Most big cities are segregated, both economically and racially—and the economic segregation amplifies the racial segregation.

The exodus of middle class Black and Hispanic people from high cost urban areas drives some crazy income distributions in places like San Francisco: https://statisticalatlas.com/place/California/San-Francisco/.... If your apartment building, restaurants, etc., are places mainly populated by those making over $100k/year, there will be a vanishingly small number of Black people in those places. (See table 10). Contrast somewhere like Atlanta, where a third of households making $75-100k/year (a very comfortable income in that city) are Black.

Chicago is pretty segregated, but the transit situation is easily the best of any major US city. A car helps you get places quicker, but an adventurous person can get all over the city easily on the buses and trains and any given neighborhood is very walkable.

The main issue is the cold. You have 3 months of amazing summer and 8 months of cold with two weeks of spring and fall on either end. If you're not from the Midwest, it can really wear on you and bring you down.

Cold is fine.

Getting robbed at gunpoint isn't. That's the real Chicago you have to contend with.

Crime-wise (and on many quality of life issues), Chicago is like 3 cities in one: - a rich, extremely safe city (broadly, greater Loop and north/northwest sides) - a poor, unsafe city (south and west sides) - a middle income, very average city (the more suburban, far northwest, south, and southwest area)

Your experience will vary greatly, depending on which areas you visit.

It also has more than triple the population of SF, or twice as many people as SF+Oakland combined, so any absolute (as opposed to per-capita) numbers aren't comparable.

Only place I’ve been robbed is SF (Tenderloin, 2002). Only place I’ve had my car broken into is SFBA (Berkeley 2008, San Jose and SF in 2018).

And Chicago has nearly 6x as many violent crimes per year as Oakland or San Francisco and still edges them out on property crime.

Is that per captia?

Chicago is less than 6x bigger than San Francisco or Oakland.

SF, yes (“only” 3x bigger), but Chicago is more than 6x the population of Oakland.

I'm just asking for accurate statistics.

As someone how has lived in both cities, I can say I felt unsafe way more often in SF than Chicago. Chicago's crime is gang related and isolated to a part of the city kind of disconnected from the main hub. But in SF the craziness is in the nice areas, I have had to deal with way too many violent mentally unstable people there, in fact I remember one of the two years I lived there a British woman randomly got a kitchen knife jabbed through her skull. In SF you're dealing with a large number of seriously mentally ill going to and from work.

As someone who has lived in several of the places topping the crime charts in the US, I want to tell you that this comment stinks of privilege.

In Chicago you were able to afford to live somewhere isolated from the reality of most Chicagoans.

In San Francisco you have so thoroughly priced everyone out that there isn't anywhere for the lower classes to go and so the bullshit is everywhere for everyone to deal with. Boo hoo.

Never happened to me or my friends. And apparently there's less poop on the sidewalks than SF.

I don't know anyone that died of Covid. I wash my hands and are not walking around in Chicago.

I have no plans to live in fear and plan to walk around downtown Chicago in the future.

Happened to a friend across the street from University of Chicago 2 weeks ago.