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It's happening all over the US. Cities are seeing building booms in their downtown surrounding neighborhoods while the rest of the city is dropping residents and home values dropping off. Basically becoming millennial neighborhood donuts.
Here is a theory that is out there in city planning circles. For instance; downtown and outer neighborhoods are booming while neighborhoods like Garfield Park are declining, eventually gentrification will move it's way to Garfield then once Garfield becomes way too expensive then Austin becomes the next hot new neighborhood and inner suburbs will be the ghettos. Hipsters and millennial's are eating their way through the city. Hipsters and millennials hate anything too commercial or too popular once a neighborhood becomes hot they're on their way to the next "iffy neighborhood". It's like the skit in Portlandia...It's so over
It's happening all over the US. Cities are seeing building booms in their downtown surrounding neighborhoods while the rest of the city is dropping residents and home values dropping off. Basically becoming millennial neighborhood donuts.
Here is a theory that is out there in city planning circles. For instance; downtown and outer neighborhoods are booming while neighborhoods like Garfield Park are declining, eventually gentrification will move it's way to Garfield then once Garfield becomes way too expensive then Austin becomes the next hot new neighborhood and inner suburbs will be the ghettos. Hipsters and millennial's are eating their way through the city. Hipsters and millennials hate anything too commercial or too popular once a neighborhood becomes hot they're on their way to the next "iffy neighborhood". It's like the skit in Portlandia...It's so over
If this is in fact what's happening, it's fascinating how the US follows Europe in so many things, from politics to fashion to urban trends. What you're described is exactly how most French cities are currently.
Chicago is easy to fall in love with... but it’s a tough, irrational love that makes your heart ache. It kicks your butt with disappointment after disappointment.
That said, I miss it terribly when I’m away. The gorgeous architecture, the distinctive neighborhoods, the grand shabbyness, the roar of the El, the smell of iron, the blues, the striving artists, the rich and checkered history. I own RE there and cough up my property taxes to pay the pensions, along with all the other schlubs. And if I didn’t live in Manhattan, I’d either leave the US or live in Chicago. Because I love it, irrationally, and I’m at peace with that.
Boston's a great city one of the few US cities I would consider living in. So I live in a very well maintained 100% brick 100 year old home ~3300sf SFH on a ~7000sf lot. In Lincoln Square, so my commute is about 30-40 minutes on the Brown line. Always curious what something like that would cost in Boston.
Lincoln Square is awesome.
I’d say it’s probably most similar to a few neighborhoods in Cambridge or Brookline or Somerville. Urban, artsy, more recently gentrified.. Id expect to pay north of $1.5M for a livable SFH property. Even at that price point, you’re not talking about the desirable neighborhoods in those areas. Davis Square in Somerville, for example, would likely be more expensive.
But, taxes are a bit less (though it’s known as Taxachusetts).
Boston has essentially become one of those "drive until you qualify" kind of places. There are some "somewhat affordable"places not far from Boston, but it takes some time to find them, and they might be in a alternating "one good street, one bad street" pattern..
Chicago has some of the same problems, but not to the same extent. The prices are not as severe, and there are more choices...
Chicago is a better value to me. And in the suburbs, you can buy a reasonable property in a very upscale town (As close as Park Ridge, as far as Naperville) for <$400k. That just doesn’t exist in Mass anymore.. Even beat up areas with **** poor school systems, like Malden, will see homes being sold in the $700s. Huge shortage of housing, high demand, and a lot of net new high income jobs. I mean, there are cities and towns in their entirety with less than 15 SFH for sale.
Anyways, regardless of the severity of the issues Chicagoland faces, it will never implode like a Detroit or Cleveland. Too diverse of an economy, too established, too desirable. But, as it relates to this thread, people are definitely going to battle the storm. It’s coming- I think all of the indicators are there.
Boston area is nothing compared to Chicago in terms of infrastructure - traffic jams are far worse than Chicago land, roads on average are in worse shape, commuter lines are even older and slower than Chicago, and they are far and between. The city itself is so small, and way more expensive than Chi. Chi airport is world class, Boston is more like regional.
The only positive things about Boston vs Chi thing is Boston has substantially less violent crime, and better seafood.
BTW, financially MA is not much better than IL, similar problems with underfunded pensions, and no way to solve. Prop. taxes in MA towns with good schools are comparable to IL, but MA has prop. taxes cap, which helps.
I always wonder how MA, NJ, CT managed to have much higher bond rating having pretty much same financial crisis.
First of all, to reiterate the first link, Chicago has seen a reduced position in the global financial index. That's massive news that indicates a number of things.. Seriously, review that list. It's worth it.
To your points about the huge private sector growth, let's dig a little deeper. How much of this is Chicago standalone growth, and how much is relative to suburban headquartered companies relocating into the city/back into the city based on demand?
My suspicion is that it's VERY much to do with the latter. Which is largely why the suburban growth is well below the national median, and may not get back to pre-recession numbers. Which, by the way, plays very well with my narrative earlier about Chicagoland as a whole.
