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I definitely like EGP IF Chicago sees economic growth and jobs. I also wouldn't rule out spillover from Pilsen westward into South Lawndale either. But again, without significant job growth (real jobs that pay), this cannot physically occur. It'll be like trying to fill an empty cup with no water!
Rahm won't survive after this term so there may be a chance for the voters to do the right thing. We can only hope that they don't act like sheeple and elect a Preckwinkle or Madigan or some other handpicked stooge to replace him. With Rahm and the Machine on the ropes, there is opportunity for new blood to step in and change the direction of this City. Scott Waguespack, are you listening??
Is Chicago seeing economic growth and jobs right now? It seems like the West Loop has been seeing a lot of tech companies locating their regional headquarters there as well as some local tech companies for which the Blue and Green lines would be straight shots. Added to that are the stability that the medical district and UIC probably provide.
It's not really that East Garfield Park is going to be particularly ritzy within a decade, but it certainly is an area that has potential and is at the current moment a place that few people recommend people move to--these are pretty much the conditions necessary for a city that isn't booming (modest growth is fine, just can't be a significant contraction) for anything near what the OP is asking for.
Here's a much better question: WHEN will the values of Chicago real estate begin to show the same strength as other cities?
The downward pressure caused by out of control property taxes and years of horrendously irresponsible unchecked debt increases. The average home price appreciation in 20 major cities was 4x greater than Chicago: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/reale...r-cities-again
There "growth engine" cities of Denver, Portland and San Francisco showed literally 10x stronger price appreciation than Chicago!
Chicago is a mature, slow growth city without physical boundaries for continued new construction on the edge. If you're not growing at high rates (and that covers about all of the Midwest and Northeast), demand isn't going to increase much. If someone can build in an open field, that takes away one potential buyer of pre-existing housing stock.
The areas with the greatest appreciation have at least one of these two things boosting housing prices. Looking at 3 year movement in metro Case Shiller (because you can't really see the pattern month to month) proves that Chicago is seeing the same strength as other cities that are most similar in terms of these characteristics.
SF, Vegas, Miami, LA, San Diego, Portland, Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Phoenix are all either high growth, hemmed in for future development, or both. All have 27+% appreciation in the last 3 years. Detroit does too (27.9%), but they were so completely in the dumps that it is impossible for them to not have fairly robust appreciation. Tampa is at 29.8% with neither, but they do have the recovering retirement market who are now able to sell of their northern homes or use their growing investment portfolio for second home purchases. This is something that is definitely helping Miami, Phoenix, and Vegas too.
Here's the rest of the index:
Boston 19.0%
Minneapolis 18.2%
Charlotte 16.7%
Chicago 14.3%
DC 11.4%
NYC 10.1%
Cleveland 7.3%
Charlotte is growing like crazy, but it's in a megasprawl stage that keeps prices down. Kind of like where ATL, HOU, and DAL were before the sprawl began to taper a bit. Minneapolis is a strong economy that is growing. It's not doing appreciably better. DC is a huge growth engine. It has actually appreciated less. Nobody is worried about Boston and NYC, yet Chicago is pretty much squarely between those two.
The index itself is also skewed a bit by the higher than normal inclusion of growth markets and/or hemmed in markets as well. Looking at the 30 largest metros not in the index, high growth markets are outnumbered 2:1. A broader based index of the 50 largest metros would likely put Chicago right in the middle of the overall list.
I'm hoping Humboldt Park will skyrocket for a couple of reasons, one of which is I bought a house here at the worst time to buy a house (2005) and I'd like to see a meaningful return on my investment someday.
The other reason is I'd love to see gentrification push the gang a-holes out of my neighborhood. We've already seen that to a degree, but with apologies to the fine folks of Austin and East Garfield Park, I'd love to price these criminals out of my neighborhood.
