Justin Fox, Columnist

What's Going Right in Chicago

The suburbs are suffering. But the heart of the city is thriving like never before.

January 11, 2017 at 8:57 PM UTC

Corrected

January 12, 2017 at 4:43 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Darkness and light.
Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

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The news out of Chicago hasn't been great lately! There were 780 homicides in the city in 2016, up from 468 the year before.1484168639790 The city's public-employee pension funds are in deep, deep trouble. The Chicago metropolitan area shrank by an estimated 6,263 people in 2015 -- the biggest population loss of any metro area in the nation.

It all sounds like a city in a downward spiral. But have you been to Chicago lately? I was there last week, working out of the Bloomberg bureau downtown, attending a conference nearby, and visiting people in neighborhoods to the north and northwest. Even in the chill of early January, the city seemed as vibrant as I've ever seen it. When I tried this observation out on Alden Loury, director of research and evaluation at Chicago's Metropolitan Planning Council, he agreed: "In the central business district and the residential areas near it, I don't know that there's been a more prosperous time in decades."