“I think there’s not as many resources as there are in other neighborhoods,” he told me.
#Chicago 1930 census how to#
Part of the problem, he told me, is that kids that grow up in neighborhoods like his often don’t know how to apply to jobs or where to seek out help. He’s currently piecing together two part-time jobs that both pay minimum wage. But after taking a 13-week course to get a welding certificate, Travis hasn’t been able to find a full-time job in Chicago. Travis couldn’t afford college, but he wanted a good, steady job with a solid paycheck, so he decided to become a welder like his grandmother before him.
Someone like Travis, who has lived in Chicago his whole life, just miles from this growth, should be surrounded by good job opportunities. For each new job for an educated worker in a city, five additional jobs are created for people like construction workers, waiters, and hairdressers, according to research by Enrico Moretti, an economist at UC Berkeley. Many mainstream economists believe that it should: In theory, people who live in booming cities with a highly educated population will have more opportunities than those in rural areas because the successful workers in cities will spend money, creating jobs for less-educated people. cities to be named one of PricewaterhouseCoopers’s “ Cities of Opportunity” in its periodic report on places that foster economic innovation and “common wellbeing.”īut this prosperity isn’t filtering down to people like Brastell Travis, a 21-year-old who lives in the city’s Englewood neighborhood. These factors are part of why Chicago was one of just four U.S. (It has since ticked back up to 5.3 percent.) Almost one-quarter of households in the city of Chicago earned more than $100,000 a year in 2016, according to census data. In May, the unemployment rate for the Chicago metropolitan area sank to 4.1 percent, the lowest since the government started tracking it in 1976.
The evidence is everywhere, from the gleaming office towers and condos going up alongside the river to the prosperous international companies such as Motorola Solutions, the whiskey giant Beam Suntory, and GE Healthcare that have relocated their headquarters to downtown. Like many of America’s biggest cities, Chicago has thrived in the globalized world-at least on a superficial level. The disconnect is why Andrew Diamond, the author of Chicago on the Make, has called Chicago “a combination of Manhattan smashed against Detroit.” In some prosperous cities, such as Chicago, where the number of wealthy census tracts has grown fourfold since 1970, people at the bottom are struggling as much as they always have, if not more-illustrating that it’s not just the white rural poor who are being left behind in today’s economy. But this neat division, rural versus urban, erases another part of the story of America’s changing economy: the pressure that those twin forces are exerting within cities, pulling some people up to the very top while pushing others to an unforgiving bottom. They’re moving to urban places.īehind this divergence lies a straightforward story: The twin forces of globalization and technological change are enriching a handful of big urban areas, while resources are drained from the heartland, leaving it often devoid of opportunity and prosperity. People with a college education are leaving rural areas. Rural areas are losing jobs urban ones are gaining them. Rural counties are poorer urban ones richer. CHICAGO-Americans hear a lot these days about the country’s urban-rural divide.
0 kommentar(er)