Humboldt is often talked about in terms of being "up and coming" and there has been some meaningful improvement overall, with the addition of the 606, and in areas like the Augusta/California intersection. I hope that said improvement continues, and even accelerates in the near future. We love our house and the location, but after 10 years of being "up and coming" I'd like to see HP reach at least the level of retail/development/safety/amenities that Logan Square has achieved in the last several years.
Is Chicago seeing economic growth and jobs right now? It seems like the West Loop has been seeing a lot of tech companies locating their regional headquarters there as well as some local tech companies for which the Blue and Green lines would be straight shots. Added to that are the stability that the medical district and UIC probably provide.
It's not really that East Garfield Park is going to be particularly ritzy within a decade, but it certainly is an area that has potential and is at the current moment a place that few people recommend people move to--these are pretty much the conditions necessary for a city that isn't booming (modest growth is fine, just can't be a significant contraction) for anything near what the OP is asking for.
Maybe to some extent, but not enough. Chicago thrived during the 1990s but we lost a bleep ton of high paying consulting and tech jobs after the dot.com bust in 2000, and we haven't fully recovered. Aaron Renn wrote a great series of articles on this a few years ago. I think they were already discussed in a thread on this Board but here are the links to them for your convenience.
He points out that the Chicago region lost 7% of its jobs during the first decade of this century and has been slow to recover. He blames lack of a calling card industry, an inhospitable political/tax/regulatory environment for any business but the connected, and, of course, the neglected middle and working classes who live outside the borders of the Emerald City for this.
There may have been some forward progress during the last four years since these were written but I'd say generally, we've still got a lot of work to do to make up for what we lost, much more to grow.
And see Chet's concerns above. If there has been any growth, it has been pretty one-sided. One area we are definitely lagging in is manufacturing. A key reason is our pro-union environment coupled with ridiculous workers' compensation laws at the State level. While protecting workers is good, and should be a priority, this has to be better balanced with current economic realities.
And even if we are making inroads in some areas, we need to be doing better. As Renn puts it in one of his articles (which sums up my feelings more succinctly than I ever could):
There’s nothing wrong with being a champion for your city, but when you become too much the booster club society, it’s not healthy. A little more paranoia and a little less spin would probably do the city good. Chicagoans would clearly recognize the excess earnestness that characterizes such rhetoric if they saw it in another city – I see it all over the place, as all kinds of cities make the case for why they too are one of the next great tech hubs by closing ranks and presenting a unified, totally positive marketing front to the outside world – so I’d suggest they think about how they’d evaluate the statements they make if those same statements were being made by boosters of another place like say Kansas City.
Maybe to some extent, but not enough. Chicago thrived during the 1990s but we lost a bleep ton of high paying consulting and tech jobs after the dot.com bust in 2000, and we haven't fully recovered. Aaron Renn wrote a great series of articles on this a few years ago. I think they were already discussed in a thread on this Board but here are the links to them for your convenience.
He points out that the Chicago region lost 7% of its jobs during the first decade of this century and has been slow to recover. He blames lack of a calling card industry, an inhospitable political/tax/regulatory environment for any business but the connected, and, of course, the neglected middle and working classes who live outside the borders of the Emerald City for this.
There may have been some forward progress during the last four years since these were written but I'd say generally, we've still got a lot of work to do to make up for what we lost, much more to grow.
And see Chet's concerns above. If there has been any growth, it has been pretty one-sided. One area we are definitely lagging in is manufacturing. A key reason is our pro-union environment coupled with ridiculous workers' compensation laws at the State level. While protecting workers is good, and should be a priority, this has to be better balanced with current economic realities.
And even if we are making inroads in some areas, we need to be doing better. As Renn puts it in one of his articles (which sums up my feelings more succinctly than I ever could):
There’s nothing wrong with being a champion for your city, but when you become too much the booster club society, it’s not healthy. A little more paranoia and a little less spin would probably do the city good. Chicagoans would clearly recognize the excess earnestness that characterizes such rhetoric if they saw it in another city – I see it all over the place, as all kinds of cities make the case for why they too are one of the next great tech hubs by closing ranks and presenting a unified, totally positive marketing front to the outside world – so I’d suggest they think about how they’d evaluate the statements they make if those same statements were being made by boosters of another place like say Kansas City.
