Quick update, Jewel-Osco is opening a new grocery store at 61/Cottage and Rahm announced plans to renovate the 63/Cottage Green Line. Zimmer also hinted at plans to build a new residence hall south of Midway and north of 61st. All announced in the past few days. This looks like just the start…
There are plenty of surface parking lots just north of 61st. Shovel ready for a new dorm or other UChicago building.
START A NEW THREAD – “PARKING AND SHOPPING” !!!
How “safe” is Washington park …
My impression is – not safe. The neighborhoods to the west are supposed to be some of the more dangerous in Chicago.but things might be changing west of Hyde Park as well as south of Hyde Park for all I know.
There are numerous GIS systems for keeping track of crime in Chicago.
https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Crimes-Map/dfnk-7re6/data
http://gis.chicagopolice.org/clearmap/startpage.htm
http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/shootings
The first link is probably the best GIS system. Despite what some people on this board maintain, Hyde Park still suffers an elevated level of crime, and the Washington Park area west of Cottage Grove has crime rates that rival the worst parts of the City.
On the contrary, I think looking at the data only confirms that Hyde Park is one of the safest areas of the city. Compare [Hyde Park](https://image.■■■■■■/ieqfWQ/hyde_park.png) to [Lincoln Park](https://image.■■■■■■/eZQsd5/lincoln_park.png) at the same zoom level.
No one’s disputing that. Raw crime rates are a very flawed metric that tell you very little about your individual chances of being a victim of a crime. The difference between a “dangerous” neighborhood and a “safe” neighborhood in terms of statistics is minuscule - the different between less than 1 crime per 1000 people and 3 crimes per 1000 people. And those three people are going to have lived there their entire lives, they aren’t going to be some U of C student passing through on their way to the Green Line.
I still maintain that the area of the city that something bad is most likely to happen to you is the Loop.
Follow along with https://incidentreports.uchicago.edu/ and you’ll find the greatest amout of crime around campus are when kids fail to watch their laptops in public spaces, and don’t lock up bikes correctly.
I couldn’t find any violent crime on campus or really even near it (within a block or two), most was theft which like @Marylandfour said is students leaving there stuff unattended and someone grabbing it.
That data is found at the following website which monitors incidents of crime per thousand residents:
http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/community
By that measure, here are the rankings among Chicago’s 77 official community areas for Violent Crime, Property Crime and Quality of Life Crime on a per thousand residents basis:
Washington Park: 2, 5, 9
Hyde Park: 44, 22, 66
Lincoln Park: 62, 22, 48
Loop: 11, 1, 25
Hyde Park and Lincoln Park have relatively low levels of Violent Crime and Quality of Life Crime, but above average levels of Property Crime. Within Hyde Park, the campus is considered to be very safe. However, the further from campus one goes, the higher the rates of crime.
The Loop has elevated levels of all types of crime, but that is largely impacted by the large transient population of workers and tourist that flow into and out of the Loop every day. The crime per thousand residents is a poor measure for the Loop.
Washington Park has some of the highest crime rates in the city, with 2.5 violent crimes per 1,000 people in Washington Park in the past 30 days, and 5.0 property crimes per 1,000 people in Washington Park in the past 30 days. (up 30% year over year). At that rate, a typical Washington Park resident will report a violent or property crime every 11 years. Who knows what does not get reported.
Possibly, but the Loop has a tremendous daily transient population. In contrast, Washington Park has very few transients and a high crime rate.
BTW, the safest neighborhood in Chicago is Mount Greenwood in the far southwest. That should be no surprise as it is the home of a great many municipal workers, policemen and firemen, and it ranks 77th, 73rd and 77th for the three types of crime. Coincidentally, it was the only Chicago community that voted Republican in the last election.
http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/community/mount-greenwood
So based on official stats, UChicago is safe. Safer than the areas around the Lincoln Park Zoo where I lived. That is a big effing deal!
