[Chi-town]

There are parts of the South Side that are improving, and there are areas that are nice already (i.e. Hyde Park, although the downside there is access to downtown). But there is a reason why most people want to live on the North Side.

 

[Chi-town]

Bobaks! I love that place!

I lived in LaGrange for a few years in high school, and all my friends and I would go to Bobaks to buy booze... those people had no concept of what constituded acceptable identification. "I left it in my other pants" would suffice.

Do most people really want to live on the North Side? There are thousands and thousand of people on the South and West Sides who have absolutely no desire to live on the North Side. I'm one of those people.

Great. But if one believes in the basic economics of market capitalism, and I do, they would disagree with you. I don't doubt that many South and West siders have no desire to live on the North Side. But most people in general (including, of course, those moving to the city from elsewhere) absolutely do. There is a reason prices are higher on the North Side, and it is because there is more demand to live there.

And you're sort of the pot calling the kettle black with that last statement, Dampyre. You say yourself that you have no reason to ever go north of Division Street... why would I need to go south of Roosevelt? Both sides of the city have everything local residents need, and for anything else one can go downtown (that's the point of a downtown, is it not?). And Chicagoans on both sides of the city could care less about the suburbs, for the most part.

 

[Chi-town]

chi-town, aren't you a sox fan? comiskular is south of roosevelt, there's one reason right there.

Yeah, I ride the Red Line to 35th occasionally. But that's an exception to the rule, based on the fact that I grew up a Sox fan because a family friend was one of their team doctors. He'd get me seats behind home plate, and visits to the clubhouse before and after games; how could you not be a Sox fan?

 

[Chi-town]

As a North Sider, I've gotta say: thank God for the South Side. It's real. It's gritty. It's muscular. It's what Carl Sandberg had in mind.

There may be more money on the North Side than the South, but a lot what made Chicago rich, the heavy industry that drove the place for so many years, was on the south.

Yep; and now the accountants, bankers, lawyers, marketing execs, etc that make Chicago rich live on the North Side.

 

[Chi-town]

Leopold and Loeb tops any crime story the North Side has ever had!

Yeah, Al Capone and John Dillinger were nobodies!

 

[Chi-town]

How do those people make Chicago rich? :lol:

America as a whole, and its successful cities, have been making a transition for decades from a manufacturing to a service economy. Cities like New York and Chicago now thrive thanks to jobs in areas like financial services, not factories.

 

[Chi-town]

^ Well, since most of the U.S. population happens to be white, my assertion that "most people" want to live in the North Side is accurate if one isn't hung up on race.

As for the last part; there is a reason for everything we do. If you go to the North Side, you have a reason for it. I've gone to the South Side, since summer: 1) biking down the lakeshore; 2) to see friends @ the UofC; 3) to take visiting family to the Robie House and UofC campus; 4) to check out new buildings @ IIT; 5) White Sox games; 6) visiting friends from school in Beverly. But for the most part, Chicago is a city where most day-to-day requirements can be satisfied within walking distance of home and everything else can be found downtown. How many Manhattanites ever go to Queens?

So, only people who live on the North Side work in the financial services field. Gotcha....

Most do; there are few upper middle class South Side neighborhoods.

 

[Chi-town]

^ No. Chicago is three or more distinct parts that intersect downtown, but are relatively self-supporting otherwise. A glance at a CTA map will show this. But one still can't deny the fact that, overall, wealth in the city in concentrated in North Side neighborhoods near the lake.