victims of crime in those troubled areas.
Again: I'm no defunder. But we tried intensive policing and incarceration (and: if you catch someone with an illegal firearm, put them in prison!) and it didn't work. CPD broke the major gangs in the 80s and 90s, and now we've got dozens and dozens of tiny new gangs.
I feel like didn't work is a poor argument because you could just counter that it wasn't enough. Presumably at some limit of policing, crime would be largely eliminated (at potentially tremendous cost) but it seems unlikely to me that it wouldn't work.
It would seem that such a hypothetical level of policing is taking place inside actual prisons, and yet violence and contraband run rampant. If it isn't possible to eliminate crime amongst already incarcerated people, what suggests that an arbitrarily high level of policing would eliminate crime amongst the wider populous? Especially when such levels of policing would almost certainly approach something akin to imprisonment?
The US is already MASSIVELY winning the "percentage of your population in prison" contest. Then you look at the recidivism rates and realise why it doesn't work.
Tough on crime -> more people in prison -> criminals are treated like dogs -> significantly more likely to reoffend upon release, and thus we have a cycle.
It's still a necessary component, even if it's not sufficient. People are way too eager to be soft on crime without offering anything in the way of an actual solution. To me, it sounds like cover for less than altruistic motivations.
It’s stronger than that: you can’t say it didn’t work at all. Using the same rigor you can say they didn’t do enough! Unless you have extremely broad meta studies, and you don’t, saying it didn’t work is just personal skew.
The intensity of policing in Chicago has varied and hasn't solved the west and south side crime problems. I honestly don't care if Chicago decides to intensify policing. I'm not, like, morally opposed. I just think it's whistling past the graveyard if you can't fix the underlying economic problems. They're getting worse, not better, as all the families with economic mobility in the redlined neighborhoods flee to the south suburbs.
I agree it needs more than just police, but I suspect it needs a ton of law and order too.
Fwiw I’ve talked to some very in the know locals, one who owned a ton of liquor stores all around those parts, and the common knowledge is that the police basically don’t have any control and won’t engage on just about anything. It’s essentially run by gangs at this point.
I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I got CPD to track down a mugger whole my phone; they were arrested less than 15 minutes after I got mugged. The arrest happened at J&J Fish in Austin. The police clearly had control there.
At the same time, there are drug corners all over the west side; there's a gas station in Humboldt Park on my commute that is occasionally an open-air drug market, with dealers literally out in the street doing traffic control. I'm sure that's shocking and upsetting to very in-the-know west siders who own liquor stores. Will CPD really engage over small groups of people selling heroin on a corner? No, I doubt it: I see the same groups day after day on my drive into the office.
Those parts of the city are not safe to be in. It's not OK that there are parts of the city that are not safe to be in. I'm not making excuses. But that absolutely does not describe the area around the McDonalds HQ, or, for that matter, almost anywhere in Chicago that middle/upper-middle class white people live.
That sounds like an extremely exceptional success story out of CPD.
I was mugged about ten 8 years ago on a Friday night by three people after they cornered me and threatened to shoot me if I did anything stupid. After they stole my stuff, I went into the nearest Cheesies and called the cops. The group that mugged me told me they'd shoot me if I called them, but meh. They took took a police report, and that was that.
Even though they knew my phone was stolen, they didn't do anything like what they did for you, nor even attempt to. I ended up keeping the phone activated for about 48 hours so I could figure out who had my phone with the hopes that I could my stolen stuff back. The person who stole the phone called a lot of people in that time: their parole officer, an HIV specialist, family. Tried to pass that info onto the police and they wouldn't take it. Parole officer refused to even listen.
So I submitted some FOIAs for the camera footage of the area -- it was right off the red line at Sheffield and Belmont: no footage they said. When I called the investigator who told me that the investigation was suspended and they weren't looking into it anymore (not shocking). But I still persisted on the call to try to get some semblance of traction to get my stuff back and asked why there was no POD footage -- investigator said it moves randomly and didn't catch me getting mugged. Not sure I buy that, but whatever.
To get me off the call, the investigator asked if I had anything to drink the night I was mugged. I said I had a beer about four hours earlier. He used that as a means to say that anything I said about that night was unreliable and then ended the call.
All stats thus far show that countries generally deemed to be 'soft' on crime have lower crime rates, significantly lower portions of their population in prison, and have significantly reduced recidivism rates.