Looking at the zoomed in version of the maps, its easy to see that all the areas where UChicago are engaged, are safe.
The school will continue to rise, and continue to be much much safer, because it is doing the right things in its periphery.
So all I can say is BUILD BABY BUILD! 
This is out of left field and I apologize if it’s been mentioned already – I haven’t studied the thread – but does anyone have info on whether UChicago will be expanding its Engineering program(s) soon? That seems to be the missing piece from becoming a killer destination for any main academic area.
UChicago students are not typical Washington Park residents. Bringing up these statistics while discussing whether Washington Park is safe for a UChicago student is irrelevant. No one is going to tell anyone to move off campus to 56th and Indiana - but people act like traveling into the neighborhood is just as dangerous. It isn’t, and pretending it is only perpetuates the problem.
Coincidentally, it’s one of the few Chicago communities that still holds its [racism on its sleeve](Life, and a Death, in Mount Greenwood – South Side Weekly).
Comparing Mount Greenwood to Washington Park, Hyde Park, or Lincoln Park is apples to oranges. Mount Greenwood is way, way more suburban - the nearest L line is miles away and it’s surrounded on three sides by suburbs that aren’t, demographically speaking, any different - it’s not much of a revelation that, say, River Forest (Which consistently votes Democratic! Wow!) is safer than every inner city Chicago neighborhood.
@prezbucky , I think the official answer to that is still “never.” It would be close to impossible to have an ABET-accredited engineering program that also satisfied the Core. I doubt a non-accredited engineering program would be much of a draw, and I don’t think a majority of any significant body – trustees, faculty, administration – is ready to abandon the Core as essentially the identity of Chicago’s undergraduate program.
Also, it would be ridiculously expensive to start from scratch and to build an Engineering Division at the same quality level as the rest of the University’s programs in less than a generation or two. Look at how hard a time Yale has had, and it never had to re-start entirely from scratch. If Chicago decided to do that, it wouldn’t have money for anything else.
Maybe it could acquire IIT in a merger. I suppose I could see that happening. Otherwise, it’s hard to get there from here.
Columbia, which has even more rigorously defined core than Chicago, has made modifications for its engineering students that allow them to finish within four years:
https://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/ask/faq/question/2362
But I agree with @JHS that adding a full-scale engineering department will be horrendously expensive and take forever to build up a good reputation. Harvard recently received a $400M donation to beef up its engineering department, and it will still likely forever live in the shadow of MIT.
“I couldn’t find any violent crime on campus or really even near it (within a block or two), most was theft which like @Marylandfour said is students leaving there stuff unattended and someone grabbing it.”
I don’t care too much about theft. Sure it’s a hassle if kids have to be careful about their property and annoying when you have to pay to replace something fairly expensive, but in the end, it is just money, which is a relatively small thing compared with $300,000 in tuition, room, and board.
I care a LOT about violence, including the emotional trauma from threatened violence, and the risk that a robbery becomes something other than just a loss of property and emotional trauma.
I looked for only a few seconds, and in the report in Zinhead’s first link, found a reported strong-arm robbery at 61st, in the blocks between Logan Center and the South dormitory at 5:20 p.m. on 6/22/16.
It all depends on what you’re comparing with. If you’re comparing with other parts of big cities, that’s one thing; if you’re the kind of person who can say something like, “It’s pretty safe; the worse that’s likely to happen is that you’ll get mugged”, then maybe you think the U of C campus and areas close by are pretty safe. If you’re coming from a non-city environment, where someone being robbed/mugged (much less at gun- or knife-point, much less injured at all) is the kind of thing you’d see on the news, not hear about happening to friends of friends, then that same description will seem very different to you.
