“Besides, this is a misleading chart, because the middle class is still very much there, they just moved to the suburbs. I’m sure you could make a similar chart for every city in America since the 70s if you exclude the suburbs.”
What does that mean for the city itself? Here in NJ having people and businesses flee to the suburbs really hurts the cities; they run out of money, and the infrastructure falls apart. Newark NJ was laying off cops during their worst murder stats in decades; having ants living outside of the grasshoppers’ hive didn’t save them.
I don’t know about Chicago, but another problem facing cities is that the whites aren’t moving to the suburbs; they are disappearing altogether. The suburbs are increasingly Hispanic, and the dwindling number of whites move even further away.
Well, the infrastructure has only improved in Chicago in recent decades, so I haven’t seen that effect. The city has budget problems, but those are mostly all due to the union demands and bloated pension plans, not from drops in revenue.
One thing that helps Chicago is that the near suburbs are in Cook County, so a lot of suburbanites are paying into the same property tax pool. Also, most of the jobs are still in the city, so those businesses are still paying taxes.