2000 census numbers are in for Illinois. How does the region stand? There was a welcome rebound for the city, but faster growth on the suburban fringe challenges the Chicago region to preserve a high quality of life.
Chicago…The city is a turnaround winner. Chicago’s older suburbs, with some troubling exceptions, are holding their own. Many go-go suburbs along the metropolitan frontier are booming … so much so, they are at risk of choking on their own success.
So say analysts at the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) after an initial scan of the 2000 population figures for Illinois and the Chicago region released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
“On balance, this is positive news for the Chicago region,” said MarySue Barrett, president of MPC, which has tracked development patterns in the Chicago area since its founding in 1934. “This confirms that the metropolitan region is growing at a stronger, healthier rate. We have finally shaken off the Rust Belt blues and reestablished ourselves as an economic magnet.”
“The City of Chicago,” Barrett added, “has turned an important demographic corner and is growing again. That’s huge – a reversal of a half-century’s negative trend.”
Chicago had been losing population since the 1950 Census, when the city’s official population peaked at 3.6 million. It now appears, however, that bullish immigration, coupled with the much-publicized back-to-the-city migration of young professionals, high-tech workers, gays and affluent retirees, is more than offsetting the historic, post-War out-migration of suburb-bound families.
The U.S. Census counted nearly 2.9 million city residents, a four percent increase over the 2,783,726 here in 1990.
The biggest growth story, however, is regional. Strong gains in the five collar counties pushed the population of the six-county metropolitan area to just over 8 million. That’s an increase of 11.4 percent during the 1990s, or four times the rate of growth during the previous two decades.
Indeed, from 1970 to 1990, the population of the six-county region grew by only 4 percent – the result of lower birthrates, smaller households and the flight of manufacturing jobs to the Sun Belt and developing countries.
The region’s return to double-digit growth is “both an opportunity and a challenge,” Barrett said.
“The opportunity is to show we’ve learned over the past 30 years how to grow more sensibly,” she said. “Growth is good. Growth means new jobs and rising incomes. But growth will not, by itself, improve the quality of life in our region. Not unless we plan now for balanced development.”
What worries MPC is that much of the growth during the 70s and 80s consisted of developments in which homes were set apart from services, a separation that increased our dependence on the automobile. Little thought was given to locating residential and commercial developments close to public transportation, to preserving spirit-lifting green space, or to building a mix of housing near outlying employment centers, including housing that entry level workers can afford. The result: longer commutes, ozone alerts and the fourth worst traffic congestion among U.S. metros.
These concerns, Barrett said, are beginning to focus political attention on the Illinois Growth Task Force, a legislative panel trying to curb wasteful, uncoordinated growth by recommending planning incentives, not mandates. There are several “balanced growth” bills now before the General Assembly, including measures to help municipalities do comprehensive planning and help companies assist their workers in buying housing closer to their jobs.
Besides the city’s rebound and the regional growth spurt, several other Census 2000 trends caught the eye of MPC analysts:
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Although Cook County as a whole gained 5.3 percent in population during the 90s, several inner-ring suburbs continued to lose. For some that’s merely the result of more elderly, empty-nest households. But for many have-not communities in south and west Cook County, population loss signals a worsening of disinvestment and debilitating racial isolation.
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The stunning 67.9 percent increase in the region’s Latino population – and the remarkably broad geographic dispersal of the 1.4 million Latinos now here – has far-reaching implications for politics, public education, social services and private-sector businesses throughout the region. No enterprise, public or private, can afford to neglect this huge and growing market.
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DuPage County remained the region’s growth machine, adding 123,000 residents (a 16 percent increase) in reaching the 904,161 mark. But with so many of DuPage suburbs fully developed, the region’s growing pains now shift to Will, McHenry, Kane and Lake, which had eye-popping percentage gains of, respectively, 41, 42, 27 and 25 percent.
"This pace of growth means there will be development pressures both in mature areas served by aging infrastructure and in new areas on the edge of our region,” said Scott Goldstein, MPC’s vice-president for policy and planning. “Unplanned growth can make it harder to redevelop mature communities, and to account for the costs of providing schools, roads and clean water on the fringe.”