I live north of Howard, that little notch of Rogers Park that sticks up above the rest of the city. This chimney of Chicago is the perfect place to observe the disappearance of the middle class in Chicago. When I walk out my front door, I see poverty: There’s a tent city in Triangle Park. The homeless under the Howard L viaduct, trying to keep warm and dry. On Mondays and Wednesdays, the hungry line up for free food at the Howard Area Community Center, and every day, they sit down to a free lunch at A Just Harvest. At least once a day, I’m asked for spare change. A panhandler once followed me into the post office. Another followed me into a Subway, until she was yelled at by the employee, who had seen this bid for cadging a free meal. There’s a man in kneepads who stands in front of a Caribbean bakery chanting, “Dollar? Dollar?” as though it’s his life’s fixation.
That’s only one side of the neighborhood, though. On Juneway Terrace, just around the corner from all this desperation, the tall, deep-porched houses are worth — on average — $800,000. You won’t find a working family’s bungalow north of Howard. The neighborhood hairstylist charges $75 for a cut. It may be unusual to find wealth and penury existing so close together, but to me, it says a lot about the trajectories of the rich and poor in Chicago.
There’s a map that, like so many other Chicago maps, charts the decline of the middle class in the city. In 1970, nearly half of the city’s census tract were identified as middle income. Now, the few middle-class neighborhoods left are in the Northwest and Southwest corners of the city, where city workers with middle-income jobs — teachers, firefighters, nurses — tend to cluster. The South and West sides are almost all lower income. And there’s a new element: high-income neighborhoods, which have expanded from a thin strip along the lakefront in 1970 to consume almost the entire North Side today. According to the Pew Research Center, the nation’s share of middle-income families has declined from 61 percent to 51 percent over those years. The middle-class squeeze seems even more pronounced in Chicago…