Dispatches from Chicago's south side.
The city gained 51,000 residents from 2010 to 2020 according to the recent U.S. Census. CapFax shares a number of stories from Chicago area outlets sharing more numbers. Chicago remains America's 3rd largest city, it's not over for us yet!
Now for this remap. The census was controversial for the last ward remap.Census news: Chicago’s gains https://t.co/1EmrNAWygI
— Rich Miller (@capitolfax) August 13, 2021
Just about a decade ago many residents in the 6th Ward especially were very concerned about the ward remap. We did see how the remap went in 2012, this time around who knows when the city will start to redraw the map for the next decade or so.
The state is gearing up as the Democratic House Caucus has created an online site for the public to propose their own maps. The process at least for Springfield might be different this year thanks to the changes in leadership especially in the House of Representatives so this should be interesting. Here's another site for the state Senate Democrats which also experienced a recent change in leadership with the same concept as the state house where the public can draw their own map.
Now we got to find out when the city will begin their ward remap process. While this is really old news since last year with the unprecedented global pandemic there were issues with the census and no doubt that fell behind. The remaps of wards, state legislative and congressional districts all hinge on the data collected from the once every 10 year US census.
h/t Illinois Review
BTW, here's a statement from the US Census Bureau stating all data needed for redistricting should be compiled and released to all states by Sept 21, 2021.
Also here's an update from WTTW, as of March 9, 2021 the city council nor the mayor has backed an independent process to redraw the city's wards so a independent groups have formed a coalition for that purpose.
Mayor uses unpopular president to boost census participation https://t.co/nGTbfdCzfo— Rich Miller (@capitolfax) October 2, 2019
Now, there’s a new demographic shift in her neighborhood. African-Americans are leaving for better opportunities as a small-but-growing number of Hispanics move into Englewood and West Englewood, a community residents commonly call Greater Englewood.The history is interesting as noted in the above article Englewood in the 1960s & 1970s went from white to Black and now possibly Hispanic. And then couple this with the trend that Blacks are leaving Chicago.
Greater Englewood’s total population dropped from 71,740 in 2010 to an estimated 55,004 in 2017, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. During that time, the African-American population fell from 69,776 to 51,015 — a loss of nearly 19,000 residents. African-Americans still make up more than 90 percent of the population, but as some leave, the Hispanic population has tripled in size, from 845 people in 2010 to about 2,700 people by 2017.
What’s driving the influx? Cheap property, Williams said.
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Overall, the bureau estimates Chicago’s African-American population dropped nearly 10 percent between 2010 and 2017, to 820,000. In that time, the Hispanic population grew nearly 5 percent, to 790,000.
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Aysha Butler, president of Residents Association of Greater Englewood, said there has been little coalition-building between the two groups.
“It’s really hard to have the conversation when people are feeling that their Hispanic neighbors aren’t very neighborly,” Butler said. “I know a lot of my West Englewood members are very uneasy about this and I just hope eventually that we reach a common ground because unfortunately we’ve been taught to be divided and if we were working more closely together we probably would have a little more power.”
Tracy Miller noticed something about Chicago when she moved here nine years ago. “I meet many people who say they are native Chicagoans,” she says. “It seems like there are more natives still residing here than in other cities I have lived in.”You may want to listen to this segment below [AUDIO]
Miller came here from Austin, Texas. Before that, she’d lived in Dallas and Los Angeles. In all of those cities, she says, “Everybody is from somewhere else.” But Chicago seemed different. That prompted her to ask Curious City:
“How many people live here who were born here, and what about the previous generations? There seems to be many generational families that call Chicago home.”
It’s a simple question, but the answer is complicated — and hard to pin down. We’ll confess upfront that we haven’t been able to come up with a statistic that precisely answers Tracy’s question. But the U.S. Census Bureau does collect some data that gets us close to an answer. Those census statistics suggest that the presence of local natives varies quite a bit across Chicago's neighborhoods and racial groups — while the city, as a whole, has a "native" profile close to the national average.
But many left despite having good jobs in the city. Although the census data does not indicate where those who left Chicago ended up, the new population figures show that Matteson recorded the largest numerical increase in blacks of any city in the Chicago area.Then there's also this:
Statistics obtained by the Chicago News Cooperative reveal rising income levels in parts of Matteson and other south suburbs where the black population grew rapidly in the last decade, suggesting that high wage earners factored prominently in the movement from the city to the southern periphery of Cook County.
The trend of blacks’ leaving Chicago in the past decade apparently included all economic levels, said Alec Brownlow, a geography professor at DePaul University. Spiking foreclosure rates in South Side and West Side neighborhoods increased the already high number of vacant and abandoned homes, making those areas less popular with middle-income blacks, Mr. Brownlow said.
“I would imagine that the wave of out-migrants displaced by the teardown of public housing units is supplementing the middle classes moved by the foreclosure crisis,” he said.
But whatever their income level, the newcomers say they feel more at ease after leaving the city. James Turner, an engineer at the University of Chicago, said he and his wife moved to Newbury Estates in 2005 because “there is too much chaos” in Englewood, where they used to live. Mr. Turner, 58, recalled his old neighborhood as he worked in the front yard of his 3,000-square-foot home.Foreclosures and concerns over safety to name a couple I've been able to excerpt. What if some of the ills they hoped to escape came out to Matteson with these individuals?
“You can’t trust the city,” Mr. Turner said. “You can’t trust it to have peace unless you are somewhere on the North Side, next to the lake. Maybe Rahm Emanuel can do something and put the police where they should be.”
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| Population change throughout the city by ward |
