Amazonia

Due to a number of factors, my husband & I will most likely be relocating to Chicago early this fall. While I'm currently commuting there for my consulting work, I'm not all that familiar with the various neighborhoods (given that I pretty much just go to work or sleep while I'm in town). Thus, I'm asking for y'all's advice on neighborhoods to consider in which to set up permanent residence.

Here's a quick summary of what we're looking for (we'd be moving from a 90 acre coastside ranch to Chicago, so we know we have to change our standards a bit):

- We will be renting, not buying so need a neighborhood where there's a fair amount of rental properties to choose from
- Prefer to be able to rent a single family home, as we have two large dogs that are not the best fit for an apartment setting
- Want a "real" neighborhood with shops and restaurants within walking distance, trees and such and not smack in the middle of high rises
- Ideally an easy commute via public transit to Hyde Park (which to a Bay Area native, easy means an hour or less travel time)
- Prefer to spend $2000 or less per month on rent (as one motivation for the move is to reduce our cost of living expenses a fair amount from Bay Area prices)
- Quiet is key. I'd have a hard time transitioning from the utter silence of farm life to noisy college age neighbors/busy streets.
- Not as upscale/yuppie as Lincoln Park (which is where I have an apartment now, which is nice, but a bit too bland for my taste), prefer something a bit more diverse

Since I'll continue my consulting work at U of C Hospitals after we move, the Hyde Park and Kenwood neighborhoods are at the top of our list (not just for convenience, but I very much like the general vibe of these areas). I'd greatly appreciate any of your suggestions on other neighborhoods (or even suburbs) to check out. I'd love to hear where you locals live and/or neighborhoods that you've always thought were "livable."

chgoeditor

Amazonia, good luck on your impending move to Chicago!

I live in Lakeview (on the north side, north of Lincoln Park), so I'm speaking from my own personal experience. I can't tell you if it's right for you, but I wanted to give you an option and idea.

If you head a further north and/or west of Wrigley Field (into neighborhoods called North Center, Lincoln Square, Uptown or West Lakeview) you'll find:

* Actual neighborhoods that have shops and restaurants (which aren't all chains);

* Some ethnic diversity (albiet no where near as diverse as Hyde Park, but virtually no neighborhood is);

* Single family homes, 2-6 flats, and very few high-rises;

* Far fewer yuppie/just-out-of-college kids like there are in Lincoln Park (though a fair number of young couples pushing strollers);

* A lot of trees.

If you go to www.transitchicago.com you can plug in a few hypothetical addresses and see how quickly you could get to Hyde Park. I initially didn't reply because I was skeptical that you'd be able to get there within an hour from the north side, but was surprised to find it was possible. (I'm not originally from Chicago, and having lived in cities with superior public transporation, I'm not always a fan of Chicago bus and rail system.) If you did chose to drive/car pool, you may already know that Hyde Park is a fast commute from Lakeview/etc. via Lake Shore Dr.

toomanybooks

My wife and I lived in Hyde Park 1994-2001 (she's a professor at the U of C).

Hyde Park is a pain in the butt to get to from the north via public transportation, especially in the winter or in the rain. From downtown, easy via the Metra Electric commuter train (www.metrarail.com).

There are people who commute from Oak Park via train to downtown, shift to a bus to transfer to the Metra Electric station, then another train. I am told it takes about 90 minutes. No way on earth I'd do that twice a day.

We had a son in 1997 and decided to look south along the same Metra line and settled on Flossmoor. (Hyde Park is not particularly great for kids.)Neighboring Homewood is nice as well. I'd suggest you take a look at them. Or the next stop down the line, Olympia Fields.

Flossmoor is diverse (22% African-American I think I have heard). 8000 or so people, small downtown with couple restaurants including excellent brewpub with post office and bank and new $12,000,000 public library, lots of tree-lined streets, many professionals, professors, etc. About 26 minutes by train to Hyde Park, about $100 monthly for train pass. Excellent schools for the most part. Low cost of property compared to Lincoln Park/downtown/Gold Coast, median around $300K I think. One of the highest rates of owner-occupied houses in Chicagoland, so may be challenging to find a rental. I can recommend a Realtor.

Homewood a little less expensive (median maybe $250K), roughly 17000 people. More shops in the "downtown." The two towns share a parks system which is excellent. Tons of shopping (Target, Home Depot, supermarkets, various chain stores, etc.) a few blocks away by car. Hyde Park is quite bad for shopping; you have to go all the way out near Midway airport for a group of Target/Wal-Mart/Best Buy, Sears, etc. 30-40 minutes or so. Few grocery stores in HP and expensive and run by clowns, too.

