Living on Oakley Blvd...shall i go ahead with it? (Chicago: apartment, condos)

[LJUD]

Hi,
I am going to UIC and have recently taken up an apartment at South oakley Blvd. I am totally unfamiliar with the area and would really appreciate if you could give me a true picture of the crime rate. I was reading on a few websites and everyone says that it falls in Tri Taylor area which is very unsafe.
Also I saw the number of crimes reported in that area at chicago.everyblock.com and there were a lot of break-in's in the area. Is the place sooo scary?


I will appreciate any help I can get.

[Drover]

It's definitely a mixed scene in that area, particularly west of Damen (which Oakley is). There's some low-income housing there mixed in with standard market-rate housing, so you have a strange mix of yuppies, students, low-income folks and just plain 'hood rats. What cross-street on Oakley would you be living closest to?

[RyanMcIntyre]

LJUD,

I know I responded to you privately, but I figured I'd post my response here as well:

The Tri-Taylor area USED TO BE fairly unsafe. Shop owners as well as the City are investing money in the area extensively and the changes have been tremendous: City just invested $2.3M into Taylor Street between Ogden and Western. There are 600 new high end homes and condos being built just west and the tear-down/rebuild rate is quite high. The area is gentrifying quite rapidly. This, in conjunction with the expanding medical district (new office building slated for Ogden and Roosevelt), is really impacting the area.

I lived in the area from 2004-2006 and still own 2 buildings west of you (Western and Fillmore & Western and Lexington). Visually, these two areas look rough, but here are my stats for my medical students over the past 3+ years (I have approximately 120 tenants/year in my buildings - I provide short-term accommodations for medical students):
-Never a personal assault or personal robbery
-Never a building break-in or theft
-2 Cars have been broken into the entire time - In both cases, valuables were left in plain site and in one case they also parked on an industrial street.

Use your common sense, lock doors and gates, and you'll be fine. Oakley is a beautiful street.

Cheers,
Ryan

I should also mention that 60% of these tenants had to walk each day down Taylor Street, right by Oakley to get to their hospitals. They usually work long hours, so this included early morning and late night trips.

[NearWestSider]

I have watched Tri-Taylor evolve since the late 70's, and everything I've seen happen there has been an improvement. The two watershed events for that neighborhood were the historic district designation and the demolition of the CHA high rises at Western and the Eisenhower.

I think the neighborhood overall is fine, but this a part of the greater UIC area that you really don't want to be stupid in. The problem is not the neighborhood itself, but the fact that just across the railroad tracks lies North Lawndale, one of the worst ghettos in Chicago. It is not a problem if you lead a reasonably conservative lifestyle, but if you think this is a place to be stumbling around drunk at 2:00 A.M., think again.

FYI, I know about it because a couple of my college buddies from Circle Campus were living over there in 1979. It was WAY rougher back then, but they never had any problems, and I was there many times, (I even got stuck there in the blizzard of '79), so I know for a fact you can get by just fine if you use common sense. Even then, medical center students and interns were living in that neighborhood. The key is the lifestyle you lead.

Most of the problems I have heard of had to do with really dumb things, like the UIC kids who decided to throw a party, and posted leaflets all around the neighborhood advertising it. A posse of gang bangers showed up and robbed everyone at gunpoint, so that proved to be a foolish proposition.

But stupidity can be dangerous anywhere in the city. A similar incident happened by DePaul a few years back. A couple of college kids who like to play basketball in the neighborhood playlot decided to invite some of their basketball buddies to one of their college parties. Unfortunately, two of their "friends" were in rival gangs, and gunshots were fired. Fortunately, no one was killed.

The bottom line is in the inner city you DON'T even want to know, much less make friends with, the local kids. Unless you are prepared to carry a gun.

So don't shy away from Tri-Taylor, just use common sense. And remember: NOBODY can beat the 2 for 1 hotdog special at LuLu's!