Why the Smartest People in the Midwest All Move To Chicago
Edward McClelland explains how Chicago rose above the Rust Belt cities to become the undisputed star of the Midwest, in an excerpt from his new book, Nothin’ But Blue Skies.
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Illustration: The Heads of State
While Chicago certainly has its problems, in size and prestige it handily outshines all other Midwestern cities. Edward McClelland, a journalist who grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and has lived in Chicago since 1995, wondered why. How had his adopted city succeeded in becoming one of the world’s most influential metropolises while other once-bustling burgs declined? And how evenly will prosperity be shared going forward? He addresses those questions in his new book, Nothin’ but Blue Skies, excerpted here.
“What did Chicago do right?” a woman from Cleveland once asked me.
Why did Chicago not fulfill the obituary written for it in 1980, the year Wisconsin Steel closed and the Chicago Tribune announced that the city was “being eaten away by economic forces as powerful as those that thrust it out of the marshes a century ago”? Why did it become an alpha world city, in the same league as Paris, Mumbai, Shanghai, Frankfurt, and Sydney, while Cleveland became the Mistake on the Lake and Detroit became the destination for European art photographers documenting urban decay?
The woman’s real question was, How can Cleveland imitate Chicago’s success?
The answer is, Cleveland can’t.
Neither can Detroit or Milwaukee or Buffalo or Indianapolis. Not only is Chicago’s success inimitable, it comes at the expense of every other city in the region.
The North Side of Chicago is such a refuge for young economic migrants from my home state that its nickname is “Michago.” In 2000, a quarter of Michigan State University graduates left the state. By 2010, half were leaving, and the city with the most recent graduates was not East Lansing or Detroit but Chicago. Michigan’s universities once educated auto executives, engineers, and governors. Now their main purpose is giving Michigan’s brightest young people the credentials they need to get the hell out of the state.
In the 2000s, Michigan dropped from 30th to 35th in percentage of college graduates. Chicago is the drain into which the brains of the Middle West disappear. Moving there is not even an aspiration for ambitious Michiganders. It’s the accepted endpoint of one’s educational progression: grade school, middle school, high school, college, Chicago. Once, in a Lansing bookstore, I heard a clerk say with a sigh, “We’re all going to end up in Chicago.” An Iowa governor once traveled to Chicago just to beg his state’s young people to come home.
Every University of Michigan BS who moves to Chicago means one less engineer for Detroit. It’s another consequence of globalization, the same force that’s destroying the middle class: Just as money and education have become concentrated among fewer people, they’ve become concentrated among fewer cities. Chicago is one of the winners.
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The Chicago to which I moved in 1995 was not the Chicago of 1980. It was not even the Chicago I’d visited in 1988, a few months after the death of Mayor Harold Washington. That city still hadn’t gotten over the Council Wars—years of conflict between Washington and white aldermen—which reminded everyone that Chicago was the most segregated city in America, as impossible to govern as Yugoslavia.
Most Chicagoans lived on streets that were no more diverse than Ireland’s or Nigeria’s, but they at least lived in the same city. Unlike Detroit, Chicago was never transformed by white flight into a black metropolis. There were several reasons for this. Chicago is a Roman Catholic city with strong parish allegiances. Its parochial schools prepared children for Notre Dame as well as any suburban academy did. Mayor Richard J. Daley enforced the law requiring police officers, firefighters, teachers, garbage collectors, and anyone else who drew a city paycheck to live within the city limits. It was essential to his political survival because those jobs had been granted in exchange for allegiance to the Democratic machine.
A pillar of Daley’s master plan for Chicago was to “reduce future losses of white families.” As long as those white families paid taxes and voted the Democratic ticket, Daley would try to keep the blacks out of their neighborhoods. When two black students tried to rent an apartment on Daley’s own block, he did nothing to stop the mob that protested their arrival. Instead, he arranged for the students’ lease to be canceled. Rather than allow pupils at overcrowded black schools to attend nearby white schools, he had them taught in trailers. Although the South and West Sides were “gone,” in the words of dispossessed whites, Daley’s policy of containment maintained ethnic enclaves on the city’s fringes.
Old Man Daley combined the tribal suspicions of an Irish tavern keeper with the municipal ambition of a Roman consul. Inheriting a downtown in which no skyscrapers had been built since the beginning of the Depression, he left it with the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. “What prevented Chicago from going the way of Cleveland and Buffalo?” wrote Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor in American Pharaoh, their 2000 biography of Daley. “Much of the credit lies with Daley’s aggressive program for downtown redevelopment.”
During Old Man Daley’s reign in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, he never thought about Chicago’s relationship to the rest of the world. He didn’t have to. In those years, when America still made everything it needed, it was Rome and imperial Britain rolled into one.
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This article appears in the June 2013 issue of Chicago magazine.
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I will be reading from and signing "Nothin' but Blue Skies" on Tuesday, May 21 at 6 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 1 E. Jackson St., Chicago, and on Wednesday, May 22 at 7 p.m. at Anderson's Bookshop, 111 W. Jefferson Ave., Naperville.
Calling Chicago an "alpha world city" is a bit of a stretch. "Alpha American City" might be more accurate, with comparisons to Washington D.C. and San Francisco.
actually, IANMAC47, calling Chicago an "alpha world city" is not a stretch at all. Chicago is, in fact, an alpha world city:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city
It is this type of blind boosterism that is just BAD for Chicago. This story has been rehashed a million times, and people never seem to get tired of hearing it.
