Over the past decade, Albany Park’s white, black, and Hispanic populations all grew by modest amounts, yet the community area’s total population dropped by almost 9%, according to the Chicago News Cooperative‘s collection of community area-specific Census data. This got us wondering — is Albany Park’s Asian population on its way out?
It seems so. In 2000, Albany Park’s myriad Asian communities formed a population of 10,178, or 17.6% of the neighborhood’s total population of 57,655 people. Last year, they numbered 6,694, or 12.7% of the total population of 52,657.
At the start of the decade, the Asian population in Albany Park consisted primarily of four groups:
- Filipino: 2,805 people
- Indian: 2,232
- Vietnamese: 1,740
- Korean: 1,382
By the end of the decade, the Filipino numbers had barely changed, but the group constituted a much greater proportion of Albany Park’s Asian population. The other three groups saw significant drops in their numbers:
- Filipino: 2,842 people (+1.3% from 2000)
- Indian: 1,497 (-32.9%)
- Korean: 694 (-49.8%)
- Vietnamese: 471 (-72.9%)
The changes aren’t completely unexpected, says Liz Griffiths of the Albany Park Chamber of Commerce, simply because the neighborhood tends to be a port of entry for immigrants who over time head to communities found along the Edens. Chamber studies in recent years have hinted at steady out-migration, but many of the people leaving still operate businesses in Albany Park, and the neighborhood continues to have large daytime and weekend populations of these groups, she says.