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Chicago Is Now Smaller and Less Black, Census Shows By MONICA DAVEY CHICAGO — As Chicagoans prepare to vote next week for their first new mayor in decades, the city itself looks different from how it did during much of the era of Mayor Richard M. Daley, who is retiring: it has shrunk, and black people in particular have left. While Chicago remains the nation’s third-most-populous city — with 2.69 million people — it lost more than 200,000 residents during the last decade, Census Bureau figures released Tuesday show. That is about a 7 percent decrease, a sharper drop than some leaders had expected and gloomy news for the city’s budget writers (who have to worry about the tax base) and elected officials (who have to worry about who will bear the political brunt of redistricting). The decline among blacks may be explained in part by migration to the suburbs, the demolition of thousands of high-rise public housing units and a broader population shift to the South. “Chicago was probably among the pre-eminent destinations of the Great Migration, and this marks the end of an era in some ways,” said William H. Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. According to Mr. Frey’s analysis of the new census data, blacks still make up roughly a third of Chicago’s population (with whites representing around another third, and fast-growing segments of Hispanics and Asians a little more than a third), but that is smaller than in the past. “That old image of being a white-black city is changing,” Mr. Frey said. “It means that the city itself will need to pivot from those old white-black issues and stereotypes to something that is really new.” Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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