quote:

14,000 just went plain old missing

Have they checked any abandoned buildings on the South Side?

I wonder how much he had to pay to get Madigan to let him be the gov.? He will be the patsy and I'm not sure he even realizes this.
He's like a kid with the mega Make a Wish.

I live in Wis. just 8 miles from the Illinois line. IL. is doubling it's gas tax effective July 1st. The Wis. C-stores that sell gas are thrilled. I pity the C-store owners anywhere on Il. borders. Their business is about to crash. What a kick in the nuts by your own state!

Why Is Illinois Hemorrhaging Residents?

Stateline June19

Chicago and the rest of Illinois have lost population in recent years, partly because of a lack of economic and housing opportunities for black residents and, broadly, the loss of manufacturing jobs.
The Pew Charitable Trusts

CHICAGO — It’s known here as The Exodus.

People are leaving Illinois in droves. Republicans blame the state’s high taxes and its unfunded pension liability, which tops $130 billion. Democrats believe it’s the state’s lack of investment in education and infrastructure.

One thing is certain: Illinois’ population has declined by 157,000 residents over the past five years, making it one of only two states — West Virginia is the other — to lose people over the past decade.

Illinois’ predicament is a perfect storm of declining manufacturing, stagnant immigration, declining birth rates, young people leaving for college and never coming back, long-standing economic discrimination against black residents, high housing costs, and the continued draw of residents to the Sun Belt.

What’s happening in the Prairie State may offer national lessons about the deindustrialized economy and how that creates inequity issues in wages and housing, said Matthew Wilson, a senior research specialist at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute.

For a Rust Belt state to thrive, Wilson said, officials have to focus on retaining and growing its manufacturing sector by training workers, providing affordable housing and attracting new businesses. Building up the manufacturing sector has to go hand in hand with attracting high-paying jobs, he said.

Illinois has struggled with all of that.

A 2016 poll by Southern Illinois University found that nearly half of Illinois residents wanted to move to another state, citing taxes, weather, ineffective and corrupt local government and a lack of middle-class jobs. A March poll from the university found that two-thirds of Illinois residents think the state is going in the wrong direction.

Between 2017 and 2018, 114,000 more residents left Illinois than moved in from other states. Those who left mostly moved to Florida, Texas and Indiana, IRS data shows.

Chicago’s population has dropped slightly, largely because black residents are leaving for areas with lower housing costs and more jobs that don’t require higher education. In downstate Illinois, the population loss has come largely from a decrease in manufacturing jobs.
Tale of Two Cities

Nearly 15 miles south of the famed Magnificent Mile in the booming downtown Loop is another stretch of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. Up until the 1980s, this part of the Roseland neighborhood was “the place to be” for black residents, lined with stores and restaurants. But many of those are gone now, leaving only the boarded-up facades and a distant memory.

As Abraham Lacy drove down the street earlier this month, the new father and Chicago resident described the “heart-wrenching” state of the area since its decline began 50 years ago.

This was a manufacturing hub. But those jobs are gone. Nearly 28% of the population lives below the poverty level, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“There’s no hope,” he said. “It brings me to tears. Here we are in the third-largest city in the country.”

Lacy is the executive director of the Far South Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit that brings commercial investments from public and private partnerships to local low-income, majority-black neighborhoods like Morgan Park, West Pullman and Roseland to alleviate poverty.

Since peaking in 1980 at nearly 1.2 million people, the black population of Chicago has dropped by more than 400,000 people, and the trend continues. Black residents are leaving Chicago for the suburbs and for neighboring states such as Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin.

Some are reversing the Great Migration of the first half of the 20th century, returning to Southern cities including Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, said Pete Saunders, an urban planning consultant based in the Chicago area who has written extensively on this issue.

“They just feel frozen out of opportunity,” he said. “They feel Chicago is a closed system. They can’t get ahead here. It’s designed for others to get ahead.”

Chicago is still attracting educated people seeking jobs in law, finance and tech, and many neighborhoods of the city are thriving. But there’s a growing divide between high-paying jobs and low-wage, “dead-end” work, with not many jobs in between, said David Wilson, a geography professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Real estate development is booming along Lake Michigan and in the Loop. Gentrification, he said, “is spreading its tentacles across the city,” including the traditionally poorer South Side and West Side. In other parts of the city, including Roseland, residents lacking economic opportunity are leaving.

“There’s something wrong here,” said Jawanza Malone, executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, a South Side grassroots group currently leading a rent control campaign “to stem the tide of displacement.”