I dunno about all of this. Renn definitely seemed to have an axe to grind during his short stay here. How much of his analysis is an objective assessment vs. a creative spin on data points due hard feelings is questionable. There is no doubt in my mind that Chicago has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. So has every other major traditional manufacturing center no matter the strength of their labor unionization. Part of the problem is that it takes time to "right size" a region's occupational alignment to get lean enough to take off again. The NE deindustrialized about 20-30 years earlier than Chicago and NYC went through a variation of the same thing 20-30 years earlier. Big. mature, relatively diversified economies don't really blow up again even when they do. You're not going to see an Austin/Charlotte/Research Triangle type of event here and even the cities that were once thought to be Boom Towns are starting to taper in the growth department as they expand and mature. Atlanta is a great example there.
The chasm between higher paying, highly skilled jobs and the lower skilled positions in anything outside of direct service to the high wage class in areas like healthcare, retail, personal care services is something that is a pretty universal issue. Not just in the US, but globally. We happen to see it more in the MW because this part of the country has that old manufacturing thing that continues to decline.
To me, a lot of what Renn says is fairly obvious even if not completely even handed, but the conditions rest primarily on historical occupational segmentation. Not everyone can have a calling card. LA, the Bay Area, Boston, NYC, and DC do. Houston does because of where oil happens to be. Even when you look at NYC and finance and LA and entertainment both are still quite diverse economies. Other cities that have a high degree of specialization aren't doing so in areas that offer strong wages (Miami and Vegas). Chicago's calling card was under attack during the manufacturing consolidation era. Coincidentally, it is high paying jobs in management in these fields that have not made the recovery...not the tech jobs after the dot com bubble. Highly skilled jobs in computers, math, and the hard sciences are up 16% since 2000.
I do agree that the region is far from perfect and more can be done. I wouldn't dismiss the tech initiatives though. KC does a lot of banner raising because KC is duking it out with 30 or so other metros of roughly their size to be the low cost alternative for tech. If you review the results of their initiatives based around things like Google fiber, you'll see that the consensus is that it has not done a thing to change their economy. Chicago's path is a bit different. The city doesn't need to be the low cost provider so much as it needs to make strategic targeted investments in human capital building and tech firm courtship to be the medium cost hub/provider for the middle of the country. Chicago won't win jobs by being the cheap alternative. It's more about building tech firms and know how around things the region already plays in (financial markets, logistics, marketing/ad firms, pharma, etc).
I dunno about all of this. Renn definitely seemed to have an axe to grind during his short stay here. How much of his analysis is an objective assessment vs. a creative spin on data points due hard feelings is questionable. There is no doubt in my mind that Chicago has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. So has every other major traditional manufacturing center no matter the strength of their labor unionization. Part of the problem is that it takes time to "right size" a region's occupational alignment to get lean enough to take off again. The NE deindustrialized about 20-30 years earlier than Chicago and NYC went through a variation of the same thing 20-30 years earlier. Big. mature, relatively diversified economies don't really blow up again even when they do. You're not going to see an Austin/Charlotte/Research Triangle type of event here and even the cities that were once thought to be Boom Towns are starting to taper in the growth department as they expand and mature. Atlanta is a great example there.
The chasm between higher paying, highly skilled jobs and the lower skilled positions in anything outside of direct service to the high wage class in areas like healthcare, retail, personal care services is something that is a pretty universal issue. Not just in the US, but globally. We happen to see it more in the MW because this part of the country has that old manufacturing thing that continues to decline.
