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I have not been a local in Chicago for many years. Locals might aid more and eventually a thread in each or top 2 choices then for further info on areas to live and given your expected income in these cities.
Just typing in distance from Lincoln Park Chicago to Lombard IL a due west of downtown Chicago suburb comes up for today a Sunday .... driving - ( 25.3 miles · Light traffic · 38 min.)
Looks like what I expected to get on the commonly called Kennedy Expressway toward downtown and just west of the Loop is the junction to get on the commonly called Eisenhower Expressway to Lombard. Metro trains I believe all end downtown. So one has to head there for that.
Lincoln Park is a top neighborhood north of downtown Chicago. Realize it along with downtown is probably the costliest to live. I would think others in the city and Chicago forum given your listed expected income ... away from Lincoln Park to those west and north of it or South of downtown and northwest. Just opinion from reading the forum to others who ask and give their incomes.
Of course..... cities can be cheaper then other cities. Still if you are going to choose its top neighborhoods you want to live? You will pay the highest % of your salary towards that. This is all just generalizations and opinions. Good luck choosing and of course... visits to each city and area of these Churches might be a good idea too. Seems you did at least have some knowledge of these cities on visits perhaps?
Yes, I have lived outside of Chicago and have spent a lot of time in NYC and LA. But I have never actually been to Philly (or even Pennsylvania at all). So Philadelphia is the only city among the four that is a total wild card for me.
Underfunded, definitely; bad? That depends on what you mean by "bad." Some really are. Others are "bad" only because affluent parents shun them.
ForeignCrunch: Did you have a chance to read my September Schools Issue feature?
Edited to add a comment riffing off mwj119's immediately above: Two of the 10 top-ranked high schools in Pennsylvania, including the top-ranked high school (which also routinely makes the U.S. News honor roll of the country's 50 best public high schools), are Philadelphia public high schools. Both are academic powerhouses that are college-prep-oriented, and one has to meet minimum academic standards (and in the case of the higher-rated one, win a lottery) to get into them.
A lot of Black students at this latter school (Julia Reynolds Masterman, to give it its name) complain that many teachers question their abilities, intelligence and competence either directly or indirectly; there's an entire Instagram group where these students vent anonymously. The other school (Central High School, the city's first public high school, ranked #9 in the state) is probably the high school with the most diverse student body of any high school in Pennsylvania (and I can attest to this because it's located along the bus routes that take me from my Germantown home to the Broad Street Line; the kids that board these buses at the end of the school day and take them to school in the morning look like a little United Nations).
Now consider this: Just about every one of the kids in these schools attended a city public school prior to grade 9 (for Central) / 6 (for Masterman; very few Masterman students get in from the 8th grade). Some of these may have been public charters, but many were regular public schools. If those schools are that bad, how did these students get such good educations?
Yeah it seems like all four cities can offer a good education, but it may require commutes, diligence, and a little bit of luck because none of these districts are just generally good.
On the other hand the suburban districts are usually quite good.
I also wonder how much the pandemic will substantively change these metros. I know that more affordable housing is easier to find in NYC (and perhaps less so in the suburbs), but to at least some extent this only reflects an incredibly weak economy.
I also wonder how much the pandemic will substantively change these metros. I know that more affordable housing is easier to find in NYC (and perhaps less so in the suburbs), but to at least some extent this only reflects an incredibly weak economy.
LA and New York are down 10% and 16% respectively for rent YoY, and Philly is down 4%.
Chicago is actually up about 2%.
But for buying, all of these metros are up, some by a lot.
I also wonder how much the pandemic will substantively change these metros. I know that more affordable housing is easier to find in NYC (and perhaps less so in the suburbs), but to at least some extent this only reflects an incredibly weak economy.
If the jobs that you are looking for don't have a substantial cost-of-living adjustment on the pay, then I would certainly put NYC lower on your priority list.
I live in NYC and like it a lot, but I also came here a decade ago and came in when rental prices were much lower and bought when housing prices were much lower. The pandemic might have offered some better deals in some of the more luxury-end of housing, but it hasn't done a great deal for middle-class and lower housing. The public schools in NYC can be pretty good depending on where you live and the best of the public high schools are among the best in the US and completely outclass the best of the NYC suburbs. I assume you'll find a similar dynamic in other large US cities though where good public elementary and middle schools are usually more about where you live within the city and good public high schools are more about how well your particular kid can do on tests and other factors for getting admission into screened schools.
Yeah it seems like all four cities can offer a good education, but it may require commutes, diligence, and a little bit of luck because none of these districts are just generally good.
On the other hand the suburban districts are usually quite good.
True, but the point I was making in my article is that a number of schools that get mediocre or low marks on the school rating sites actually deliver good educations.
One of the dirty little secrets of the school rating game is that "school performance" and median household income in a neighborhood correlate very highly. If you read my article, you should have learned that the idea for writing it germinated one Sunday after services at First Presbyterian Church in Germantown, a mostly low-income, heavily-Black neighborhood in Northwest Philly and the neighborhood I call home. FPCG is one of those exceedingly rare Protestant churches with a racially integrated congregation (and its associate pastor is an old college friend of mine; he's a Black guy who grew up in Mt. Airy, up the road, up the hill and up the socioeconomic ladder from Germantown).
Two white women corralled me during the social hour one Sunday about three years ago and told me how well their kids were doing at Anna Lingelbach, an elementary school that sits on the Germantown/West Mt. Airy border. They said the school had everything their kids needed to learn and thrive. The women live in Germantown's more affluent northwest quadrant, which is also where most (but far from all) of the neighborhood's white residents live.
If you look on Niche, you will see this school gets a C+ grade, and on GreatSchools, it gets a 3 out of 10.
it seems that household income (and other outside-the-school factors) account for more of the difference in how schools perform than inside-the-school factors do. That's not to say that there are no inside-the-school factors that make a difference. High teacher turnover hurts (many Lingelbach teachers are teaching the children of former Lingelbach students), as do a high number or percentage of disruptive students. Merely having a high number of low-income or nonwhite students, however, does not.
Edited to add a perhaps interesting stat: The median household income in ZIP code 19144, which includes all of Germantown save its easternmost eighth (I live outside that ZIP code), is in the upper $20k range. And five percent of its households have earnings of $150k or more a year. I challenge anyone here to find me another low-income neighborhood of which this can be said.
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