Will the South and West sides take Chicago down?

Five years ago we were writing about some of the larger projects that promised to inject new life into parts of Chicago’s South Side. In the interim, promise and reality have gone in different directions.

Patrick Sharkey, in an interview with Richard Florida at The Atlantic Cities, suggests that the current state of large tracts of Chicago’s South and West sides has negative implications for the city as a whole:

But there does seem to be growing recognition throughout the policy world that the key to sustainable prosperity lies in our cities and the urban areas that surround them. A related insight, and one that rarely makes its way into discussions of metropolitan policy, is that the fortunes of entire urban areas are compromised when cities contain sections featuring areas of severe concentrated disadvantage, low-quality schools, and high levels of crime and violence.

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