By: John

John — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:30:13 +0000

I’d be interested to see dissimilarity data by neighborhood. I bet my hood in Evanston is less dissimilar than most of the region.

By: payton

payton — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:03:14 +0000

I knew you’d chime in, and thanks. Of course, I love both cities, but was trying to put some context around things that I often hear people complaining about. I grew up attending integrated schools, and the segregation I see here is saddening indeed — but one can’t fairly single out Chicago as any worse in that regard than many other Northern cities.

Of course NYC is a bigger draw for people in the fields that it dominates, particularly in arts and media. It’s a bigger draw for immigrants, that’s for sure, including several reaches of my extended family. And yes, it attracts ambitious sorts of all stripes, since it offers more urban energy than anywhere else in Anglo America. Yet NYC isn’t some magical dimension where The Best And Brightest From Everywhere!!! frolic in their reflected glory; Chicago isn’t a second-rate backwater of lackadaisical but bitter Midwesterners. Not everyone who’s ambitious moves far from home, and not everyone who moves away is all that ambitious. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between.

Yet I have heard a lot of complaints about Chicagoans inherently being more provincial, that its population is less dynamic and overwhelmingly Midwestern. And yes, I could understand how someone familiar with the Trixie scene might say that (although again, it’s a tiny slice of the city that’s actually mirrored in most cities worldwide). This doesn’t recognize that migration potential IS determined largely by distance, and therefore that most people in any large, old metro are going to be from those parts. A lot of people in both metros just happened to be born there, and do what they do just because that’s what people there do.

And, increasingly, that’s even the case in “newer” areas like DC: I’m always amazed to meet people who work at, say, environmental NGOs not because they care for the environment but because that’s just what people in DC do. Similarly, even I was surprised to find that a substantial plurality of Raleigh’s population growth comes from people moving from within North Carolina. I, like everyone else there, assumed that everyone moving in was a Yankee.

By: neil

neil — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:23:57 +0000

So it’s more reasonable to say “Chicago and New York are equally segregated, at least within a few dissimilarity points.” Good for Chicago!

I haven’t heard someone say anything quite like number two, but I have heard people note that New York draws creative people in the fields of theatre, dance, music and visual art from around the country and world. Not sure what data source would have information on how to judge that.

Comments on: Not as cosmopolitan as one might think

By: John

By: payton

By: neil