Not true in the least. In Asia the pattern is clear: tough on crime has lower crime (Japan, Singapore, Korea), but of course there's so many confounding things there.
Central and South America and Africa are notorious for having weak policing and high crime.
Meanwhile those famous Nordic and European countries that some like to think prove the softer on crime hypothesis happen to be completely homogenous, low population and high wealth areas. And of those same places that do have bigger cities with less wealth and homogeneity, there's big problems with crime.
Even within the US tougher on crime correlates with less crime once you control for a few things.
I'm on the side of less is more, too. Poverty alleviation is, while not a universally solved problem, is well enough understood that we know what does not work. Harsh, punitive measures such as long prison sentences without corresponding in-prison safety, nor sincere rehabilitation and redemption programs, are guaranteed to maintain cycles of poverty and resentment across generations.
I do think school voucher programs is a promising direction, but like anything that becomes a pawn in the culture war, it becomes difficult to discuss it without FUD.
Those are areas that have not only deindustrialized, but have been losing population steadily for the last 60 years or so.
Deindustrialized - the South Side has never really recovered from the Stockyards and the US Steel South Works closing. Even the hospitals are closing or are closed already.
Hard to think of a solution except to subsidize economic activity in such neighborhoods.
The Obama Presidential Library may have such an effect for Woodlawn, though it's worth noting that it is sited so that it can be reached by car without actually traveling through Woodlawn.
If you live in Englewood and get on your feet financially, you're planning to move to Olympia Fields, not to build a life in Englewood. It's a huge problem. The deck is stacked entirely against these neighborhoods.
People didn't run away from violence. They ran away from any neighborhood where Black people were allowed to buy houses. Black people were locked into specific neighborhoods, and were generally not allowed to own their homes and instead locked into rapacious "contracts" for their houses. All commercial investment in the neighborhoods vanished. Generations of families grew up without opportunity or economic mobility, and crime came along with that.
I could very well be wrong, but I don't think this is quite accurate:
> Black people were locked into specific neighborhoods, and were generally not allowed to own their homes and instead locked into rapacious "contracts" for their houses
Redlining meant certain areas were deemed hazardous to investment. Maybe the "deeming" was accurate; maybe it wasn't. It certainly made loans more difficult for anyone in a redlined area (of any race).
But it didn't mean Black people weren't allowed to own homes. Many millions did and do.
My parents moved to the United States nearly penniless from India. I am very privileged thanks to them; they were not privileged, especially not when they first arrived. All of the arguments about generational wealth are compelling at first exposure, but they ignore the control group: Poor as dirt, strange-smelling, English-deprived immigrants like my parents.
I don't think it's healthy to blame white people for depriving an area of themselves. Proximity to white people isn't a human right.
Am I not saying this clearly enough? I'm talking about the 1930s-1950s. If a Black family moved onto your all-white block, everyone would move. It had nothing to do with violence. I can and do blame explicitly racist actions for the economic havoc and concomitant violence they created.
I'm sort of dumbfounded that your comments are even controversial... this exact same thing played out in dozens of cities in the 30s-50s. In the upper midwest Minneapolis, St Paul, and Milwaukee all had/have exactly the same issues for the same reasons.
U of M has a whole website mapping racial covenants[0] here in the Twin Cities, and the Wikipedia article about redlining[1] is pretty thorough, discussing exactly what you're bringing up.
Do people just not actually believe how racist everything used to be? And how decades of disinvestment leading to violence just might possibly lead to generational issues?
You can skim the Wikipedia article I linked if you're actually interested in the (heavily researched) consequences of redlining, many of which happened up into the 2000s and all of which urbanists are still trying to mitigate today.
My reaction is literally one of confusion, not "performative hedging". The charitable read of most of the comments here is a profound lack of historical knowledge ("these areas were classified as hazardous, and the violence there is why white people left"), and an uncharitable one is thinly veiled racism ("minorities by definition are violent").
I'm not making a general "poverty equals violence" argument. I'm saying that you can look at a redlining map and a Chicago crime map and see the pattern plain as day.
The movement of white people out of neighbourhoods with black people, and the use of redlining to concentrate a marginalized group within those neighbourhoods led to a disinvestment of both private and public capital in those neighbourhoods, creating and later perpetuating the cycle of poverty that leads people to turn to crime to survive. It does make sense for people with the means to leave a neighbourhood (from a personal safety standpoint) when it starts to have an increased crime problem but that is not what is being described here. Instead, the people left due to the racism that was prevalent in the mid-20th century, well before the rise in crime that resulted from their leaving.
