Hyde Park (Chicago, Highland, Oregon: real estate, crime rates, home)

[rw2006]

I heard Hyde Park is a nice area on the South Side that's home to the U of Chicago). Is it safe and worth living there?

[TeacherMan]

Well, I do not live there, nor will I soon BUT...I can tell you that if we could afford it...we WOULD move there in a heart beat!!! We are moving from MI to Chicago in about a month and (most likely) we will be settling in Bridgeport. Maybe some day we can afford Hyde Park..and we will MOVE if that happens...

We drove through and it is MAGNIFICENT!!!

Good luck...I've done a lot of research for our relocation and would be happy to share any information that could be of help!

Cheers,
-TM

[Manigault]

I live in Hyde Park. It is a safe, city neighborhood. It is also very interesting with a lot of family-type stuff to do. No night life at all; which is strange for a college town (UC is mainly grad students). A nice, relatively cheap place where one can live close to the lake. Since I've been there 30 years I guess I consider the neighborhood worth it.

[eljaykay]

Hi -
Just wanted to mention that yes, real estate is really high in h. park but also some former neighbors of mine did a lot of crime stat's research before moving from Oregon state to the southside. They found higher rates in H.Pk. than for neighborhoods further south [like south shore] - which is where they lived for 5 years. They're now in Woodlawn - and I'm way down by Chicago State...it's possible to find safe 'hoods down here.

Good luck,
El

[Drover]

Originally Posted by eljaykay

Hi -
Just wanted to mention that yes, real estate is really high in h. park but also some former neighbors of mine did a lot of crime stat's research before moving from Oregon state to the southside. They found higher rates in H.Pk. than for neighborhoods further south [like south shore] - which is where they lived for 5 years. They're now in Woodlawn - and I'm way down by Chicago State...it's possible to find safe 'hoods down here.

Good luck,
El

In what crime category did your friends find that South Shore has less crime than Hyde Park? I can't imagine it was in homicides, robberies or assaults. In the last year for which data is available at chicagocrime.org (June 6 2006 thru June 5 2007), there have been:

16 murders in South Shore (26 per 100,000) versus 0 in Hyde Park;

508 robberies in South Shore (825 per 100,000) versus 132 in Hyde Park (441 per 100,000);

625 non-domestic assaults in South Shore (1,015 per 100,000) versus 90 in Hyde Park (301 per 100,000);

34 non-domestic sex offenses in South Shore (55 per 100,000) versus 12 in Hyde Park (40 per 100,000).

It would have taken too damn long to compile respective burglary statistics, but I don't think it would be unreasonable to extrapolate from the above crime rates that Hyde Park probably has a lower rate of burglary as well.

So I'm curious: what metric did your friends use to determine that South Shore has less crime than Hyde Park? Were it based strictly on crime stats, I know which place I'd rather live.

[Chi2NYC?]

south shore is relatively safe for the south side. it's at the end of lakeshore drive, by the lake, with a very nice golf course, beach, and park district building. i expect it to only get safer and the prices to go up. if you're buying, i suspect it would be a better investment than hyde park.

[paytonc]

South Shore is a pretty broadly defined area, unlike Hyde Park, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were fewer petty/property crimes in some of the "smarter" areas there (like Jackson Park Highlands or Pill Hill). That said, I always maintained that crime in Hyde Park was far overblown when I was a student there -- I suffered one break-in, which was done by fellow students, and I knew exactly two other students (out of hundreds) who'd been robbed.

Hyde Park has beautiful housing, leafy streets, relatively good transit, a wide variety of shops, and several excellent schools. However, it's (relatively) expensive and yes, there's zero nightlife.

[Drover]

Originally Posted by paytonc

South Shore is a pretty broadly defined area, unlike Hyde Park...

It's actually a specifically defined area: 67th to the north, 79th to the south, the Metra Electric line to the northwest, South Chicago avenue to the southwest, and the lake shore to the east. It's only 3 square miles.

[paytonc]

I know the city's Community Area boundaries practically by heart. (I did, after all, study sociology at the University of Chicago, and "we" invented those boundaries.) However, you'll find that the boundaries of the South Shore CA encompass areas with of widely varying character -- unlike the (geographically smaller) Hyde Park CA, which is of more uniformly higher socioeconomic status ("SES"). Parts of South Shore are as "nice" as South Kenwood, others are not quite so nice.

[Drover]

Welp, I just spent a lot of time compiling crime data for South Shore, and it must really be on a street-by-street basis because there didn't appear to be much rhyme or reason to where the crimes occurred.