If you are working on a contract with the U of C, you may be eligible to rent from the University, which restricts rental of its better properties to faculty and staff. We lived in a huge 4-bedroom townhouse with full basement and 9/10-foot ceilings just a couple blocks from the hospital and paid something like $1400 a month in 2001. They have smaller properties, too.

HP is expensive. Some years ago I was told a nice 2-bedroom apt. was over $900. There is a high-rise apartment building near the lake (name escapes me) with lots of amenities like a health club onsite and shopping nearby that might serve.

bdesmond

You can do Hyde Park in an hour from many parts of the city. I tend to take the #6 Jeffrey Express Bus from state st.

Hayden

It is possible to drive from Oak Park to Hyde Park reasonably quickly, if you take the Eisenhower to the Dan Ryan, and then drive across the South Side. For a variation, one could drive through the Loop and take Lake Shore Drive down to Hyde Park, but of course one would have to deal with the Loop traffic, then. Oak Park is about 25 minutes from the Loop in rush hour traffic, and I think Hyde Park would be reverse commute. Some don't like driving across the South Side slums, but I find them a beautiful part of Chicago, and the neighborhoods have moved up quite a bit. Transit from Oak Park to Hyde Park is pretty poor--one can take the el and then walk over to the metra line or wait for the bus, but toomanybooks has it right: transit is a trek.

Having grown up in Hyde Park and Oak Park, I can say they're fairly similar in overall feel. Oak Park is known for its architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, etc.), great schools, extensive libraries (a "village" of 55,000, the citizens recently voted to rebuild the main library, which project was just completed, and there are two branch libraries), park & rec system, and diversity. Under diversity, one can understand racial, ethnic, and class diversity, although the last has decreased a bit with the jump in housing prices over the last 10-15 years. Oak Park, as a largely residential suburb, has correspondingly high property taxes, in part because of its schools, libraries, and park system, and very limited industrial tax base.

Oak Park has the distinction of being the community at which the redlining and blockbusting that characterized late 1950s and 1960s real estate on Chicago's West Side were not allowed to dominate, and instead, an integrationist approach was taken. Although the reasons for demographic shifts on the West Side are many and complex, and people may find integration good or bad, that is only to say that within Oak Park there is a degree of pride in the community's diversity and open-mindedness, and that represents a change from the stereotypical Oak Park of Ernest Hemingway's youth or the 1950s (Hemingway, who grew up in Oak Park, famously referred to Oak Park as the land of "broad lawns and narrow minds."). Although there are a few pre-1900 farmhouses and other houses, most of Oak Park's housing stock is turn-of-the-century (ca. 1900s) or a bit newer, with the vast majority of the newest stuff having been built in the 50s, and quite a few condo projects (and the odd new home) in the last 10-15 years.

To get a feel for Oak Park, take a look at the Wednesday Journal, which is the local paper (http://wednesdayjournalonline.com/). One can also get the Oak Leaves, but that is more a mass-produced paper and won't give you the same perspective. I don't know if Bobbie Raymond is still around at the Oak Park Housing Center on South Blvd. near Austin (http://www.apartmentsoakpark.org/), but they do a good job of describing the village there and giving people advice on what the neighborhoods are in an even-handed way. They now offer an apartment listing service (i.e., different from what you're looking for), but call them up if you visit Oak Park with the intention of living there.

A couple drawbacks are that Oak Park is landlocked--so you don't get the lake views (or summertime lake cooling) you'd get in Hyde Park--and, while it has a nice park system (not to mention Jens Jensen's nearby Columbus Park in Chicago, with its recently restored refectory and waterfall, and the nearby Forest Preserve lands), it's not quite the same as the lakefront, Jackson Park lagoons, and Washington Park in Hyde Park. One has to go a little further for as much dog romping room.

More broadly, a challenge is that Hyde Park is also fairly isolated. A lot of what Chicago has to offer in terms of theater, music, and museums is closer to the Loop or towards the north side. While there is a sort of new neighborhood that has risen out of old industrial land just south of the Loop (I think Mayor Daley may have moved there), a lot of the more Hyde Park-like neighborhoods are north of Congress/the Eisenhower, and could require a commute across the Loop.

I'm not as familiar with what's towards the south. I think there are some great working-class neighborhoods down there, like Beverly or Pullman, but they have a bit more of a feeling of isolation from the rest of the city, or so I've heard.

If you are feeling adventurous, you might try buying a place around Garfield Park, in Austin, or on the South Side. These areas are still by-and-large slums, though, so although you might find an architecturally interesting house and large lot, the potential crime rate may be a bit different than what you're looking for. With the exception of magnet schools and some similar schools, the public schools in those areas are considered to be pretty bad.

