The Economist surveys Chicago

This week’s Economist has its first survey of Chicago since 1980. As John Grimond writes, there have been a few changes during those years:

Appearances often deceive, but, in one respect at least, the visitor’s first impression of Chicago is likely to be correct: this is a city buzzing with life, humming with prosperity, sparkling with new buildings, new sculptures, new parks, and generally exuding vitality. The Loop, the central area defined by a ring of overhead railway tracks, has not gone the way of so many other big cities’ business districts?soulless by day and deserted at night. It bustles with shoppers as well as office workers. Students live there. So, increasingly, do gays, young couples and older ones whose children have grown up and fled the nest. Farther north, and south, old warehouses and factories have become home to artists, professionals and trendy young families. Not far to the east locals and tourists alike throng Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, a stretch of shops as swanky as any to be found on Fifth Avenue in New York or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Chicago is undoubtedly back. Back, that is, from what many feared would be the scrapheap. In 1980, when The Economist last published a survey of Chicago, it found a city whose ?fa?ade of downtown prosperity? masked a creaking political machine, the erosion of its economic base and some of the most serious racial problems in America. There followed an intensely painful decade of industrial decline and political instability during which jobs, people and companies all left Chicago while politicians bickered and racial antagonisms flared or festered. Other cities with similar manufacturing economies, similar white flight and similar problems of race and class looked on in dismay. If Chicago, the capital of the Midwest, the city of big shoulders, the city that works, that toddlin’ town (few places have generated so much braggadocio), were to descend into rust-bound decay, what chance was there for Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St Louis, Detroit and a score of smaller places? Chicago’s revival should not be judged merely by the manifest sparkle of the Loop and such districts as River North, the Gold Coast and Streeterville. A more telling indicator is the growth of population recorded in the most recent (2000) census: an increase of 4.0% for the city since 1990 (compared with 3.9% for Minneapolis, and losses of 5.4% for Cleveland, 7.5% for Detroit and 9.6% for Pittsburgh). Other signs of economic vigour include the arrival of Boeing, which moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, the growth of the futures and derivatives markets embodied in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Board of Trade, and the decision to expand O’Hare to ensure it keeps its place as the busiest (depending on the measurement) airport in the country…. So Chicago seems to have weathered its period of deindustrialisation and emerged looking pretty robust. Other cities still groping for life after manufacturing death and trying to restore hope to their citizens and to the benighted neighbourhoods in which they live would do well to see what they can learn from Chicago’s experience. This survey will try to do the work for them. It will examine an American success story. Is it as good as it seems? How much of it depends on Chicago’s peculiar circumstances? How much could be repeated elsewhere

The survey suggests four reasons for Chicago’s rebirth:

1) Geographical advantages unique to Chicago (Lake Michigan, being the largest city in the Midwest); 2) Immigration:

Though Latinos are individually poorer than other Chicagoans, their collective household income of $20 billion a year makes up nearly 10% of the six-county area’s total. The sales-tax revenues generated in the shops of Little Village’s 26th Street are, it is said, greater than those of any other retail corridor in Chicago but Magnificent Mile. Latinos are also a driving force in the region’s property market. Since 1990, the growth in the number of Latino workers has just about matched the growth in jobs in the region. And the numerical match has paralleled a geographical one: many Latinos go straight to the jobs, which are mostly in the suburbs, bypassing the inner city altogether. Thus one person in five in the six-county area is now a Latino, making a living, likely as not, as a gardener, labourer, office cleaner or waiter. In the 1990s, the Latino population doubled in each of the five suburban counties around Chicago.

3) Civic-minded businessmen:

Too much can be made of planning in Chicago: in many ways the city is a monument to the creativity of chaos. But the influence of business is hard to exaggerate. The people who run the place could, and sometimes do, fit into one room. Some are politicians; some are academics; some are heads of museums or hospitals or outfits like the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations or the MacArthur Foundation. But most are in business. Indeed, if you are the boss of a big business anywhere in the Chicago area, you are expected to take an active part in the civic life of the city. Accordingly, the same names appear over and over again on the boards of universities, hospitals, museums, orchestras, opera companies and local charities. More to the point, business is almost always an active participant in any public endeavour, from school reform to the creation of Millennium Park, the brand new $475m park-cum-auditorium-cum-ice-rink-cum-fountain-cum-you-name-it just north of the Art Institute.

4) Richard Daley’s focus on public housing, schools, and greenery.

Go check it out. Grimond makes way too much of Chicago’s success at landing corporate eadquarters’ like Boeing — and I was surprised he never mentioned Ed Glaeser’s work on the economics of Northern cities. Still, it’s interesting reading.