Ah, yes there are some nice new stores and trendy bars and restaurants in that part of LP... The city has moved many of the former "Cabrini Greenies" into Section 8 housing about 1 1/2 miles west of the new Apple Store... That public transit station has been infested with muggers and thieves for years now...
Please. The neighborhood and the world have changed. Your hyperbolic fear of an imaginary urban dystopia is just laughably irrational. Instead of fixating on what has been demolished a few blocks south, I'd suggest also
taking a look at what has been built a few blocks north. The average HH income within one mile is $107K; the average Lincoln Park condo in 2010 (!) sells for $600 per square foot (i.e., a walk-in closet costs $30K+); and the nearby Crate & Barrel, Whole Foods Market, Home Depot, and Best Buy stores are their highest or second-highest grossing stores worldwide. (Home Depot and Best Buy have each opened 3-5 stores nearby, to try and disperse the crowds.) The neighborhood has indeed changed really quickly, so it looks a bit unkempt wherever developers dreamed bigger than their investors, but companies like Apple don't make big investments without doing lots of due diligence.
Oh, and you're wrong about restaurants: they're relatively rare in the Clybourn area, trendy or otherwise. However, head exactly "1 1/2 miles west of the new Apple Store," past the multi-story Mercedes and Cadillac dealerships, and you'll be at Milwaukee, North, and Damen at the middle of Wicker Park. There, you will find not "Cabrini Greenies" but restaurants dishing out $30 rack of lamb, lounges with $20 cocktails, Parisian boutiques selling $1000 dresses, coffeehouses packed from dawn til midnight with dozens of MacBook users, and throngs of yuppies gobbling all of it up. The houses aren't prisons of poverty, they're swank lofts and million-dollar mansions. Strange as it might seem,
one million consumers live within five miles of this store (
five times the population around the recently opened Spokane or Boise stores); somehow, we occasionally manage to emerge from all the howling misery and mayhem suffocating this Purgatory... and purchase precious Apple products.
As for the train station, there have been two muggings in the past six months in or around it. In that time period, around 1.8 million people have walked through the station -- about 10,000 a day. I don't know about your standards, but a one-in-0.9-million chance of getting mugged sure doesn't sound like "infested with muggers."
I wish the didn't have to take it up the butt with the local Chicago tax withholdings.
Um, tax withholdings here are pretty low: state income tax is just 3% and there's no city income tax. Sure, sales taxes are high, but Illinois' overall taxation is "below average" for states per the Tax Foundation.
I hate that I am forced to drive through it so often.
Ah yes, the old "it's so crowded, nobody goes there anymore." (Except, of course, the countless thieves lurking everywhere!) There's conveniently a subway station and bike lane right there, you know.
