is lansing IL going down the tube? (Chicago, Crete: school, to live)

[deechee]

Originally Posted by Humboldt1

I welcome this debate.

Please reconcile this.

It is not that Lansing is changing racially but the quality of those moving in vs. those moving out. Lansing is becoming more like Calumet City. From my vantage point, this is not a good thing.

It is more an issue on the education and income level of those moving in. It is not like Lansing is being flooded with people who have bachelors or master's degrees and high-paying jobs.

Exactly.

Originally Posted by ajolotl

But is it really being flooded with people who have less education than those leaving, or just who tend to be more dysfunctional? I honestly don't know, but I never though of it as a particularly white collar area 10-20 years ago. Same for Cal City.

That's because it wasn't. It was just majority white. Of course, that didn't make it a desirable area just because of that, but once the whites started leaving, the people who replaced them were different. Did not value the same things...etc. I see it all the time. When I lived in the city, citizens of East Beverly and parts of Morgan Park complained about the same stuff. I can't blame them, they're telling the truth.

Would you leave, if your attorney neighbors moved and another professional couple moved in? (like a teacher and a doctor?) Or would you move if the attorneys moved and six people who work in minimum wage jobs with friends who are not exactly role models moved in? Or nasty, loud, obnoxious, ghetto fabulous people made all kinds of noise and tried to steal from you, vandalize your property and made bad influences on your child(ren)?

I know what my answer is. If anything like that happened to me, I'd be packing up as soon as I got the money to move.

[Humboldt1]

When non-working people replace working people, it is never a good thing, regardless of race.

[deechee]

Originally Posted by Humboldt1

When non-working people replace working people, it is never a good thing, regardless of race.

Basically, that's what I just said.

[SonySegaTendo617]

Originally Posted by Humboldt1

When non-working people replace working people, it is never a good thing, regardless of race.

Why do I get the sense when I read this thread, I'm not seeing the real truth told about Lansing? It's totally understandable to me if the public schools, government services, etc. may be mediocre or even crap(causing one to theoretically send their kids to private schools, or one choosing to move to a different community instead), but past posts here automatically prove that there always will be some that are closest racists and falsely paint a community's ethnic makeup changing as a 'decline'.

However, at the same time, I also agree with Humboldt and deechee that if non-working people who don't give a crap move in to a community, and that the city/village/etc. council doesn't do enough to address problems caused by newer residents, yes it could decline. Maybe Lansing residents could look into forming a similar type of organization that some Elmwood Park residents formed, when crime issues arose there:
Elmwood Park Neighborhood Civic Organization | Elmwood Park, Illinois

[Humboldt1]

I hope that Elmwood Park will stay relatively nice. As long as all the cops continue to hang out at johnys it should be fine. There are certainly some challenged apartment buildings and longtime residents complain about changes but nothing those happening in areas like lansing and calumet city.

I hope that Elmwood stays nice as I am looking to buy a house in River Forest/Oak Park in the next few years.

Neighborhood associations only work when people who care live there. When you have human garbage moving into an area associations are not enough. I have seen this firsthand on the west side in Humboldt Park.

[belowground]

My wife and I live in Chicago and are planning to move to the suburbs later this year. We are both from Park Forest and lived there until we graduated from Rich East and went on to College.

The towns we are considering moving to are Crete, Monee, Homewood, Frankfort and Lansing. What we can afford is a big part of what we choose. We would choose Frankfort or Crete if money wasn't as tight. We like Lansing because the home prices are lower and there are some nice brick homes. The area around Ridge Rd and Burnham looks nice. It would be nice to be close to the downtown Ridge Rd area. We drove down downtown Ridge Rd and liked that there are many open businesses and very few, if any, empty/out of business stores. We also noticed the racial makeup of people downtown was balanced, maybe even with slightly more white people. We want a town with a balanced racial makeup, we don't want a town that's all white.

I have a friend that is from Calument City, who now lives in Munster. He told me to just stay away from the apartments on Torrence.

[At1WithNature]

^ I think Crete would be ideal.

What is wrong with Park Forest? Why abandon the community where you are from?

[belowground]

My parents and my father-in-law still live in Park Forest so we visit often. We don't like that many businesses are closed/empty. Downtown park forest (the centre, plaza and whatever else they have called it over the years) is nothing like what it was in the 80s. I just don't like Park Forest enough to choose to live there. After living there for 25 years I'm ready to experience something else.

[At1WithNature]

If you want to experience something knew, you should probably move to a different part of Chicagoland or the city of Chicago itself. A real change would have you leaving the state and Midwest all together.

[belowground]

We've been living on the far north side of Chicago for the past 5 years. I work in Chicago and love my job too much to leave the Chicagoland area.