Chicago was the city where humankind first split the atom, that made huge strides in blues and jazz, that produced all of those Nobel Laureates at the University of Chicago. It produced gutsy writers, the Studs Terkels, the Richard Wrights, the Ernest Hemingways of the world. Where are those who would give this city that creative spark that would GLOBALLY transform science, literature, and the arts today? People speak of the revolution in the entrepreneurial community here--it's a start, but it's not enough. Where are the big ideas; Chicago's entrepreneurial community is centered on deal of the day sites. The financial markets and innovations that have defined them are shrinking in the wake of today's economy (just ask any trader how spreads are these days). What are going to be the industries of the future for Chicago where people from all over the country, all over the world come to make it? Where people from Harvard and Princeton, Berkeley and Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, La Sorbonne come here to take their shot (Sorry, the world is a lot bigger than Michigan State, and Chicago badly needs a wider range of perspectives than those of frat boy accountants from around the Midwest). What about artists? How do we foster an environment here where those who actually CREATE and BUILD are celebrated, where they do not face ridicule simply because something is impractical, but are lauded for taking the chance to nurture a big idea?
I grew up here, I love this city, and I strongly agree with those who say that Chicago doesn't like to take an introspective look at itself and fix what's broken. If you're from that quaint little Midwestern farm town, I understand that Chicago may be a bit overwhelming for you, and you might think its the coolest place in the world. Not to be rude, but that perspective isn't the one we should be listening to in the conversation. The world is now a lot flatter than it used to be, and the cold reality is that if we really want to be a global city, the population needs to wake up and and realize that we are in a cutthroat fight, a global fight for talent, ideas, capital, jobs and culture. We need to find a niche where we can excel, and capture those trophies, not rest on our laurels.
The article, in short, is silly. Does someone at the magazine have an inferiority complex? Did a recent trip to NYC or SF tarnish their municipal pride?
First, the local economy. Chicagoland has higher unemployment than Metro Detroit. It has the second lowest job growth among the ten largest cities since 2010. The local economy is ok, but hardly good.
Second, the population. Second worst city population loss in the country, behind only Detroit, from 2000-2010. The metro area has grown, but still far behind national averages. And even the metro growth rate has plummeted since 2010. We're now last among the ten largest metros in % growth since 2010. Again, not a catastrophe, but hardly something to crow about.
Third, recruiting talent. It's not that easy. Chicago gets a ton of Midwest talent, but doesn't draw from a national base. It's easy to get someone from Indiana or Iowa, who thinks Indianapolis is a happening place. Good luck trying to recruit someone from NY or CA or even TX. They won't come here. They hear about the crime, corruption, weather, Midwest feel, and no thanks.
Chicago, in short, is a great city, but with significant shortcomings. These kinds of articles feed into the national rep. that Chicago has something of a chip on its shoulder and doth protest too much. It's not really world class, though it sure as hell tries.
Chicago has effectively become the capital of the American Midwest and the author is correct in pointing out that it has maintained itself pretty much at the expense of the rest of the Midwest. I don't believe we ever set out to do that; we were just in the right place. Frankly, it would be far better to be a few feet taller than healthy robust Midwestern cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland instead of just taller than our more depressed neighbors; let's hope we all begin to grow together in the future.
Belmont100, your post is silly.
1. Wrong: unemployment 9.5 Chicago metro, 9.9 Detroit metro
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/metro.t01.htm
2. And who left during 2000-2010? The poor. Who's moving to Chicago? People with money. All those gentrified neighborhoods aren't full of welfare mothers.
3. Chicago has been called the Mecca of the Midwest. We lure in much of the young talent with opportunities and without the high prices of SF or NY. Hey, while your making comparisons why not compare us to Paris or London? Because we're not equal, that's why. BFD. Compare NY to Paris or London, not us. Chicago metro is the 7th largest economy in the world.
BTW - the staff of the Onion just transferred from NY to Chicago.
As a lifelong Chicagoan born and raised on the southside I did not realize how blatantly a so called "World Class city" could starve off a portion of itself until I had an opportunity to live and work in other large cities. The southside is a commercial desert compared to the northside and downtown.It seems incredibly stupid that the powers that be(Daleys and Emanuel) would not invest equally in all sections of the city.However, if you have narrow minded racist mindsets about certain ethnic groups that are the foundation of your political ideologies it makes sense. In fact, Chicago has divested in business, affordable housing and education that has affected the living souls that reside in this section of the city. This type of action not only destabilizes communities but hurts the potential of what the city could really be.This is akin to self amputation of a limb because it is somewhat physically different than the other.(how counter productive) The message to poor and working class Blacks seems to be "find somewhere else to live, we don't want you here. Personally, I have never felt that I was part of the "city thats works" (For a few). The Chicago I live in has been nothing more than a "slammed door in the face to opportunities for upward mobility". Chicago is a perfect storm of corruption, racism, tribalism, segregation, dull minded politicians, arrogant elitist that suffer from delusions of granduer just to name a few. I am the anti-ambassador for Chicago. I will never promote Chicago as nothing more than what I know it to be; a cesspool of hate, bigotry and oppression. The title of former chicagoan sounds real nice. Peace