Said differently, how many net new private sector jobs are created by companies relocating to Chicago from out of state? And how many are to do with start-ups in the city? I see very little influx from out of state. This is a story of migration within Illinois, mixed with the standard growth of the US economy. But, aggregated data for all of Illinois tells the true story, tried and true.
Can you name companies that have moved from out of state to Chicago? I know there has been expansion in some, which is helping.. Apple/Google/Amazon being a few. But, I can't. Can you name some notable companies that you've seen blossom since the rebound in 2013-2014? Adversely, can you name companies that have relocated from the 'burbs back to downtown? I can: Caterpillar, Mcdonalds, Motorola, ConAgra.. That's a lot of in-state jobs that simply shifted.
So, I absolutely think it's stagnant.
I get what you're saying though I disagree for several reasons.
What you're saying about recent years seeing companies shifting headquarters from the suburbs to downtown is accurate--that sort of a shuffling of chairs doesn't really make a net gain of jobs. However, you can say that those companies moved to downtown for a reason and that part of becoming more competitive as companies is being more centrally located which may pay dividends later for the company and for Chicago.
On your list of Chicago suburbs to city companies, you listed ConAgra which is very off the mark. ConAgra's movement isn't a shuffling of Chicago suburbs to city--it's not even a shuffling from within the state of Illinois. ConAgra was formerly in Omaha and that's a good gain for Chicago. ConAgra's move to downtown Chicago is also significant in terms of the industry it's in as it also seems to be the industry that Chicago is positioning itself to be at the top for the US. That would be the food / agricultural processing industry. Chicago and it suburbs already had a significant presence in the sector previously, but it's growing with not just ConAgra's relocation but Archer Daniels Midland having relocated to Chicago which is also from outside Chicagoland.
Chicago's tech sector is also growing at a pretty good pace and has had a couple of unicorns in recent years. There's also just the fingers in every pie kind of economy that Chicago generally has that seems to be doing surprisingly well in parts. Like, how did Ulta Beauty get as big as it is? That's just bizarre.
Chicago is economically doing pretty alright for itself in regards to the private sector and seems to be setting itself up.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 04-13-2018 at 03:20 PM..
First of all, to reiterate the first link, Chicago has seen a reduced position in the global financial index. That's massive news that indicates a number of things.. Seriously, review that list. It's worth it.bo suburban headquartered companies relocating into the city/back into the city based on demand?
...
Okay, so your link went to a comparison of GFCI18 with GFCI19. Why you did that, I don't know, since GFCI23 is the most current ranking.
But, okay ... first let's compare GFCI 18 with GFCI 19 ...
Let's compare that to peer cities in roughly the same cluster. Below are all the cities that had 700+ points in either GFCI 18 or GFCI 19, or were not about 700 in either, but are trapped between cities that had 700 in one or the other. That leaves us with 22 peer cities and, for what it's worth, despite a points decline of one half of one percent Chicago had over 700 points in both 18 and 19, so if we remove any city that had under 600 in either 18 or 19, we're down to 12 cities. I was going to make a list of cities that had a 6XX score in 18 but a 7XX score in 19, but there aren't any. No city in the top 22 cities that scored in the 600s in GFCI 18 moved up. Period. Not just didn't move into the 700s, but didn't move up, period.
London and New York retained their 1st, 2nd rankings, both increased their scores by 4 points. Singapore and Hong Kong swapped their 3rd and 4th positions because Singapore gained 5 points and Hong Kong lost 2 points. Tokyo gained 3 points and stayed ranked 5th. Zurich lost 1 point but moved up 1 ranking to 6th because Seoul plummeted by 19 points and 6 places to 12th. DC gained exactly 1 point but jumped 3 places to 7th. San Francisco lost 1 point and dropped from 9th to 8th (OMG, SF is FAILING!!!!). Boston gained 0 points and leapfrogged from 12th to 9th. Toronto crashed 7 points and slid from 8th to 10th place. Chicago gave up 4 points but held strong at 11th place (what were you saying happened to us?). Seoul, as previously mentioned, lost 19 points and cratered from 6th to 12th place. Dubai actually lost 5 points but managed to bump up 3 places to 13th. Even more impressively, Luxembourg ceded 2 points but managed to leap from 19th to 14th place. Geneva, that failed city in a failed, neutral country, lost 13 points and fell 2 places to 15th place. Shanghai, amazingly, managed to lose 5 points, but still climb 5 ranks from 21st to 16th. Sydney's loss of 12 points resulted in sliding down 2 rankings, from 15th to 17th. Frankfurt gave up nearly as much as Seoul at 17 points and catastrophically free-fell from 14th place to 18th place. Shenzhen stretched its legs by losing 6 points overall but gained 4 places from 23rd to 19th - they'll be "one to watch." Osaka was knickered of 12 points but just hung on to 20th place. Montreal tied Frankfurt by losing 17 points and dropping 4 places from 17th to 21st. And, finally, Vancouver, that paragon of high finance barely beat out Seoul by sliding 18 points but losing only 4 places, from 18th to 22nd.