Chicago is among a handful of metropolises that are losing their black residents, including Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose.

The high rate of black residents leaving is the main cause for Chicago’s stagnant population, and the drain could get worse, several fair housing advocates and urban demographers said.

More than a third of young adults want to leave Chicago, a January survey from the University of Chicago’s GenForward Project found. Participants, especially African Americans, said the biggest reason for wanting out was racism and how that affects policing, job opportunities and neighborhood development.

Chicago’s new African American mayor, Lori Lightfoot, seems keenly aware of this challenge, calling it “the proverbial canary in the mine shaft” when asked in April about the city’s population decline by the Chicago Tribune.

“We’ve got to create real opportunities and incentives for businesses and for all neighborhoods to prosper,” she added.

Chicago’s population is staying afloat because of a continued influx of Asian immigrants. The number of Chicago-region residents born in Asia has increased by 60,000 since 2010, while the number of Chicago-region residents born in Latin America has decreased by 18,000, according to a Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
Immigration policy protest
Stateline Story April 24, 2019
Immigrants Prevented or Minimized Population Loss in a Fifth of U.S. Counties

While some traditionally Mexican Chicago neighborhoods like Pilsen have been hit by gentrification pressures, Chinatown and other neighborhoods south of the downtown Loop have generally been shielded, said David Wu, executive director of Pui Tak Center, a church-based community center next to the Chinatown gate.

After the 2020 census, the city will have its first majority-Chinese ward, Wu said. The area in 2017 elected Democrat Theresa Mah, the Illinois General Assembly’s first Chinese American member.

“These neighborhoods are defined by an ethnic identity,” he said, sitting in the neighborhood’s new public library, where half of the books are in Chinese. “Whereas other communities are defined by socioeconomic class.”

President Donald Trump’s strict immigration policy might halt this growth, however. In an attempt to keep some of this immigrant base in Illinois, state lawmakers last month passed a bill that offers financial aid to undocumented immigrants attending public colleges or universities.

But development in the South Loop is spreading south and could make Chinatown and other Asian American enclaves less affordable.
Stateline June19
David Wu, executive director of the Pui Tak Center, has been a leader in bringing Chinatown a new library and riverfront park. Chicago’s population loss has been slowed by booming Asian immigration.
The Pew Charitable Trusts
Keeping Manufacturing

Vincent Flaska wanted to expand his forklift manufacturing business in 2015. He could have either kept Hoist Liftruck in Illinois, where the company was based since 1994, or moved it just over the Indiana border to East Chicago.

He chose Indiana.

“The environment that has been created in Illinois is not supportive of those blue-collar jobs,” he said.

With the move, Flaska saved $1.75 million annually on workers compensation insurance and an additional $1.5 million on state taxes — on top of the $15 million in financial incentives from Indiana. The company is now closer to the steel mills it relies on. Some of his workers bought their first homes after the company relocated.

The move “was a no-brainer,” he said. Earlier this year, Flaska’s business was acquired by Toyota Industries North America — a move, he said, that couldn’t have happened if it was still in Illinois.

There has been “chronic and concentrated joblessness in manufacturing” in Illinois, said Teresa Córdova, director of the Great Cities Institute. Because of changes to rural and manufacturing jobs in the state, working-age people are having a harder time finding work in downstate communities, she said.

Four out of five counties statewide, many anchored by manufacturing, are losing population.

As manufacturing has steadily declined in the Rust Belt over recent decades, states have scrambled to keep businesses from going overseas or to other places within the United States.

For states such as Indiana, that means promoting its lower tax rates and offering special tax incentives, like it did for Hoist Liftruck. For Illinois, that means promoting its workforce and logistical hub of Chicago.

But Moody’s found that Illinois manufacturers will face “daunting competition,” as companies look to lower-cost areas to keep competitive. The decline in manufacturing in Illinois, the report said, “will prevail.”

Manufacturing is responsible for 592,000 jobs in the state, according to the Illinois Manufacturers Association. From 2001 to 2016, the state lost 30% of its manufacturing jobs, according to a Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning analysis.

Lake County, just north of Chicago along the Wisconsin border, is one of many in Illinois that have lost population in recent years. But leaders there have concentrated on retaining and growing pharmaceutical and advanced life sciences manufacturing sectors, said Kevin Considine, the president and CEO of Lake County Partners, a public- and privately funded business development corporation.

