Chicago - Change The Metrics, Change The Narrative

Great things are happening in the Windy City. You just have to look under the hood to see it.

Vintage apartment buildings in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood. Source: gettyimages.com

Quick – what’s an easy metric that most people use to assess the health of a community? For most urbanists it’s simple: population change. If a place is steadily gaining population for some period of time, it’s taken for granted that things are going well for that place. A place that’s stagnant or in population decline is surely a place that’s lost some of its appeal, perhaps some economic strength, and residents make the decision to seek greener pastures elsewhere. I mean, in a nation as mobile as the U.S., where people choose to live is the best way of evaluating a place’s economic health, right?

Another question – what scale of place is best for making this assessment? Some 80 percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas, with nearly two-thirds alone living in the 56 metro areas with more than one million people. However, while people live in metro areas, their lived experience is not an entire metro area. It’s a subset of the metro area. It starts with where your home is, and your perception of change in your immediate surroundings. If you work within close distance of your home, perhaps your assessment is limited to a small fraction of a metro area. If you work further away, maybe you’re exposed to different places that are clearly connected to where you live, but are in many ways quite different. Where you sit defines where you stand.

Then there’s the matter of “cities” and “suburbs” that I brought up in a couple of recent pieces. What constitutes a city or suburb is clearly in the eye of the beholder. However, it’s fair to say that there are large cities that are dominated by the sprawled, auto-oriented uses we associate with suburbs, and there are small communities outside the boundaries of large cities that can have very city-like traits such as dense development, assess to public transit, and a diverse mix of uses.

It’s time to impose some order on our built environment chaos.

All this came to mind when I recently read a post from former City of Chicago Department of Housing policy director and X user Daniel Kay Hertz noted that in the 2023 American Community Survey data release by the U.S. Census, Chicago reported the most occupied households at any time in the city’s history. The data showed that there were nearly 1.18 million occupied dwelling units in Chicago in 2023, surpassing the previous high of 1.16 million in 1960. The number of occupied dwelling units in Chicago hit bottom in 1990, with 1.03 million. Since then Chicago’s been adding about 4,500 occupied units annually, or about 0.4% each year.

It’s modest but meaningful change. It’s actual growth, really, especially considering that Chicago’s population dropped by 900,000 between 1960 and 1990, and an additional 150,000 since 1990. As Hertz says in the post, “(i)n other words, >100% of the population decline of the city is now explained by (decreasing) household size.”

Chicago is in demand, but that demand presents itself differently than in other cities. To wit: between 1950 and 2023, the average household size decreased from 3.33 in 1950 to just 2.26 in 2023. That’s a decline of 32 percent. Yet that’s a greater percentage decrease than Chicago’s population decrease of 26 percent over the same period (going from 3.62 million in 1950 to 2.66 million in 2023).

I’d argue that the population change metric has become less useful because of this trend. It’s a national demographic trend that’s been proceeding for more than half a century. It overvalues places that tend to attract families (i.e., actual suburbs and core cities with a strong suburban development character), and undervalues places that are comprised of so-called “non-traditional” households – single young or middle aged adults, couples without children, seniors.

Another metric I thought would have a similar effect is mean household income change. Just as a Chicago observer could notice that the city “feels” like it’s growing despite its population loss, it also “feels” like it’s getting wealthier despite their still being concentrations of poverty. What I found in the 2010 and 2020 American Community Survey data is that the 2010 mean household income (in 2020 dollars) was $78,332, and in 2020 was $94,733. That’s an increase of 21 percent.

Bottom line is, there are some interesting demographic changes happening in Chicago. The city is effectively trading out middle and working-class families for upper-middle class couples and individuals.

But do the household and income figures really mean anything if there’s nothing to compare them with? Given what I’ve written about city/suburb relationships in Midwestern metros being tense, and cities masking urban weaknesses via annexation or consolidation, I’m particularly concerned with how cities compare with the rest of a metro area. In other words, we as urbanists need to find the right kind of framing to that allow us to view metro areas as mixes of cities, suburbs and exurbs, and have metrics that allow us to look at each separately, in comparison with each other, and holistically.

Here’s how I’d frame it. In my opinion, the core city (or cities, in the case of a multi-core city metro) serves as the, well, core city. The suburbs would consist of a metro area’s urbanized area (defined as a contiguous set of census tract blocks that are "densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas", generally with a density greater than 1,000 persons per square mile), minus the core city. The last level would be the exurbs, or the balance of the metro area with the core city and urbanized area removed.

I put that framing to the test, again using Chicago. I looked at changes in households and incomes in the Chicago metro area’s city, suburban and exurban levels, and made some revealing findings. See the table below:

The table examines occupied household and mean household income changes between 2010 and 2020, for each of the three metro tiers. Surprisingly, the core city of Chicago greatly outperformed its suburbs and exurbs in its increase in occupied households. As for household income (all figures expressed in 2020 dollars), Chicago nearly doubled the pace of the larger suburban tier, closing the gap between city and suburban areas significantly (one note: the land area of Chicago itself and the metro area are fixed quantities between 2010 and 2020, but the urbanized and exurban areas are not. The urbanized area expanded slightly, by turning former exurban land into urbanized area land.)

Viewed from this perspective, a new narrative for the entire metro area can be seen. Chicago – the city – does not appear to be in the kind of free-fall that’s often portrayed in the media. It’s fairer to say the city is undergoing a transition from its 20^th century manufacturing roots to a 21^st century knowledge-based economy. Perhaps more slowly than what happened in the nation’s coastal cities, but significant nonetheless. Chicago’s exurbs on the periphery have slightly increased in households but dramatically increased in income. Meanwhile, Chicago’s inner and middle ring suburbs appear to be in a holding pattern, with slight household growth and modest income growth.

In a nutshell, the city core is leading the transformation of the region. Change the metrics, change the perception.