Report Shows Changing Face Of Chicago Area
CHICAGO (WBBM/CBS) -- A report is out Monday about the changing faces in many Chicago area neighborhoods.
As WBBM Newsradio 780's Pat Cassidy reports, more than 600,000 people in the six-county Chicago area live in neighborhoods that have seen racial or ethnic change over the past 10 years.
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In Chicago, whites are moving from the lakefront west to less-expensive areas, while Hispanics are moving even farther west to the bungalows and two-flats of the Northwest and Southwest sides.
For an example of the change, the neighborhood near 54th Street and Kildare Avenue was 67 percent white, with no one of Hispanic heritage. But by late 2009, the area was 68 percent Hispanic, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
But whites displaced Hispanics in some Northwest Side areas, including parts of West Town and Logan Square, and the part of the Bridgeport neighborhood located west of Halsted Street, the Sun-Times reported.
Another change seen in the report is that rather than starting in the city, some Hispanic immigrants are moving directly to suburban communities such as Elgin and Aurora, the Sun-Times reported.
Blacks overtook whites in some south, west and southwest suburban areas. Black populations were less concentrated in the city, but grew in particular in southern suburbs such as Chicago Heights, Glenwood, Lynwood, Matteson and Sauk Village, the Sun-Times reported.
Asians remain concentrated in Chinatown, in medical centers on the Near West Side, and in parts of Des Plaines, Park Ridge and Niles.
The most diverse Census tract in the six-county Chicago area is in Rogers Park, north of Devon Avenue between Ridge Boulevard and Damen Avenue. The tract is 29 percent Asian, 24 percent Hispanic, 23 percent white and 16 percent black, the Sun-Times reported.