85% of the people in the redlined neighborhoods were white. That was around of half of all urban households. Why didn't redlining lead to the same cycle of poverty and violence for white people?
The majority of people who currently live in the redlined neighborhoods are white. Why didn't redlining lead to the same cycle of poverty and violence for those white people?
What the hell are you talking about? The neighborhoods we're talking about are overwhelmingly Black. You can't have set foot on the south or west sides of Chicago and not know that.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Wicker Park was redlined. Then it was gentrified. Everything on the North Side has been gentrified. You know what wasn't gentrified? West Garfield Park. Miss me with whatever weird next comment you've got locked and loaded about "well why wasn't Garfield Park gentrified".
The redlined neighborhoods on the north side also weren't black (Lincoln Park was Puerto Rican). People have written books about how the gentrification of the north side happened; you can consult them.
The north side was completely white when the redlining maps were made. That was late 1930's, the black population of Chicago even by 1940 was only 8%, almost exclusively on the south side east of State Street. The west side was also almost exclusively white then too, there were a couple of black neighborhoods (not West Garfield Park at that time).
In the 1930's there weren't many Puerto Ricans in Chicago, the ones that were there lived on the south side. They didn't start coming in numbers until the late 1940's, they moved into Lincoln Park in the 1960's.
So, Wicker Park was white when it was redlined, Lincoln Park was white when it was redlined, West Garfield Park was white when it was redlined.
The "white flight" mostly happened with the riots in the 60's. At least in the mid-West.
I think it's fair to say that race caused the riots, but to say that racism caused people to move is just silly. I don't care if black or white people are setting fire in my neighborhood, if I can move somewhere safer, I will.
That’s not the timeline in Chicago. Racial covenants were deemed unconstitutional in the early 40s. White flight occurred in the 50s. By the time of the riots the neighborhoods that suffered from riots (and landlords burning their property for insurance fraud) were already majority black.
I think the problem is that when white people leave a neighborhood, they bring with them their political influence to allocate city funds to that neighborhood. Funds for things like... adequate policing. Huh.
> I think the problem is that when white people leave a neighborhood, they bring with them their political influence to allocate city funds to that neighborhood. Funds for things like... adequate policing. Huh.
I don't think that makes sense in context of GPs argument, as GP also argues that "more policing" did not help alleviate the violence problem.
The assertions "police were defunded, therefor the area got more violent" and "policing was escalated, and still the area got more violent" cannot both be true at the same time.
Refusing to fund more policing in response to rising crime is effectively the same as pulling out funding. Either way it's "not his problem", he's quite adamant that crime in Chicago doesn't effect his own family, and he opposes more funding to police in neighborhoods his family wouldn't be so safe in.
I agree with this. People are and will be the the way they are, we can't exactly fix that as a whole. What we can make better for sure, is the system. And so, systemic issues should be fixed on the system's level.
My wife and I have visited Chicago from Ohio about five times over the last ten or fifteen years. We’ve brought in the new year on the Navy Pier a few of those years. We really enjoyed our visits.
We’ve heard enough about the crime in Chicago over the last few years that we’ve agreed to stay away for a while.
I'm not sure why I feel the need to mention this, but without doing a deep dive on the statistics, we hit the tipping point to not return.
Probably the city just got boring to you. It's great for a couple visits, but after that you gotta decide to live here, or go see other places. I like Montreal, have you tried there?
Interesting you mention Dan Ryan as the highway that bears his name was placed where it is specifically to act as a racial barrier and to break up a burgeoning black political power base.
At the same time mega public housing projects were built for the same purpose going against the best practices then and now.
It’s not surprising that 2 of the biggest infrastructure projects in Chicago history that were used with the express purpose of isolating and disempowering specific neighborhoods should have the effect of doing just that.
For decades, Black families were explicitly forbidden to live in much of Chicago by means of covenants on real estate parcels; those families were concentrated in specific neighborhoods. At the same time, the Home Owners Loan Corporation drew maps grading areas from "desirable" to "hazardous" --- the "hazardous" neighborhoods were demarcated with a red line, hence the name. Lenders refused financial services to any family in the redlined neighborhood.
