Here are maps showing the change in population by census tract between 2010 and 2020 in the Chicago area. The numbers are from the full 2010 Census and from the 2020 redistricting data released by the Census Bureau on August 12, 2021.1
These maps are comparable to the 2000-2010, 1990-2000, and 1980-1990 maps that I made while working at the University of Chicago Library’s Map Collection. I again used red for population increase and green for population decline. I acknowledge that some people would have preferred to reverse the color scheme (or avoid using red and green at all since many people are red-green color-blind), but I’ve opted for consistency.
These maps suggest that there has been a continuation—maybe even an intensification—of many of the trends that date back at least to the 1980s. The area of most concentrated population growth in the Chicago region is a substantial zone around the Loop, where there has been a great deal of new, generally expensive, multi-unit housing built on land that had mostly not been residential at all (at least in recent decades). In the last ten years, this area of population growth expanded along the city’s Lakefront, mostly to the north but also to parts of the South Side. The areas of greatest loss have been certain predominantly African-American neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, the southern suburbs, and (especially) northwestern Indiana. There have been similar losses in some Northwest Side, mostly (but decreasingly) Hispanic areas. The population of most of Chicago’s suburbs has generally been more stable than that of the city. There is a complicated patchwork of growth and loss, the former perhaps more likely on the North Shore and in the outer suburbs, the latter a little commoner in some older suburbs.
Here’s a map of Chicago and vicinity:
And here’s a map of the larger region:
- The tract boundaries used are for 2010. Where 2010 tracts have been split into several new tracts in 2020, data from the latter have been consolidated to 2010 boundaries. In the very few cases where two 2010 tracts have been merged to form a single 2020 tract, 2020 data have been distributed among the corresponding 2010 tracts. Boundary changes between 2010 and 2020 affected fewer than 3% of Chicago-area census tracts, so any dubious data manipulation would be all but imperceptible on these maps. Note that the thin black lines on the maps are tract boundaries; the thick black line represents the Chicago city limits; the blue lines indicate freeways; and the location of dots within tracts is random. ↩