Why do Chicagoans look down on people from the suburbs? (Joliet: top neighborhoods, homes)

[jdiddy]

Originally Posted by Alacran

Then how come in the bay or LA or Houston or Atlanta, etc no one cares?

Because housing in the Bay Area is so ridiculous it’s understood you move wherever you can afford. Houston’s city limits are so large it would be like if Oak Brook and Tinley Park were Chicago neighborhoods instead of suburbs. More importantly, all three of those cities saw most of their development post ww2, so there isn’t a major lifestyle difference between city limits / suburbs.

[MassVt]

This is just splitting hairs, anyway. If a stranger asked me where I live, I'd probably say "Boston ", although I live in a suburb of Boston. No point in getting into geographical semantics about this..

If someone says they live in Chicago, but actually live in Evanston, does it really make that much of a difference? Is the questioner trying to make an obscure point, or is he just making casual conversation? It's usually the latter..

[Alacran]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZMzcRYoM_A


^^^ Evanston vs Chicago video.

Yes people are that crazy about it.

[personone]

Originally Posted by MassVt

This is just splitting hairs, anyway. If a stranger asked me where I live, I'd probably say "Boston ", although I live in a suburb of Boston. No point in getting into geographical semantics about this..

If someone says they live in Chicago, but actually live in Evanston, does it really make that much of a difference? Is the questioner trying to make an obscure point, or is he just making casual conversation? It's usually the latter..

Exactly. I've never experienced it being anything other than maybe a benign joke. Definitely not to the point where someone from the city is "looking down on" someone from the suburbs. Almost everyone from the suburbs will mention the closest major city they are from when talking to people outside of the region. In the D.C. area I did every so often hear some city residents complain about people from the suburbs claiming DC, but it wasn't frequent. As I've mentioned earlier, I have not heard that complaint in Chicago, so like most things, I guess people's experiences greatly differ.

[personone]

Originally Posted by Alacran

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZMzcRYoM_A


^^^ Evanston vs Chicago video.

Yes people are that crazy about it.

Hahaha...fair enough, but I bet he'd have the same reaction/response if the guy was from Lincoln Park or Lakeview (as opposed to Evanston). I think if two people from LA were talking about crime, and one was from an OC or LA county suburb and the other from Watts/ South LA, you'd see the same response.

[hendersj31]

Think he said Bruh enough times?

[goofy328]

Originally Posted by compactspace

It's easy to point at urbanists who promote walkability, transit, sustainability, quality public spaces (over private ones) and great public amenities as being 'anti-suburban'. And it's true: they'll point out that suburbs are ecologically disastrous, culturally destructive and promote fear, obesity and 'otherizing'. But urbanists are only a subset of city-dwellers who dislike the suburbs.

So why then?

My guess is because in many cities, people in the suburbs want to use the city for its jobs and cultural offerings, but they don't want any of their tax money going to 'those people'. (The horror!) The 'my taxes only go to my back yard' mentality sets the city up in competition with its suburbs, who hang off it like parasites and jealously reserve any resources they have for their residents only.

To keep it all humming, there's the old trick of segregationist zoning -- minimum lot sizes, zero public transit and so forth. Can't have the wrong sort going to our beloved schools to lower the standards and soak our hard-earned tax dollars.

So yeah. The people living in the actual engine for a metro area get resentful.

Chicago really isn't bad in this regard. Thankfully, Chicagoland is reasonably cohesive and the membrane between suburb and city is porous. It helps that old inner suburbs like Oak Park are transit-driven, dense and city-like. Metra, a shared transit resource, helps too. Even better, Illinois's body politic forces municipalities to redistribute the wealth a little. I could foresee things being much worse if every far-out dinky-di suburb were given its 'every man for himself' druthers. (Though even now, witness the race-to-the-bottom tax undercutting that goes on between Chicagoland counties. So destructive.)

Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore and St. Louis are what happens when dog-eat-dog suburbanism takes over. Lovely cities in many respects, but hobbled completely by the bloated, isolationist, politically powerful suburban donuts that choke them.

New York started to go that way too, until the city had its renaissance. Thankfully, Jane Jacobs and her followers didn't let their idiot midcentury mayors tear up Manhattan to built freeways so suburbanites in Connecticut could have quicker car commutes.

Detroit is the worst. Then again Atlanta is not that far behind it.

[blacknwhiterose]

Originally Posted by Alacran

Then how come in the bay or LA or Houston or Atlanta, etc no one cares?

Because those are sunbelt cities that have a more porous border between their "city" and "suburbs" parts. Chicago is in the upper Midwest and does have a more distinct look between it's urban core and it's suburbs.


Also, I think the profile of many young transplants who come to Chicago is a factor. Most of the hating-on-the-suburbs stuff comes from young transplants who probably grew up in some backwater town in Ohio or Michigan, then think they're the **** after moving to Lincoln Park/Chicago.


It's true Chicago doesn't quite have any regional peer in the Midwest region, so it creates this sort of pride-inferiority complex where some city dwellers have to throw the suburbs and the rest of the Midwest under the bus in a futile attempt to equate Chicago to New York, Los Angeles, and San Fran.

[doodlemagic]

Originally Posted by blacknwhiterose

Because those are sunbelt cities that have a more porous border between their "city" and "suburbs" parts. Chicago is in the upper Midwest and does have a more distinct look between it's urban core and it's suburbs.


Also, I think the profile of many young transplants who come to Chicago is a factor. Most of the hating-on-the-suburbs stuff comes from young transplants who probably grew up in some backwater town in Ohio or Michigan, then think they're the **** after moving to Lincoln Park/Chicago.


It's true Chicago doesn't quite have any regional peer in the Midwest region, so it creates this sort of pride-inferiority complex where some city dwellers have to throw the suburbs and the rest of the Midwest under the bus in a futile attempt to equate Chicago to New York, Los Angeles, and San Fran.

You bring up a very interesting point, I personally don't get into all this city pride stuff where are you from but if I were to get into that stuff I think it's funny that people who grew up in "real" Chicago neighborhoods and have generations of their family lived in areas move out to the burbs and then you get some recent college grad who moved from Michigan to Lincoln Park and has lived there for 6 months talks crap about being a "real chicagoan".

My gf finds it funny all these people who live in Ukie Village and have such neighborhood pride but more the hipster types, she grew up there decades and decades ago when it wasn't anything like it is today and just kind of finds the whole thing funny

[NOLA101]

Originally Posted by blacknwhiterose

Also, I think the profile of many young transplants who come to Chicago is a factor. Most of the hating-on-the-suburbs stuff comes from young transplants who probably grew up in some backwater town in Ohio or Michigan, then think they're the **** after moving to Lincoln Park/Chicago.


It's true Chicago doesn't quite have any regional peer in the Midwest region, so it creates this sort of pride-inferiority complex where some city dwellers have to throw the suburbs and the rest of the Midwest under the bus in a futile attempt to equate Chicago to New York, Los Angeles, and San Fran.

Ding, ding ding! We have a winner!

You can tell the "Chicago pride" types with the city flag on their backpack, constantly talking negative about the Midwest, bragging about their cramped two bedroom in Lincoln Park like it makes them hot stuff.

If you're from rural Indiana or something, yeah, you think it's a big deal that you're living somewhere that doesn't look like Muncie or Terre Haute.

The reality is that A. Chicago proper isn't that different from the suburbs, for the most part and B. Even the parts that are different (i.e. the core), aren't that urban/cosmopolitan compared to other global cities around the world. Lincoln Park is a looong way from NYC, Paris or London. But it's easier to rag on Kalamazoo.