>> the Home Owners Loan Corporation drew maps grading areas from "desirable" to "hazardous" --- the "hazardous" neighborhoods were demarcated with a red line, hence the name. Lenders refused financial services to any family in the redlined neighborhood.
The HOLC did not use the redlined maps to deny loans. For one thing, they couldn't have, the HOLC was a temporary program intended to deal with the Great Depression and the maps weren't completed until the HOLC had made 90% of the loans it ever made. And second, it did make loans in the redlined areas, and it made a higher percentage of loans to black borrowers than other lenders.
The HOLC did share the maps with the explicitly racist FHA, but the FHA didn't use the maps to deny loans. It couldn't have, the FHA insured loans, it didn't make them. It also focused on financing new construction, the redlined areas were already built up. And when it did refuse to finance black borrowers, it appears to have used block by block census data, not the HOLC maps. Outside of the FHA, it doesn't appear that the HOLC shared their maps with private lenders.
If you're using the HOLC maps to measure the effect of something, you're measuring something other than the effect of lending decisions. If the HOLC map of Chicago is a map of Chicago violent crime that is correlation rather than causation. There must be other factors that explain the correlation.
Are you seriously attempting a first-principles argument that redlining didn't actually happen (or, "it happened, but it was just some lines on a map that didn't mean anything")? Because that's the only way I can find to read this comment.
Did the HOLC draw maps with red lines on them around neighborhoods where they thought mortgage loans were going to go bad? Yes.
Were those maps used to deny loans in the areas with red lines around them? Certainly not by the HOLC, and almost certainly not by the FHA or private lenders.
Was there racial discrimination by the HOLC? Maybe. Less than with other mortgage lenders of the day.
Was there racial discrimination by the FHA? Yes. Mostly block by block based on census data and New Deal projects that collected data. They did make their own maps, but that's hard to research since those maps were mostly destroyed in the 1960's. The ones that survive don't match the HOLC maps. There's some overlap.
Were there racial covenants? Until 1948, yes, that's not redlining though.
Do the maps made by the HOLC in the 1930's explain violent crime in Chicago in the 2020's? No. Not at all.
"Was there racial discrimination by the HOLC? Maybe."
Yeah. Ok. They literally cited the presence of racial covenants in neighborhoods as a reason to rate them more highly. There are HOLC maps that reference neighborhoods as "threatened by negro encroachment".
How do you expect anyone to take you seriously with this stuff?
Nah, I don't think I'm going to continue trying to re-establish whether redlining was racist or not with someone who just said they're not sure the Home Owners' Loan Corp was itself racist. I've, you know, been on message boards before; I know how this conversation ends: with some weird appeal to phrenology, most likely.
You can of course content yourself with your victory on this thread. It'll be valuable currency in your effort to convince the world that redlining was overblown, and likely of little long term impact on American cities.
So - your theory is that a loan practice which has been illegal since the late 1960's is responsible for the current high and growing crime in Chicago? What's the mechanism for that?
Do I think 50 years of overt, de jure housing segregation that locked Black families into neighborhoods where they were explicitly not allowed to get home loans had any long term impact on the communities of people that lived there? A little, yeah, yeah I guess I do. I don't think "the late 60s" is the mic drop you think it is; some of us were alive in the late 1960s.
Explain why so much of the rest of the world passed redlined communities.
Korea, Israel, Czech, Hungary, Poland, etc etc. The data strongly contradicts your implied thesis.
But you think people born in what is one of the wealthiest cities in the world shouldn't be compared to urban Indians or people (like my dad) born in a mud hut.
Correlation is not causation. And I wouldn't ask you to explain why equally poor zips don't have the same murder rate, since it's obvious you've never considered controlling the data that way.
That's certainly the case for McDonalds Corporate, which has its headquarters in the heavily-patrolled, maximally gentrified West Loop. Nobody who works in McDonalds HQ is worried about crime near their building.
Where crime in Chicago is a real problem is in the south and west sides of the city, where white people don't live. Those areas are playing out a slow motion mechanistic tragedy set in motion a century ago when they were redlined, sliced in half by the Dan Ryan, evacuated by white people, and disinvested. A map of Chicago violent crime is, roughly, a map of redlining.
The city can make no excuses for this. It's an ongoing human tragedy running at a scale that is hard to get your head around. At the same time, it's hard to take the CEO of McDonalds seriously, because the crime problem in Chicago is mostly segregated away from him and people like him (and me).