Chicago vs Rest of Midwest.

[RisingAurvandil]

Originally Posted by emathias

While I agree that St. Louis is slowly improving, unless a lot has changed in the past 18 months it's still not even in the race compared to Chicago. 18 months ago I flew to St. Louis during what was accidentally during Mardi Gras. I took the light rail into the city for my hotel, but the rest of the time I felt kind of trapped due to the limited transit (in coverage, frequency of service and length of daily schedules) and ended up renting a car for my last day to be able to get around and see stuff.

And as far as "cranes everywhere," have you been to Chicago lately?

Here's a map of just 3 square miles of the north half of central Chicago. The red dots are buildings under construction right now. The purple ones are buildings that will be starting any day now, the yellow ones were recently completed (and that's just a few of them, I got bored and didn't fill in all the recently completed ones), and the green ones are solid proposals of which I would guess about 80% of them will at least start construction within 2 years. All the green ones are for high-rises of 12+ stories. Most of the red ones are also highrises of 12+ stories - probably 90% of them, with 10% just shorter but still significant developments. There are about 45 red dots. Of those, at least 35 of them are residential highrises, with an average unit count of probably 250. In central Chicago the occupancy rate for units averages 1.5 people per unit, so that means in those 3 square miles there will be about 13,000 new residents within 2 years. If all the green ones get built by the next census, that would be another 8,250 people. I think there have already been about 15,000 new residents within the area of that map, so we're potentially talking about as many as 35,000 new residents in just half of the central area. If we included the south half, it'd probably be another 25,000 people, for a total of perhaps 60,000 new residents in 6 square miles of Central Chicago between 2010 and 2020. Are there any other Midwest cities even coming close to those sorts of numbers in their core?

I wasn't trying to take a shot at Chicago by any means. I'm sure it has a lot of construction, much more than StL. I was only mentioning that there is a visible pickup in construction here. We have a decent "subway" line through the middle of town, which is something that most other Midwest cities lack. But we could use about 2 or 3 more lines!

As for transit, no Midwestern city can match Chicago. The El and the bus grid, in particular. And I'm always visiting the lakefront when I'm there. I enjoy it more than most ocean coasts I've visited.

The only real advantage other Midwest cities have over Chicago is financial stability. The debt situation in Chicago and Illinois cannot continue forever. The people will pay for the fix. But who knows how long this process will take. New York was once in the same situation. It took them 30 years to escape it.

[Careless]

The biggest differences that I can think of between white people in Chicago, Madison, and Minneapolis (the only groups I feel comfortable/experienced enough with to compare) are that the Chicagoans are much more accepting of corruption, slightly to the right politically (while remaining well to the left of center), and much less comfortable with guns and hunting

So from my perspective, they're pretty normal for Midwest cities, and very different from rural and exurban Midwesterners

[ipkl07]

Chicago has a lot of history and culture, as do other cities in the midwest. In a number of places I still get a community feel in the midwest. You start heading down to the southeast like Atlanta it's more everyone for themselves with little to no community feel. Everyone for the most part is from somewhere else and Atlanta is simply a stop for them and a majority of the residents from what I see don't care about it, nor want to care about it, where Chicago and the midwest people have more of a sense of this is my home and I don't plan on leaving and I want to take care of it and a lot of us midwesterns take pride in our work, homes, and community where the southern regions I don't see that. I recently just moved back to the midwest from the south about three days ago. I'm really happy to be back. I love it up here and I love the people up here.