The Middle Class in Chicago Is Almost Gone

“It raises a lot of questions as to what kind of city it will be,” said Janet Smith, co-director of the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which compiled the maps that document Chicago’s shrinking middle class — and an increasingly polarized city — over the past five decades. Demographer Rob Paral said the map of Chicago’s shrinking middle class is partly showing that sort of racial change, which brought with it an accompanying reduction in average incomes. Smith, the UIC researcher, said as the middle class is squeezed out of a growing number of neighborhoods, Chicago, like many cities, has “fewer and fewer children.

Source: www.wbez.org