To me, a lot of what Renn says is fairly obvious even if not completely even handed, but the conditions rest primarily on historical occupational segmentation. Not everyone can have a calling card. LA, the Bay Area, Boston, NYC, and DC do. Houston does because of where oil happens to be. Even when you look at NYC and finance and LA and entertainment both are still quite diverse economies. Other cities that have a high degree of specialization aren't doing so in areas that offer strong wages (Miami and Vegas). Chicago's calling card was under attack during the manufacturing consolidation era. Coincidentally, it is high paying jobs in management in these fields that have not made the recovery...not the tech jobs after the dot com bubble. Highly skilled jobs in computers, math, and the hard sciences are up 16% since 2000.
I do agree that the region is far from perfect and more can be done. I wouldn't dismiss the tech initiatives though. KC does a lot of banner raising because KC is duking it out with 30 or so other metros of roughly their size to be the low cost alternative for tech. If you review the results of their initiatives based around things like Google fiber, you'll see that the consensus is that it has not done a thing to change their economy. Chicago's path is a bit different. The city doesn't need to be the low cost provider so much as it needs to make strategic targeted investments in human capital building and tech firm courtship to be the medium cost hub/provider for the middle of the country. Chicago won't win jobs by being the cheap alternative. It's more about building tech firms and know how around things the region already plays in (financial markets, logistics, marketing/ad firms, pharma, etc).
The sort of home that somebody can have well below $300K in Kansas City is "blow you away amazing" -- charming, fully remodeled home in a walkable part of the city -- 4401 Terrace St, Kansas City, MO 64111 | Zillow
Mind you, Kansas City is no "boom town" -- it is very well established city of moderate size that certainly has it fair share of problems, but the sorts of advantages it has in terms of BUSINESS CLIMATE is largely a function of the fact that is has a much more solid fiscal standing...
Chicago's massive debt load may have gone unquestioned by a complacent City Council, but now that key aldermen see the weakness of Rahm and can peck away at his notorious "insider deals" they may actually be some reigning in of the out of control spending that has been going on -- As Emanuel fights for political life, aldermen show independence | Chicago Sun-Times
I dunno about all of this. Renn definitely seemed to have an axe to grind during his short stay here. How much of his analysis is an objective assessment vs. a creative spin on data points due hard feelings is questionable. There is no doubt in my mind that Chicago has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. So has every other major traditional manufacturing center no matter the strength of their labor unionization. Part of the problem is that it takes time to "right size" a region's occupational alignment to get lean enough to take off again. The NE deindustrialized about 20-30 years earlier than Chicago and NYC went through a variation of the same thing 20-30 years earlier. Big. mature, relatively diversified economies don't really blow up again even when they do. You're not going to see an Austin/Charlotte/Research Triangle type of event here and even the cities that were once thought to be Boom Towns are starting to taper in the growth department as they expand and mature. Atlanta is a great example there.
The chasm between higher paying, highly skilled jobs and the lower skilled positions in anything outside of direct service to the high wage class in areas like healthcare, retail, personal care services is something that is a pretty universal issue. Not just in the US, but globally. We happen to see it more in the MW because this part of the country has that old manufacturing thing that continues to decline.
To me, a lot of what Renn says is fairly obvious even if not completely even handed, but the conditions rest primarily on historical occupational segmentation. Not everyone can have a calling card. LA, the Bay Area, Boston, NYC, and DC do. Houston does because of where oil happens to be. Even when you look at NYC and finance and LA and entertainment both are still quite diverse economies. Other cities that have a high degree of specialization aren't doing so in areas that offer strong wages (Miami and Vegas). Chicago's calling card was under attack during the manufacturing consolidation era. Coincidentally, it is high paying jobs in management in these fields that have not made the recovery...not the tech jobs after the dot com bubble. Highly skilled jobs in computers, math, and the hard sciences are up 16% since 2000.
I do agree that the region is far from perfect and more can be done. I wouldn't dismiss the tech initiatives though. KC does a lot of banner raising because KC is duking it out with 30 or so other metros of roughly their size to be the low cost alternative for tech. If you review the results of their initiatives based around things like Google fiber, you'll see that the consensus is that it has not done a thing to change their economy. Chicago's path is a bit different. The city doesn't need to be the low cost provider so much as it needs to make strategic targeted investments in human capital building and tech firm courtship to be the medium cost hub/provider for the middle of the country. Chicago won't win jobs by being the cheap alternative. It's more about building tech firms and know how around things the region already plays in (financial markets, logistics, marketing/ad firms, pharma, etc).
