Violence Driving People Out of Chicago

And out of the swanky neighborhoods. ‘I’ve never had to think about my own safety in this way before’: Shaken by summer looting in affluent neighborhoods, some Chicagoans are moving away.

But they don’t want to wait it out here in the city, fearful of stepping outside at night and hoping for things to maybe get better.

They want out.

“Not to make it all about us; the whole world is suffering,” said Amber, a 30-year-old nurse who lives in River North. “This is a minute factor in all of that, and we totally realize that. We are very lucky to have what we do have.

“But I do think that I’ve never had to think about my own safety in this way before.”

Security is high up on the list of things people want, even if they don’t recognize that until it is gone. And it is gone in Chicago. You can’t buy security in Chicago. The most expensive neighborhoods are being looted, are the site of carjacking and, robbery, assault and rape. At some point, like now, people will say “enough.”

Chicago has been Neil Spun’s home for more than half his life, but recently, the 60-year-old state worker has been conflicted about staying in his Edgewater apartment due to the rioting and looting that started in late May following the death of George Floyd. [SNIP]

“There have been riots before, and looting,” Spun said. “It just seems to me now that the city isn’t doing anything about it. I don’t see this getting any better, and so I’d like to leave.”

Life in Chicago, and in other cities, is taking on the characteristics of the state Hobbes described as a State of War.

Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil in 1651. This is not a new idea.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.