BTW, when I was a victim of violent crime in Hyde Park, I almost didn’t report it (stress, hassle, and knowing that the only benefit would be that it would show up in crime reports … and then when they came, the Chicago cops ended up criticizing me for the bad locks U of C had on my apartment). But in the end I did report it, and looking at the online reports now, I realize that it probably didn’t even show up in the regular crime reports. When I was a victim of violent crime in the Loop (a mugging that slightly injured me), I didn’t report it, because I absolutely had to get to work that morning and I guess I didn’t feel like it would make much difference. I never thought to ask the guy who lived in our U of C apartment the year before us, the one who was robbed at gunpoint coming home from class at 4 in the afternoon, whether he reported that crime, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was no. Crime reports may or may not tell you about relative crime levels, but they don’t tell you about absolute crime levels, because a lot of it isn’t reported.
“Coincidentally, it’s one of the few Chicago communities that still holds its racism on its sleeve.”
- A police shooting is automatically racist? Interesting thought process there.
“Comparing Mount Greenwood to Washington Park, Hyde Park, or Lincoln Park is apples to oranges. Mount Greenwood is way, way more suburban - the nearest L line is miles away and it’s surrounded on three sides by suburbs that aren’t, demographically speaking, any different - it’s not much of a revelation that, say, River Forest (Which consistently votes Democratic! Wow!) is safer than every inner city Chicago neighborhood.”
- "way more suburban" doesn't mean safe. Check out the Austin neighborhood, for instance.
@JBStillFlying Did you read the article? After the shooting, some activists came to protest. In response, half of Mount Greenwood, far outnumbering the protestors, came out with baseball bats and pit bulls and shouted racial slurs at them.
A week later a girl was [url=<a href=“https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20161107/mt-greenwood/marist-high-school-devastated-by-students-racist-text-that-went-viral%5Dsuspended%5B/url”>https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20161107/mt-greenwood/marist-high-school-devastated-by-students-racist-text-that-went-viral]suspended[/url] from a local high school for texting “I F****** HATE N*******”. The South Side Weekly article goes more in depth about Mt. Greenwood’s deep rooted racism, but I have a friend here from Mt. Greenwood and no one from the neighborhood is particularly surprised about all this. Mount Greenwood is where the old, blue collar South Side that used to regularly form gangs to go into Black neighborhoods and beat up random kids (our illustrious former mayor Daley was part of the Hamburg Athletic Club, one of the most notorious ones) moved when they abandoned their neighborhoods.
Have you been to Austin? There’s nothing suburban about it. A better comparison would be a suburb like Harvey - but comparing a solidly middle class White community with a deeply segregated and impoverished Black suburb is, again, apples to oranges.
@JHS Stanford has only three of its nine engineering programs ABET accredited. Its not an issue for top flight schools, and can be a hindrance for those schools on the leading edge of science and technology to worry about ABET. I believe more and more top schools will not be getting ABET accreditation as it takes time and money away from the program itself. Having said that state universities and others will still need to get it in order to validate there programs.
The statistics were posted in response to a question regarding the safety of Washington Park. Every year a new batch of students and parents get involved with UChicago, and every year there are recurring questions regarding safety on campus, Hyde Park and the south side. Rather than promoting your opinion as to what is safe or not, it is better that new students and parents can see the underlying data and make their own decisions.
Mount Greenwood was brought up because someone up-thread made the inaccurate assertion that Hyde Park was one of the safest areas of the city. That is terribly misleading. In terms of crime, the statistics show that Hyde Park is probably average on a per capita basis for a Chicago community, with Mount Greenwood being the safest and Garfield Park being the most crime ridden.
To put things in perspective, in the past 30 days, here are the total number of violent crimes and property crimes in each of these areas.
East Garfield Park 57 / 63
West Garfield Park 40 / 78
Hyde Park 9 / 70
Lincoln Park 11 / 172
Mount Greenwood 0 / 14
BTW, most of the kids attending UChicago and other top colleges likely grew up in a suburban area with crime rates similar to Mount Greenwood, so moving to an “average” city area like Hyde Park can be quite the adjustment.