For people who made their career and livelihood in the city, Conner wrote, “it seems to me that there should be a sense of obligation to the place that created the opportunity for you.”
By the next day, Conner says, “I got 25 or 30 emails supporting me and three that told me to F off.”
A more articulate reply came from Marge Naegele, a Charles Rutenberg Realty agent based in Naperville. A former longtime Chicago resident who now lives in Harwood Heights, Naegele told Crain’s that “I don’t think parents with kids in school have time to invest in waiting for the city to change, or helping the city change. They can come back later if it changes, but you can’t ask them to stay if they don’t think their kids are safe.”
Conner’s newsletter is the latest flashpoint in a contentious debate citywide and more specifically in real estate circles. Are people leaving Chicago and, if they are, is it because of crime?
According to the U.S. Census, Chicago lost more than 81,000 people, or 2.9% of its population, between April 2020 and July 2022. Crain’s reported earlier this month that crime — and sometimes just as important, the perception of crime — is one of the factors in the city’s weak real estate market relative to the suburbs. Other factors include the protracted work-from-home era that makes living within an easy commute of downtown offices less necessary, and the widespread disappointment in Chicago schools and public transit, Crain’s reported earlier this month.
News reports of crime are a constant. In May and June, 11 people were robbed within several blocks of one another in Lincoln Park. River North had shootings in May and June. A shootout between people from two vehicles on Irving Park Road lodged bullets in the windows of some nearby apartments in May.
A result is that “I get calls saying, ‘I want to get out of here,’ or ‘Let’s move our search to the suburbs,’ ” said Mario Greco, a Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices agent who lives in and focuses on North Side neighborhoods. “It’s been going on since COVID in 2020,” Greco said, but this year, “it’s gotten a little more forceful.”
Friday morning, just before he spoke to a Crain’s reporter, Greco says he received a screenshot of a local newsletter about armed robberies in Lincoln Park. The client, a Chicago resident of many years, texted him that she’s scared. She has been considering selling her Lincoln Park house but does not yet have it on the market, he said.
Among the couple of dozen supportive messages Conner received was one from Carole Klein, a Baird & Warner agent who lives in Streeterville.
“I appreciated the fact that he was talking to people about not giving up on Chicago,” Klein told Crain’s.
Klein attributes much of the talk of an exodus from Chicago to lopsided media coverage of crime. “I feel like every time there’s a shooting in Chicago, it’s plastered over the national media and the local media as if there’s no other city that had a shooting over the weekend,” Klein said.
The cumulative effect of the crime coverage, Klein said, is that “people who don’t live in Chicago and don’t come into Chicago think we’re taking our lives in our hands every time we walk out the front door. And we’re not.”
Former Chicagoans who now live in New York were recently corresponding with Klein about getting a place here, she said, but “they said they’re going to put that off until they see what happens” with the city’s efforts to get crime under control.
Derek DiSera is a Compass agent and multifamily property investor in Irving Park, who says several of his clients who expected to live a long time in the city “are voting with their feet.” Recent clients have left Chicago for Barrington and Wilmette, with crime “on their minds. It’s not the only reason people leave, but it’s one of them.”
After a carjacking near their Bucktown home, a couple told DiSera “We’re done,” he said, and began looking at homes in Elmhurst.
Some, clearly, opt to stay despite scary incidents. DiSera said a neighbor was sitting on his front porch one morning and called out to thieves who were about to steal a catalytic converter from a car parked a few doors down. The man told DiSera that the thieves then pulled up in front of the man’s yard and yelled at him, “Do you want to f-ing die today?”
“That didn’t scare him,” DiSera said. “They have four kids. They’re staying.”
Conner grew up in the city and with his wife and fellow agent, Rudy Conner, and moved to northwest Indiana for several years before moving back to the Near North Side in 2022. “We’ve seen the violence,” he said. “It was at North Avenue Beach,” which was shut down because of violence in both May 2022 and May 2023.
In his…
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