Champaign vs. Urbana? (Chicago, Campus, Time: crime, house, neighborhood)
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To the OP, I wouldn't bother buying a place in Urbana/Champaign. Rentals are cheap and plentiful throughout the area and nearby towns. Odds are that you are only going to be there for a few years and will move once your husband graduates.
It's unlikely that you will build much equity in a couple of years and you might have difficulty selling your place when you need to.
Reading this thread is making me laugh. Champaign-Urbana is dangerous?!?! I think you ought to go to a real city and see some crime. Unless you are from an extremely small town where news of stolen bubble gum is considered crime, I see no reason for you to view C-U as a dangerous or violence prone community. Seriously. I lived there, single woman, on my own for a few years with zero problems and no friends had any problems either, almost all of us are mid-to-late 20s and lived off campus with no roommates. I think if you want to find crime you can and there are some not so great parts of town, but you wont be living in them. Its not something you see daily and its not something to become preoccupied about. No reason to stay indoors all the time and be afraid of the community. Use common sense and you should be fine.
I've lived a lot of places, big cities, mid size cities, suburbs of big cities, C-U is probably the safest. I can easily recall, them opening nightly news broadcasts with the corn festival on one night and fire hydrants being emptied by kids playing on another night. Seriously. Does that sound like a dangerous community to you? I'm not trying to say there are no problems in the area, that there isn't a low income section to both, but lets be realistic here, there is not big city crime going on in C-U in some major way.
Almost everybody I knew well when I lived in CU had experienced some type of crime, generally stolen bicycles (mine from the garage of my apt building), burglary, attempted burglary, and so on. Several people I worked with served on rape juries. I was a visiting nurse there, and believe me, there are a lot of residents who own guns. Once when I was a VN, someone answered the door with a knife in hand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JasmineFlower
You don't seem too torn to me, you seem to be trashing the area, scaring people away from the place. Not sure where you have lived, but if you are from a bigger city and know what's it like to be aware of guns or drugs around and holding your purse when you're walking down the street, watching the news and having all of it be about violent crime. C-U is the opposite of this. If you think for one moment that C-U is somehow even remotely close to being as comparatively dangerous as St. Louis and Detroit, you're being completely unfair and unrealistic to the area, plain and simple. Its night and day. Not sure why you are trying to paint the area in this manner, but think you should keep it to yourself.
I saw plenty of this when I was a visitng nurse. Of course, I was in places that the student community doesn't usually go. But it's not that big a town.
Quote:
Originally Posted by slim04
To the OP, I wouldn't bother buying a place in Urbana/Champaign. Rentals are cheap and plentiful throughout the area and nearby towns. Odds are that you are only going to be there for a few years and will move once your husband graduates.
It's unlikely that you will build much equity in a couple of years and you might have difficulty selling your place when you need to.
I would certainly agree with this. Also, DH and I lived there for 10 and 7 years, respectively, thus were there long enough to get a good handle on the place. You really don't know when you've crossed the line from Champaign to the west, to Urbana to the east, unless you see a sign. The main "industry" there is the U of I, and its employees live all over the area. DH's grad school advisor has lived in Champaign for several decades. Both cites have old areas that are considered "hip" by many, apartment complexes, and single family houses.
Renting isn't really an option for us, I can't live in an apartment so we'd have to rent a house, and even then, we have three cats and two dogs and the money we'd have to pay on pet deposits don't make it very cheap.
The issue of violent crime always comes up in threads about CU. It's amazing to me how differently people view the area; some people say they wouldn't recommend a woman to go out unescorted after dark in any part of CU, others feel like those people are talking about Champaign like it has the kind of "real danger" you see in large inner cities, which is of course ridiculous.
CU is not big, but it's big enough to see both of these points of view. The reality is that there are areas that should be avoided. That said, IMO even the "dangerous" areas are fairly safe (i.e., if you were just walking thru, I would Guess there's about a .1% chance anything's going to happen to you. I'm not talking about lurking in these areas, just walking thru). Of course it's worse if you're alone and/or it's night, but I think these situations are Easy to avoid (unless you live in the area, or you have to enter for work, as Katiana did working as a VN).
There are also some extremely safe areas of CU. Anyone who says they would recommend against going out after dark in the far south west of Champaign is Paranoid, plain and simple. Sure, something Could happen, but that area feels as safe as anywhere I've ever seen. And this isn't the only area by any means, it's just a good case-in-point; there are Plenty of safe areas around CU. It is easy to overlook these areas, however, because you can't walk/bike to them from campus (well, you could, but you wouldn't, unless you live there); there are a lot of people who don't even know they exist. This is arguably the reason they are so safe ... if you live around a lot of people, esp. where cultures/classes collide, you're going to see a higher crime rate. If you move into an area w/ lower population density, where people who don't live there have no reason to be there, you're going to see a lower crime rate.