“I won’t kid you,” he said. “You drive through southeast Wisconsin and you see a lot of brands that were Illinois companies.

“I’m not saying that nobody is moving, but I think we’re doing a pretty good job over the last four years at making the case at why companies should grow here instead of move.”
Chicago Chinatown
Stateline Story August 29, 2017
Should Chinatowns Stay Chinese?

While neighboring states such as Wisconsin and Indiana have “been very good at playing the incentive game,” attracting businesses with tax incentives and infrastructure grants, Considine said the skilled workforce in Illinois “is far and away our greatest strength.”

But in order to keep that workforce competitive, the state must retain educated young people, encouraging them to pursue careers in biochemistry or welding, he said. Waukegan is one of three cities in the country to offer an advanced manufacturing curriculum for high school students, training 200 skilled technicians a year.

The reality, however, is that Illinois has a brain drain problem.

Nearly half of Illinois college-bound public high school students chose to go to out-of-state universities and colleges in 2017, according to a March analysis by the Illinois Board of Higher Education. In 2002, that number was under 30%. Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin continue to take in more college students than they lose, U.S. Department of Education data show.

When young people go out of state for college, they are less likely to return home after graduation, said Nyle Robinson, the board’s interim executive director. This is especially concerning for the rural, downstate regions that have been losing residents.

Illinois ranks second nationally in losing college students to other states, topped only by New Jersey, according to the U.S. Education Department. “It’s certainly concerning,” Robinson said.

Robinson especially cites the education funding cuts that came from the 2015-2017 budget impasse in Illinois as a contributing factor to this outmigration of young people. Both high- and low-income students are leaving the state, he said.

Robinson was encouraged to see the Illinois legislature this month approve $1.9 billion for the University of Illinois System — the largest funding increase in nearly two decades. The funds are designated for new buildings, renovations and other capital investments. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the budget.

Some neighboring states have tried to take advantage of some of the political turmoil in Illinois and negative press around high taxes and population loss.

Speros Batistatos, the president and CEO of the South Shore Convention & Visitors Authority, helped launch a digital campaign to lure Illinoisans to move to Northwest Indiana, targeting young families and empty nesters with the promise of fewer taxes and an easy commute to Chicago.

“We’re not trying to bash our friends next door,” he said. “We’re just trying to be a competitive suburb of Chicago.”

The campaign seems to be working. Peter Novak, the CEO of the Greater Northwest Indiana Association of Realtors, said, “Builders can’t build homes fast enough.”

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/r...morrhaging-residents

I lived in Illinois from the age of 3 until I was 17. I was too young to care about politics but I enjoyed growing up in a rural area with plenty of hunting and fishing. It’s too bad the dems are destroying the state. I haven’t been back since 1987 but I’ve been wanting to visit just to show my wife where I grew up and to visit my old barber and other people from my childhood. I’m sure it will be my last trip to that state.

we ( here in il)
wait to get gas , until we are in Iowa .

we maybe buy gas in Il about twice a year.

when ever we are at the Sa,'s or costco , it never fails,
there are always Illinois people filling up, over there.

not one or two cars, but 5 or 6 , at a time

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
we ( here in il)
wait to get gas , until we are in Iowa .

we maybe buy gas in Il about twice a year.

when ever we are at the Sa,'s or costco , it never fails,
there are always Illinois people filling up, over there.

not one or two cars, but 5 or 6 , at a time

This is only going to become more prominent when the gas tax goes up July 1st!

quote:

we ( here in il)
wait to get gas , until we are in Iowa.

I live in Missouri, but not far from the JB Bridge. We also have lots of cars with Illinois plates getting gas in Missouri.

I'm right over the Il.-Wis. line on the Wis. side. Ill. charges sales tax on groceries, Wis. does not. Pull into one of our grocery stores especially on the weekends and there are as many Ill. plates in the lot as there are Wis. plates. Ill. recently had a Rep. governor but the poor guy never stood a chance. Up to his eyeballs in corrupt democrats.

Have no fear, Mary Jane to the rescue. I am sure no graft or corruption will be part of the licensing process either. What is next for Illinois, legalized prostitution?

https://apnews.com/7b793d88f3c84417b83db0f770854960

Illinois becomes 11th state to allow recreational marijuana.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Illinois’ new governor delivered on a top campaign promise Tuesday by signing legislation making the state the 11th to approve marijuana for recreational use in a program offering legal remedies and economic benefits to minorities whose lives critics say were damaged by a wayward war on drugs.