In other words: NY is the biggest/flagship city in the country, and has finance (plus healthy doses of everything else); SF happens to have tech; LA happens to have entertainment; and Chicago is basically like every other city/place in the country.
In other words: NY is the biggest/flagship city in the country, and has finance (plus healthy doses of everything else); SF happens to have tech; LA happens to have entertainment; and Chicago is basically like every other city/place in the country.
Yea, the one industry where Chicago seems like it's going to be the largest center for in the US is agricultural commodities and food processing (basically Big Agriculture, sort of). It's not quite there yet, but it looks to be headed there soon what with the fairly recent relocating of Archer Daniels Midland and the coming relocation of Oscar Mayer, co-headquartering of Kraft Heinz in Chicago, and ConAgra moving in from Omaha. These will all be joining multiple huge corporations in the sector that are already in Chicago or its suburbs. It's a massive and varied industry, but it doesn't really roll off the tongue (though there are some fantastic sounding names in the bunch--Ingredion sounds wonderfully absurd). It's sort of funny as it's almost an ancestral linkage to the old Union Stockyards.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 01-11-2016 at 07:02 PM..
The unfortunate thing is that Chicago needs to make do with a situation that it has had little control over and is often placed in a position where federal and state policy screws it over in addition to the local municipal and state governance issues.
The idea of Chicago as a hub of the Midwest through improving rail instructure in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio would have probably been a good boon for the Great Lakes region as a whole and Chicago in particular, but the kibosh was put on that due to local state politics in other states. That kind of posturing made no sense since all this federal government supposed largesse comes after decades of these states (save for Indiana which incidentally is among the most vocally right to work states in the region) have been massive net contributor to federal taxes with Illinois state especially screwed in both total receipts of federal spending minus federal tax contribution and in terms of percentage receipt of federal spending versus federal spending.
Meanwhile, several net benefactor states in the US seem to have gleefully and actively poached industries from net contributor states. Added to that is free trade economic policy that hasn't been much good for the manufacturing heavy Great Lakes state nor has it jived well with the cheaper immigrant labor the coast and the southern border states have had been able to take advantage of (and done without stringent enforcement of US labor laws) and has been part and parcel of collapsing the social contract that US workers had worked for. It's a lot of unfortunate things in and around Chicago, but still it can do better in terms of adapting policy to current conditions and leveraging what advantages it has better, in my opinion.
In other words: NY is the biggest/flagship city in the country, and has finance (plus healthy doses of everything else); SF happens to have tech; LA happens to have entertainment; and Chicago is basically like every other city/place in the country.
Kind of. Sort of. Not really.
Each metro economy has a different degree of diversification. NYC and Chicago are both very diversified, for example while San Jose, DC, Vegas, Miami, and Orlando are not. Metros can specialize in high value add/wealth generating industries (like San Jose/Bay Area generally and DC) or they can specialize in low wage/low value add industries like hospitality (Vegas, Miami, Orlando). Diversification is on a spectrum with cities like Chicago and St. Louis being pretty much squarely in the middle while places like NYC and LA are still very close.
Industry orientation only tells you so much though. The types of jobs within those industries in a given metro can either boost or hurt income. NYC and LA are extremely high value add in their flagship fields and still very high value add in most other things even though both are fairly well diversified. Metros like Seattle, Raleigh-Durham and Austin are very specialized and high value add, but not value add to the extent the Bay Area/DC is generally or NYC or LA are in their specific fields. Miami is very high value add in hospitality, but the industry is such a low value economic generator that the degree to which they are value add doesn't overcome the industry orientation.
