moorhosj wrote:Almost Retired wrote:Having lived in Chicago area for half my life and now in Texas for the past 15 years I think the statistics you mention don't tell the story because they are influenced by other factors. Like Transportion. We live in the Austin area. Rush hour driving is no fun, but it's not nearly as bad as Chicagoland. And that's without adding snow and ice in the winter. Chicagoland does have better public transportation because it's more condensed. Most of Texas is too spread out to make that work for us. Outside the cities I think Texas in general has much better roads than Illinois. Health care access in our larger towns and cities are just fine. And as I work in the health care field it is my observation that hospital quality is very high in Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston. Our rural areas are not as well served simply because of how spread out Texas is. We have counties bigger than Rhode Island. It's an 800 mile drive from Texarkana to El Paso (east to west). I would match many of our urban Medical Centers against any in Illinois. The Education stats are skewed. Our suburban schools are excellent. As good as any public schools in Illinois. And the University of Texas system is much larger, much better funded, and higher rated in many fields than the Univ of Illinois system. Our health and educational statistics suffer due to the Rio Grande Valley area. Too many non English speaking immigrants down there. Hundreds of thousand of illegals. There is serious poverty down there in the border counties. Cartel crime. Eliminate the Rio Brande Valley and our health, education and education statistics would be much better. We have brutal summers. You have brutal winters. That's a trade off. The difference I see personally is that we can live in a bigger, nicer house, in a safer neighborhood, for less than half the cost of the nicer Chicago suburbs. We sold a house recently for $425 K. 4 bedrooms, 3 full baths, huge landscaped lot. Our property taxes were $6k a year. That same house in my sister's town of Downers Grove would have cost us $700-$800K and our property tax on that house would have been closer to $16 K. So we can enjoy a comparable lifestyle for far less money. And we pay no State income tax. To each his own. We loved Chicago as teens and 20 somethings. Got less enamored once we bought a house and were paying those property taxes. Couldn't stand it by the time we turned 50. We'd never move back. Not even if Mayor Munchkin gave us the keys to a free house. Miss the pizza and the Italian beefs and Ricobene's breaded steak sandwiches.
In lieu of providing any actual data to support your stance, you have a bunch of anecdotes and opinions (from 15 years ago). It’s ok to prefer living somewhere else, but just hand waving away actual facts kind of shows your bias.
I live in a $600k single-family home in Chicago. I pay $7k in property taxes and have good public schools. A lot can change in 15 years.
“The education stats are skewed.” - How? By looking at the whole state rather than just suburbs? Sounds like the opposite of skewed to me.
“Eliminate the Rio Grande Area and out stats look better.” - Why would we ignore parts of a state when measuring the impact of a states policies? What an odd comment to make while trying to explain how great your state is.
Medical centers - Northwestern is ranked #10 in the country and Rush is ranked #17. Houston Methodist is #20. https://health.usnews.com/health-care/best-hospitals/articles/best-hospitals-honor-roll-and-overview
I get that you prefer Texas, more power to you, but at least provide some data for your stances. Trying to throw out parts of the state to make it seem better pretty much proves my point that taxes are so low because state doesn’t invest in things that make working class people’s lives better (transportation, healthcare, education).
This is an interesting debate you are having. I will say, if you pay only 7k in property taxes with good schools on a SFH in Chicago, you are in the 1%. I don't know how you pulled that off. My mom is in Morgan Park and hers continually rise. She's over 13k on a property that cost her 170k 20 years ago and they're pushing for another property tax increase. Look at an area like Homewood Flossmoor if you want to go suburban and the property taxes there are outrageous.
The thing not making this an apples to apples comparison is that Chicago skews the income data in Illinois. In several different areas in the state of Texas, you can make that 60k average. I can go to Dallas, Austin, Houston, Waco, San Antonio, El Paso and make around that much money. I eliminate one of those regions and the state is still at the 60k average. You eliminate the Chicagoland area and Illinois falls flat on it's face.