If you have children you should consider not living in C-U proper unless you are willing to pay for private education. The school districts in both cities are dysfunctional, have had troubles with teacher misconduct, and have fairly tone-deaf boards. I would recommend St Joseph or Mahomet as having far superior school districts.
With just a couple of exceptions, most of the CS program areas no longer admit Master's students. Instead, CS graduate students are typically admitted as PhD students and then if they can't pass their qualifier or don't finish their dissertation, they're given a Master's degree as a departing consolation prize. I'd estimate that almost half the admitted PhD students in CS do not finish the degree for one reason or another. Be aware the CS department here is ranked among the best in the world and the competition in every facet of the program is keen and intense, and burn-out frequently occurs.
The good news is if your husband is admitted and does well, he'll have many opportunities open to him (even in this bad economy). Virtually all the CS students I know that are graduating this May have multiple job offers at excellent (and in a couple cases astounding) starting salaries.
I am actually a student in the CS department here at the University. I am a Master's student and will be graduating this August. I'm not sure what EyesInTheSky is talking about when he says that they are "not admitting MS stduents." He is just simply mistaken on that point. Other than myself, I know plenty of people who have been admitted directly as MS students over the last 3 years.
I will have to agree with him/her, though, about it being a difficult department to enter. If you do get in, though, you WILL DEFINITELY have some wonderful opportunities! Students regularly leave to work for Intel, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, etc. I'm personally moving to Nashville next year to start a PhD program at Vanderbilt in Biomedical Informatics.
As for where to live, I live in Urbana and I love it. I'm from a small town, though, and think that this place is a big ciy ;-) I really don't think you'd be disappointed in either Champaign or Urbana. I'd say you should base it entirely on the houses and not rule out either of these 2 great towns!
I am actually a student in the CS department here at the University. I am a Master's student and will be graduating this August. I'm not sure what EyesInTheSky is talking about when he says that they are "not admitting MS stduents." He is just simply mistaken on that point. Other than myself, I know plenty of people who have been admitted directly as MS students over the last 3 years.
I will have to agree with him/her, though, about it being a difficult department to enter. If you do get in, though, you WILL DEFINITELY have some wonderful opportunities! Students regularly leave to work for Intel, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, etc. I'm personally moving to Nashville next year to start a PhD program at Vanderbilt in Biomedical Informatics.
As for where to live, I live in Urbana and I love it. I'm from a small town, though, and think that this place is a big ciy ;-) I really don't think you'd be disappointed in either Champaign or Urbana. I'd say you should base it entirely on the houses and not rule out either of these 2 great towns!
Hi BigRedBrain and thanks for your insights. I collaborate with some of the CS research groups in Siebel (AI, computer vision, NLP, data mining, systems, etc,) and I can state as fact that faculty in these research groups generally do not admit terminal MS degrees, which is usually awarded only as a consolation prize to students that hit a brick wall in their PhD program, usually post-qual. Further, you took my quote out of context and gave it a meaning I did not intend. The full quote I wrote states, "With just a couple of exceptions, most of the CS program areas no longer admit Master's students." I generally stand by that claim, although I could have put more emphasis on the number of exceptions that exist.
Thus, someone in your group is the exception I previously said exists. Apparently there are some other research groups that intentionally award terminal MS degrees, but those numbers are small compared to the overall number of PhD students as a whole. I'm quite sure a substantial majority of the graduate students in Siebel are classified as PhD students and not MS students.
Congratulations on your graduation this August and on your Bio-Informatics PhD program at Vandy, which is a very good school that some called the "Harvard of the South."
Last edited by EyesInTheSky; 05-28-2009 at 02:26 AM..
what is the best place to live in champaign, il? I was told southwest champaign, savoy and the boulder ridge subdivision? I am relocating from st louis, mo
Honestly I've lived in Springfield all my life and went to Champaign/Urbana for school and Springfield is worse in terms of crime. I grew up on the north side and it is scarier (although I've never been victimized) than any part of Champaign. You will see some "opportunistic" crime every now and then in Champaign/Urbana on girls walking home at night or idiot students that think they run the town but that's about it. The "ghettos" can't even be called ghettos imo. At least there are people bettering themselves in Chambana which sort of makes the atmosphere more energetic and hopeful; the 'field is a bunch of working class people that hate their lives and aren't afraid to fight you at the bars .
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