Word: chicago
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Perhaps most unsettling is that cracks are emerging in the Midwest, a region supposedly insulated from real estate madness. In Glen Ellyn, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, Deb and John Tritt have tried to unload their house for seven months. They've spruced up the place, knocked $58,000 off the price, to $739,000, and offered a week at their Hawaii time-share to an agent who delivers an offer. None of it has paid off, and two more houses in the neighborhood are for sale. "We're moving to a town home," says Deb, "and the only saving...
...Bostonian might look on an hour-long trip to Providence as a trek, I see nothing unusual about the fact that my family regularly jumps in the car and drives seven hours to see our family in Kentucky. Therefore, spending 60 minutes on the train from my town to Chicago in the mornings and evenings barely seems like an inconvenience at all. Sure, walking twenty-five minutes to work makes the walk to the Quad seem like a hop, skip, and a jump, but after sitting on the train for an hour, it feels great. My mixed commute is like...
...stores claim that the laws drive up the costs of doing business in the city, and ultimately deprive residents of services, low prices and jobs. There also is the race factor. In Chicago, like in many big cities, the most overlooked neighborhoods are often predominantly black. Wal-Mart has sought to score points and profits in the black community, but on its own terms - the company made a hard sell to black neighborhoods in Chicago and Los Angeles, where residents are desperate for big stores. Earlier this year, the company announced its ?Jobs and Opportunity Zone Initiative,? a campaign...
...Chicago, big-box retailers have been successful on a site-by-site basis. But the City Council vote - a 35-14 drubbing - takes the issue citywide. Furthermore, retailers like Target and Wal-Mart have to answer to their shareholders, who demand growth. ?The cities are really the last frontier for big-box retailers,? says Arindrajit Dube, a research economist at the University of California, Berkley. ?The only place they are growing is global, but the urban market is just too lucrative for them to ignore...
...short term, the ordinance will hurt the citizens who are most desperate for better choices of retail outlets. In Chicago, Wal-Mart said it would scale back its plans and focus on the inner-ring suburbs. That?s not exactly a plan for the future - it might instead be a game of economic chicken...