Would you move and live in the Chicago area?

[Master Jay]

Curly Q. Bobalink, great observation! I understand that people are still joining city-data.com, but I, too, wonder when I see several brand new posters with similar sounding themes...

For ME, that would be way TOO much energy to do. I WISH I had that much free time!!

[MovingForward59]

Originally Posted by Walkaboutcreek

For the working class you get mugged daily, for everyone else, crime is not an issue.

Those days are over.
The rich aren’t going to be insulated in Chicago or other cities anymore.
How many arsons, lootings, muggings and other crines have occured on Michigan Avenue, The Gold Coast and other affluent areas since the beginning of the year?

[Bitey]

There's no way I'd move here from out of the area unless I knew it was a short-term career booster, and even then I would probably rather rent. If you buy a house for $400K (which is pretty modest around here unless you go well out into the far-flung suburbs) and you need to sell it 10 years later, you'll be lucky if it's worth $475K by then, barely keeping up with inflation. In that time you'll end up paying somewhere around $80,000 in property taxes, about another $50K or so in maintenance/upkeep, and then you'll end up paying a realtor nearly 30K in commission to sell it. So over the course of 10 years it will cost you about $160,000 -- half of which goes straight out the door in property taxes -- to live in a house that will increase in value at a break-even point with regard to inflation, if you're lucky, which you probably won't be since the ever-increasing property taxes necessary to pretend the various public-sector pension funds aren't insolvent and to otherwise feed the insatiable fiscal appetite of our overlords will erode your equity value even more.

And in addition to those outrageous property taxes you still have a 5% income tax that's almost guaranteed to go up after that stupid ballot proposition passes, plus sales tax anywhere from 8% to 11% across the region, plus some of the highest gasoline taxes in the country which are automatically indexed to inflation, PLUS tollways.

Why anyone would put down roots in this fiscal madhouse from outside the area if they have any other choice besides destitution is beyond me.

[CCrest182]

Originally Posted by Hiruko

I already live in Chicago, and this bot that has been posting about being a gay male moving to Chicago and Evanston under different screennames for several months now has got to go.

Yeah, something tells me ReadyForWhatsNext and Movingtonewplace is the same person.

[Z'Dig]

That's what this feels like! We already chewed this fat.