Table of GFCI18 vs GFCI19 as per linked by MWJ119:
Okay, so with that out of the way, let's compare GFCI 22 with the most current GFCI 23 rankings. I don't have time to set up a second table to look readable in this site's weirdly incomplete BBCode, so I'll just cherry-pick some numbers from this PDF report.
Since we compared the top 22 cities in that first table that mwj119 actually linked to, I'm looking at the top 22 cities in the most recent GFCI 22-23 comparison that I linked to above.
Of those 22 cities, the city that increased in rank the most? Chicago, leaping 10 places. The top 7 cities didn't change in rank at all. Of the top 22 cities, only New York and Hong Kong increased more than Chicago by points (35 for Chicago vs 37 each for NYC and HK).
So then I get curious and pull up the GFCI 21 vs GFCI 22 comparison paper here. And I look again at the top 22 cities which, in GFCI 22, Chicago drops off the top 22 list, ending up at 24th place. But the thing is, in GFCI 21, Chicago had been ranked 7th in the world, a pretty dramatic increase from it's GFCI 19 ranking of 11th.
So, now, we're pretty much just missing GFCI 20 to see last 7 rankings and how Chicago has fared in them. So, GFCI 20? Chicago is ranked 8th.
Now, GFCI does still have Chicago at 14th, which is down from as high as 7th as recently as last year (GFCI21 has a date of April 5th, 2017), but a considerable correction from its low of 24th place in GFCI 22 (September, 2017). Interestingly, Washington D.C. also suffered a considerable collapse of ranking between GFCI 21 vs GFCI 22, falling 16 places to Chicago's 17 places, and both cities tying for a points slide of 40 points. Also worth noting - while New York retained it's 2nd place status compared to 1st place London, it did so primarily only due to it's impressive points lead over Hong Kong and Singapore, the perennial pair vying for 3rd and 4th place rankings. New York's points total actually slid 24 points in the same list Chicago and D.C. slid 40 points. That tells me that those rankings were as much about the U.S. status in the globe as anything they did individually. Bolstering that interpretation is that in GFCI 23 (the most recent ranking), New York bounced up 37 points to Chicago's 35 points. Illustrating Chicago's relative strength among important financial centers, it managed to do that while D.C., it's pair city in the first big fall, fell yet another 20 ranking places, effectively disappearing from the list altogether.
Also of note, in GFCI 21, the one just before where Chicago and DC plummeted together, the actual text notes that Singapore and Hong Kong are converging toward London and New York. The report doesn't state this, but the implication is clear: Asia is coming. Immediately below that trend-line graph is a list of the 15 financial cities "Likely to Become More Significant" in coming rankings. Of the 15, 9 are clearly Asian cities, and if you include Istanbul, a full 2/3 of the cities are Asian, and of the five non-Asian cities, one is African, three are European, and one is North American. Further reading the fine print in the 21 report, the GFCI 21 "Areas of Competitiveness" show Chicago holding on to 7th place in "Business Environment," 6th in "Human Capital," 8th in "Finance Sector Development," a brilliant 5th place in "Reputation," with only "Infrastructure" finding Chicago a no-show - notably for infrastructure, of the 15 cities ranked, all but Beijing, Zurich, and Paris have salt-water ports, clearly illustrating their importance in that section.
So, in summary, the GFCI rankings continue to illustrate Chicago's health and strength as a globally powerful and significant financial center. GFCI 22 appears to be a blip, one that hit ALL U.S. cities, including New York, but that both New York and Chicago have bounced back from - New York a bit better - but it's important to notice that D.C. was also hit and not only didn't recover, but continued to collapse, unable to match the vitality of Chicago. That Chicago is now at 14 instead of higher, isn't so shocking considering the weird numbers hitting all U.S. cities then, and considering that Chicago went from 11th to 7th just ahead of sliding to 24th and then recovering to 14th. 11th to 7th is +4, 11th to 14th is -3. It seem entirely plausible to me that in times of global volatility that sort of movement for Chicago and similar cities is to be expected, as Chicago was not alone in seeing wild swings - and I think it's important that some peer cities that swing widely during that time didn't recover, period. And finally, if there's any doubt about what the GFCI really thinks about Chicago, in GFCI 23, they moved Chicago up in their comparative "Financial Center Profiles" table from the mid-range "Established International" column in the "International" tier to "Global Diversified" column in the top "Global" tier, in company with Moscow, Milan, Amsterdam, and D.C., beating out San Francisco, Boston, Istanbul, L.A., etc.
Better luck next time, mwj119, and no, I won't let you be my financial advisor anytime soon if this is an example of your best work.
Last edited by emathias; 04-16-2018 at 02:09 PM..
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