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[quote=Anonymous]I grew up in the Chicago area.  My parents live near Northwestern University and are about 15 miles from downtown and four miles from the city limits.  Where they live could not be more idyllic leafy suburbia with big old houses and pretty streets and a cute downtown.  I have friends who live in various neighborhoods in the city.

The truth is the violence happens mostly in a few neighborhoods on the West and South Sides, and there is pretty much no spillover into other neighborhoods where most professional families live.  There are a few gentrifying neighborhoods that get require a bit of vigilance, like any other city environment--comparable neighborhoods in DC are no different.  But mostly there is such a deep history of residential housing segregation in Chicago that neighborhoods with the worse intractable generational poverty feel isolated.  Most people are not walking around being afraid of randomly getting shot unless you live in one of those neighborhoods.  In the neighborhoods where the violence happens most of the killings are gang related and targeted, but occasionally someone innocent gets shot like a very tragic example of a 7 year old who got in the crossfire this weekend.  It really feels like two cities sometimes.  You could be out in Lincoln Park at the Zoo and completely ignore what is happening on the West and South Side.

I think the comparison to Baltimore is reasonable, but Chicago is a much larger city/metro area with a larger job market.  The numbers of wealthy or even middle class areas that don't feel "affected" by the very poor areas are more numerous than in Baltimore.  There are a lot of structural reasons that make the gun violence so intractable, one being Chicago being a transit hub in terms of rail and highway transit which means that it has the perfect infrastructure for distribution from Mexican cartels geographically.  Another being that parts of the South side border Indiana, so any gun control laws the city or state makes are pretty unenforceable when you can just get a gun from a gun show in Indiana.

With regard to living there, yes it is cold and miserable in the winter.  It is also an architecturally stunning city with the Lake and the river going through it, and in many ways a beautiful world class city.[/quote]

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