-Hayden

toomanybooks

This is true, but there are delays sometimes.

I much prefer trains for the smoother ride, but the bus is available.

toomanybooks

I pretty much agree with Hayden, but with the Dan Ryan reconstruction project over the next two years commuting that way to HP is going to be excruciating and unpredictable.

HP does have an isolated feel like an island; while it may be only 30 minutes to get to the train and go downtown, many residents end up feeling stuck there. The "activation energy" (as scientists say) seems high, especially in the almost unending winter, when depressed undergrads can be seen trudging around slowly, heads down.

One other thing about HP, and Oak Park to a lesser extent so far as I can tell, is the extreme skewing of the political views of the residents. Gotta be over 90+% leftist in HP, many of them in whackjob cuckoo-land.

As right-of-center people, we found it quite annoying sometimes. HP is "diverse," yes, but it's that fake diversity where people look different and come from all over, but almost everybody thinks exactly the same, and incorrectly on a lot of matters IMO.

There is this smug attitude from many white residents in HP that is generally unstated, but definitely there, that they are morally better than folks who live in less "diverse" areas, that they themselves are superior because they live cheek-by-jowl with lots of African-Americans. I actually heard this articulated a few times, which shocked me at first.

Crime is also much higher in HP than in the 'burbs I listed above. My impression is that it's improved, but always will be there. We did feel physically threatened a few times, and had our house and car burglarized several times in 7 years.

Beverly/Pullman, etc. are worth looking at, but check the commuting options. Might be a pain.

IceTrojan

I recommend the Cabrini-Green area.

Sweet Willie

actually is getting better, far better than it was.

ElmhurstNick

If you don't have children, I'd recommend Bridgeport (the area west of US Cellular Field), centered around 33rd/Halsted. Great access to downtown and Midway, it'd probably be easy to get to Hyde Park, lots of gentrification of residences (and it is only a matter of time before the businesses start to show up). Two major ethnic enclaves are nearby (Chinatown and Pilsen[Hispanic]), not to mention that Bridgeport was a predominantly Irish neighborhood. The mayor grew up in Bridgeport, so it's relatively safe for being in the city.

But if you have kids, I'd avoid it as the schools are not going to be up to a reasonable standard.

UNITED959

It's going to be hard to find a house with a yard for doggies for $2k/month.

While purchase prices of homes in Chicago are a touch lower than what you're used to in the Bay Area, rent is almost competitive.

I'd think you'd have the best luck in the Lakeview area -- there are tons of parks & green areas along the lake front where you can take the dogs, tons of shops and restaurants within walking distance, and it's a safe area. You can take the EL down to Hyde Park, and it for sure is less than 1 hour.

toomanybooks

Lakeview is nice, but don't you mean the El to vicinity of Michigan/Randolph Millennium Station, then the Metra to HP?

Doesn't the El only get you as close as 63rd and Cottage Grove? Not too bad, I guess, but not ideal.

Maybe things have changed since I moved.

fastflyer

The el does not get you close enough to the U of C to be a realistic daily option. You can transfer to a bus at 55th Street, but the transfer point is adjacent to the partly-demolished Robert Taylor housing project. The el tracks used to shade 63d Street almost to the lake, but this spur was demolished and the tracks now terminate at Cottage Grove.

The Metra Electric & South Shore services along the IC tracks are another option. By the way, that is not exactly a close walk to much of the University either. Hegewisch or one of the towns in Indiana, perhaps?

Hyde Park is isolated IMHO. It used to have more retail, but it is losing its village "feel." I prefer the part east of the tracks (again, a hike to the hospitals). Kenwood is gorgeous, but more expensive, and there is even less of a village there.

There are some less expensive neighborhoods west of the ghetto. Largely bungalow housing; not sure how village-like they are. Neighbohoods near the 55/ Garfield bus around 55th and Kedzie or Pulaski could work.

UNITED959

Hmmm...yes, I'm probably wrong about public transportation here...as I hardly ever use it!

I thought the EL went everywhere.

chgoeditor

[QUOTE=toomanybooks]Lakeview is nice, but don't you mean the El to vicinity of Michigan/Randolph Millennium Station, then the Metra to HP?
QUOTE]

When I was originally posting about the relative merits of Lakeview and the north side (should have also thrown out the neighborhood of Roscoe Village as another possible neighborhood to consider), I plugged in Lakeview to HP on www.Transitchicago.com and it recommended bus or El to downtown/Millennium Station and then Metra to HP as the fastest route.