DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Chicago’s Great Unraveling.

The city of Chicago made me who I am. When I was growing up there in the ‘50s and ‘60s—and for decades after—it was one of the world’s great cities. For all of the poverty on the South Side where I spent my childhood, teenage years, and early 20s, it was also a tremendously vital place with thriving middle-class communities, restaurants, nightlife, and shopping. My friends and I rode our bikes and played stickball in the alleys without fear. My parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins built lives there that they were proud of, where they could live with dignity and in relative safety.

Now so much of what made life in Chicago wonderful is being stamped out by violent crime and social dysfunction that city leaders seem unwilling or unable to address. In the absence of large-scale changes to the city’s overly lax criminal justice policies, without a concerted effort to restore order, I fear that Chicago may go the way of Detroit and end up as a decaying husk of a formerly great city.

In the following excerpt from a longer conversation, journalist Matt Rosenberg fills me in on what he calls “the Great Unraveling,” the downward spiral of crime and despair now gripping Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. It’s a heartbreaking story, one that we’re hearing from too many American cities. There are plenty of people like Matt who love Chicago and are trying to save it, but city and state political leaders need to intercede in a more proactive way. If they’re unwilling to do so, they need to be voted out.

You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript at the link.

I’d just add that Chicagoans elected their last Republican mayor in 1926.