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Notes -
Chicago was strongly affected by red-lining. Anecdotally, most of the non-petty crime is strictly limited to the south and west sides of the city. There is very little chance you will just "wander" into the bad neighborhoods unless you are completely oblivious, deliberately or otherwise, to the changing neighborhood affluence markers. It's literally a gradient from good -> bad. The only real exception to this rule is the area around Hyde Park, which is the purview of the University of Chicago. It's smack dab deep in the ghetto, the metra stop for Hyde Park is very rough, but the actual neighborhood itself is super nice, until you cross the street boundary.
I was living on the South Side, and kept going to places like the DMV, or the grocery store, or some cool little fried shrimp place on a bridge, or a nature preserve, and my father in law kept giving me startling strong opinions about the places I had to drive through to get to them.
I lived on the outmost west side of the "good" parts of the city, in avondale/logan square. It was fine. The neighbor had a bit of "character" about it, but was more rough working class rather than actually ghetto. The worst thing that ever happened was a drive by shooting 3-4 blocks south of my apartment. Unfortunately, as is generally the case, a bystander was caught in the crossfire.
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