Chicago is diversified, but is very high value add pretty much across the board. This is what separates the region from "everyone else". Chicago is the Ron Santo of metro area economies. It does nothing extraordinarily well, but it does everything very well. The regions industries do not add value to the extent of Silicon Valley in tech, NYC for finance, LA for entertainment, Boston for research, Vegas/Miami for hospitality, etc. within their local industries, but each industry is much more sophisticated/high wage than if you were to compare it to a random largish metros in the US.
I wouldn't say that Chicago is pretty much like everyone else. No one is really like anyone else because industry max and the quality of each industry within a metro varies. On the balance, Chicago's economy is more innovative/high value add than probably 75% of the largest 50 metros in the country.
If you were to only look at the largest 13 metros in the country (combining LA/Riverside together and the Bay Area too), they tends to be more sophisticated still than the rest of the top 50. DC, NYC, the Bay Area, and Boston are the stars of the bunch. LA is pretty close. Miami, Phoenix, and Detroit are the laggards. Chicago, Philly, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston are all middle of the pack and Chicago has a nearly airtight case for at worst #3 among that group. With the exception of energy+Houston, Chicago is pretty much higher value add across the board than all of the other 4. What's dragging them back is older manufacturing that is still phasing out. The region still has a very sophisticated and rich economy that separates it from "everyone else". It's just going through transitional pains that places like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston avoided by being too young/small when manufacturing was big in the first place.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chet everett
The sort of home that somebody can have well below $300K in Kansas City is "blow you away amazing" -- charming, fully remodeled home in a walkable part of the city -- 4401 Terrace St, Kansas City, MO 64111 | Zillow
Such a home would be AFFORDABLE on the kind of salary that is well within reach of somebody that might work in some kind "tech" field....
Mind you, Kansas City is no "boom town" -- it is very well established city of moderate size that certainly has it fair share of problems, but the sorts of advantages it has in terms of BUSINESS CLIMATE is largely a function of the fact that is has a much more solid fiscal standing...
Chicago's massive debt load may have gone unquestioned by a complacent City Council, but now that key aldermen see the weakness of Rahm and can peck away at his notorious "insider deals" they may actually be some reigning in of the out of control spending that has been going on -- As Emanuel fights for political life, aldermen show independence | Chicago Sun-Times
Color me not so impressed by that home/price. KC is competing with a lot of regions for the title of low cost tech provider and a smallish rehabbed house going for >$200 sq/ft in a bad school district (mind you, in an area not too far from the plaza), isn't extraordinary. Squeezing 4 beds and 3 baths in a 1500 sq ft house isn't my idea of awesome. If that's your thing, I can get you a 4 BR/2.3-3BA fully rehabbed with top of the line appliances/fixtures in a 2600-3000 sq ft all brick historic 2-3 story walkup here in STL for 300-350 in neighborhoods that more or less resemble a Logan Square or Andersonville.
There is something to fiscal standing and business climate, but you're tooting that horn too much. KC is trying to build a tech hub on the basis of the presence of Sprint and health care tech companies like Cerner. STL is trying to do the same with a much better hospital/healthcare infrastructure in place, Express Scripts, Centene, and much better access to tech talent out of the university systems within 4 hours of the metro. Everyone is doing this stuff. It is a very crowded field. The problem with building these things is that you need fairly thick labor markets to attract the talent needed to grow them. If people don't have alternative employment opps in the event the startup doesn't pan out, they tend to avoid relocating there in the first place. A region like Chicago has enough alternatives where a startup employee can go do inhouse tech development in fields like finance, pharma, marketing, IT consulting. This is a major differentiator. Very few sub 2.5-3.0 million metros have what it takes to attract the talent to generate big returns in this area. Those that do tend to have major educational research/students in their backyards serving as a pipeline (Austin, Pittsburgh and the like).
Here's a list of startup funding by metro for most major categories (excluding biotech). This would include KC's strong suits (healthcare information, communications). Teaser: Chicago is on the list. KC is not.
Last edited by Chicago76; 01-12-2016 at 09:13 AM..
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Still seems very unlikely...
