Chicago’s surprising “hot” neighborhoods
Whenever I come across a “these are the hot Chicago neighborhoods” article/blog post, I usually just sort of glance over them. They are all the same, talking about the same "hip," popular neighborhoods, and they don’t really have anything new to say.
But every once in a while, an article throws me for a loop. Like this recent Chicago Tribune piece.
The hot areas are scattered throughout the Chicago area, according to data from the Chicago Association of Realtors. Within Chicago, they include neighborhoods like Albany Park, the Near West Side, West Lawn, Ashburn and Dunning.
Albany Park has been touted as the next big gentrification frontier for as long as I’ve been in this country. Ditto the less gentrified portions of Near West Side. But the other three surprised me.
West Lawn
All three are working-class neighborhoods that were traditionally home to immigrants from Eastern European countries. All are part of the so-called Chicago Bungalow Bet. And none of them are as purely white as it used to be. Ashburn is a mixed-race neighborhood, sandwiched between a (traditionally) largely white Scottsdale and (traditionally) largely black Wrightwood. I say “traditionally” because, since the early 2000s, the number of white residents has been decreasing while the number of Mexican-American residents has been increasing, throwing old assumptions off-balance. West Lawn and Dunning have also seen an increase in Mexican-American residents, though while Dunning remains majority-white, West Lawn is definitely majority-Hispanic right now.
The reason for the shift, as best as I can tell, is the same. More Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics working factory jobs, while the older generations of white residents are choosing to retire to the suburbs and the younger generations are moving elsewhere in the city.
Which is kind of why their presence of the list of “hot” neighborhoods puzzled me. They are not the sort of neighborhoods people are supposed to want to move to. They are nowhere near the ‘L’ lines, and there are certainly no coffee shops or hip galleries. In fact, it’s businesses tend to be fairly old-school. But reading the article carefully, I realized that the people who are driving the growth aren’t 20-somethings fresh out of college - it’s the working-class families that have been the lifeblood of theses neighborhoods for decades.
In Chicago, Pat Cardoni, an agent with Insider Show Homes, works with a rehabber that targets neighborhoods it sees as on the upswing, such as West Lawn and Dunning.
[…]
"There's lots of buyers out there," Cardoni said. "I see a stabilizing force. It's hard-working families. There's certain areas where there's opportunity and a demographic of people coming around again, saying it's time to buy."
And, when you think about it, there are many things about these neighborhoods that would appeal to working-class families. They are safe neighborhoods, the housing is affordable and not terribly elaborate, and they are relatively close to railyards, airports and factories.
I am curious how many of those families are Mexican-American or otherwise Hispanic. The article doesn’t say anything about race/ethnicity. While the population patterns suggest that Hispanic families drive the growth, I find myself thinking back to a WBEZ article written back in December about the population changes in Belmont Cragin - another Bungalow Belt community that has seem population shifts similar to West Lawn… until recently.
Peggy Mejias has been living in this house in Belmont Cragin since the 1980s, when home prices were near $50,000. Back then her household was the second Latino family on the block. Over the years she’s seen the neighborhood shift from mostly white to mostly brown.
“Now it’s more Mexican. But now I’m starting to see more Anglos in the area,” Mejias said.
Maybe it’s a bit of column A, a bit of column B. Not enough data to be sure. But it is something worth keeping an eye on.
And heck - I have been meaning to explore Ashburn and Dunning.
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