Legalization in Illinois also means that nearly 800,000 people with criminal records for purchasing or possessing 30 grams of marijuana or less may have those records expunged, a provision minority lawmakers and interest groups demanded. It also gives cannabis-vendor preference to minority owners and promises 25% of tax revenue from marijuana sales to redevelop impoverished communities.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker, whose election last year gave Democrats complete control over state government again after four years under GOP predecessor Bruce Rauner, signed the bill in Chicago amid a bevy of pot proponents, including the plan’s lead sponsors, Rep. Kelly Cassidy and Sen. Heather Steans, both Chicago Democrats.

“Today, we’re hitting the ‘reset’ button on the war on drugs,” Cassidy said.

Residents may purchase and possess up to 1 ounce (30 grams) of marijuana at a time. Non-residents may have 15 grams. The law provides for cannabis purchases by adults 21 and older at approved dispensaries, which, after they’re licensed and established, may start selling Jan. 1, 2020. Possession remains a crime until Jan. 1, a spokesman for Senate Democrats said.

“The war on cannabis has destroyed families, filled prisons with nonviolent offenders, and disproportionately disrupted black and brown communities,” Pritzker said. “Law enforcement across the nation has spent billions of dollars to enforce the criminalization of cannabis, yet its consumption remains widespread.”

On the campaign trail, Pritzker claimed that, once established, taxation of marijuana could generate $800 million to $1 billion a year. He said dispensary licensing would bring in $170 million in the coming year alone. But Cassidy and Steans have dampened that prediction, lowering estimates to $58 million in the first year and $500 million annually within five years.

Carrying the psychoactive ingredient THC, marijuana was effectively outlawed in the U.S. in 1937 and in the 1970s was declared a drug with no medicinal purpose and high potential for abuse.

Blacks have been most susceptible since then to “Just say ‘No‴-era crackdowns. Pritzker quoted a 2010 statistic from the American Civil Liberties Union that while blacks comprise 15% of Illinois’ population, they account for 60% of cannabis-possession arrests.

How long till unemployed dope dealers are on the dole. I left the shit show that is Illinois 22 years ago, early adopters I guess.

The taxes and unfunded state union pensions are driving people away. I have a friend who lives in a blue collar town outside of the Chicago suburbs. He has a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house, nothing special, and it has property taxes of over $8K a year! He works in law enforcement, his pension is grossly underfunded, so he probably won't get what he is supposed to when he retires. To tell the truth I don't know why he is still there.

The new gub, known as "JB the Hutt" has never had a paying job till he was elected. He is a trust fund kid from one of the wealthiest families in the nation. He has no conception of life as it is really lived by his "subjects".
He will probably be the final flush for a state that is already circling the bowl.............

quote:

Have no fear, Mary Jane to the rescue.

Also known as a great way to de-incentivize people to work. Crime will increase. More businesses that have a no drug policy for its employees will leave.

But I’m sure the illegal drug trade will stop cold; also, the corrupt city government would never dream of misusing the weed tax money. Hey, maybe they’ll even get the Obama library/self aggrandizement monument back on track.

with 12,582,032 residents as of July 2022 — but that 104,437 residents have moved out of the state in the same period.

Per
WGN website.

6th most popular state

I lived in Illinois from about age 4 to age 17. I left in 1987 and have never gone back - it is not a decision that I regret.

I still have family there that try and convince me to come back, I tell them that will never happen. Actually if all the liberals left I might go back, there was some good fishing and hunting there and some nice land.

You ain't missing nothin

Thatcher once famously said the problem with socialism is that it will run out of other peoples money.

So, when do you think that will actually happen?

They're all moving to a place they haven't ruined yet. Like an old tick on a fresh dog.

Remember to turn your phone sideways when recording the fights in the parking lot.

quote:

Originally posted by goose5:
Thatcher once famously said the problem with socialism is that it will run out of other peoples money.

So, when do you think that will actually happen?

It will only happen when there aren't federal programs to continually bail out the blue states.

Here’s the List of the Top 20 States Getting ‘COVID’ Bailout Money (And Why It Raises a Giant Red Flag)

https://fee.org/articles/here-...es-a-giant-red-flag/

quote:

They're all moving to a place they haven't ruined yet. Like an old tick on a fresh dog.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
There are Republicans in Illinois. Downstate. Most of the farmers are Republican. Chicago and the idiots in Springfield are the problem. Great pheasant hunting.