Chicago's "Decline" In Population: Blacks Leaving the Central City For the Suburbs
06/17/2012
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Aaron M. Renn writes about what he calls Chicago's "demographic disaster" in City Journal:
Begin with Chicago’s population decline during the 2000s, an exodus of more than 200,000 people that wiped out the previous decade’s gains. Of the 15 largest cities in the United States in 2010, Chicago was the only one that lost population; indeed, it suffered the second-highest total loss of any city, sandwiched between first-place Detroit and third-place, hurricane-wrecked New Orleans. While New York’s and L.A.’s populations clocked in at record highs in 2010, Chicago’s dropped to a level not seen since 1910. Chicago is also being “Europeanized,” with poorer minorities leaving the center of the city and forced to its inner suburbs: 175,000 of those 200,000 lost people were black.
The second Mayor Daley took a striking number of vacations in Paris, and brought back some highly publicized good ideas, like floodlighting bridges over the Chicago River at night just because it looks cool. I suspect, however, that the most important idea he brought back from Paris was that Americans were nuts to let violent poor people push them out of their own great cities.

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