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This is just completely untrue and historically illiterate. I was born and raised in Evanston, and am now living there again, and there was plenty of violence, murder, and gang shootings in Rogers Park and the Howard street corridor when I was a kid there in the 90s. Chicago, like most American cities, saw a spike in crime and violence that peaked there in 1974 at 970 homicides, still the record. It hit a slightly lower headcount but higher per capita rate in 1992 (948 homicides, but a higher rate due to a smaller population). Neither has been matched since. Not in 2016 (which saw around 762), and not during the peak of the COVID-era surge (which topped out around 800). It's been a continuous decline since then, and we had 416 last year, a 60-year low.
For reference: Rogers Park is the northernmost neighborhood in the city, and Howard Street is the literal Chicago/Evanston line. You will notice this is not 'contained' to the South or West sides of Chicago, it's the doorstep of the North Shore, some of the wealthiest lakefront real estate in the Midwest.
The southwest "bungalow belt" was safe - but it fell, starting around 1980. Its last hurrah was "Epton: Before It's Too Late" in the 1983 mayoral campaign which Harold Washington won.
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The Loop and River North were safe from like 2006-2016. I don’t know when that area got safe but it very march declined after 2016. Having gun violence at my RN condo and a scary stolen car incident in River North told me to peace the fuck out. Rogers Park I agree has issues. Had stay there for a month with a friend a few years ago.
Hey man, I get it. My family actually moved us out of Evanston while I was in elementary school for the same reason. Within the same month, I think my brother both got mugged on the way back from school, and our apartment on Dobson, just a block or two off of Howard, got broken into. We ended up moving to Aurora, and it's only in the last couple of years that I've come back to Evanston.
Funnily enough, Howard Street's problems trace back to a weird jurisdictional accident: it became the Chicago/Evanston line, got physically cut off from Evanston services by a cemetery and the L tracks, and by the 80s was so full of cheap vacant buildings that a documented heroin market moved into right around the Clark/Howard stop. North Rogers Park basically just started subdividing their homes and larger apartments into smaller and cheaper units immediately after WW2 and never really stopped or replaced their aging buildings, and lo and behold you've got a slum and all the complementary problems high-density, low-income housing with poor services brings.
River North is a bit of a different story. It's a nightlife strip packed with 5am bars, and the local alderman actually tried to kill those licenses because drunk crowds plus guns kept ending in shootings. When the 2020 riots hit, River North and the Mag Mile got specifically targeted, not randomly, because that's where the concentrated high-end retail was, by organized crews with U-Hauls. Then COVID brought a citywide carjacking wave that hit the North Side especially hard just because it's dense with cars and pedestrians, and downtown emptied out during the day as offices went remote, so you lost the foot traffic that used to keep the nightlife crowds in check.
Juneway Terrace, the northernmost street in Rogers Park was (is??) known as Juneway Jungle.
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Rodgers Park actually does have some really nice old apartments basically on the water. The demographics completely change as you get like 3 min away from the lake. Just old historical buildings that could be a great neighborhood.
River North wasn’t violence for a long time. I knew everyone in the club scene. There was a place called Cuvee that was high end. Then I guess it declined and I showed up one time and I still knew the doormen, but now they were bullet proof vest. There was a time when River North was just upper class kids from the North Shore.
Chicago had other issues leading to decline, but the violence making it into the wealthier neighborhoods and business drove a lot of people away. Chicago was two cities for a few decades. Post 2016 was a second White-Flight. I left the same reason Citadel left.
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