During the 1980s and into the mid-1990s there were IT consultants who would take corporate housing, or some other dwelling type in the Naperville area and schlep into Chicago on the train. Many ended up buying homes and permanently relocating. It wasn’t just Naperville, but any Chicago suburb which had express train service. Billing rates “in the city” were about $10/hr higher. People ignored the fact they were wasting 45 minutes of their life each way on the train. If you missed the last express train (only 3) coming out of Chicago, it was well over an hour on the milk run trains to get “home.”
Billing rates in the burbs were $45-$55/hr for Midrange/Mainframe work; $30-$45/hr for PC work. Early billing rates in the city were $45/hr. When nobody would make the commute they shot up to a base of $65/hr. You could almost justify wasting nearly 2 hours of your life each day on a train.
One could obtain “corporate housing” in the western suburbs for $3,000 or less per month. You had wide open spaces and restaurants with good food. They also didn’t charge $60 for a bottle of wine. Corporate housing in the city varied from $4,500 – $14,000/month within the same building. Those lower floors only get sunshine for about five minutes per day. Despite it being electric, “The L” train is massively loud. You have to be completely deaf or live above the 7th floor to get any sleep.
Let us not forget you had to pay for parking. If you wanted in-building parking with security cameras so hoodlums didn’t steal your ride or just take the battery out of it you were looking at north of $100/month for that. If you hooked up with a spousal unit you could buy a house in the burbs, park in your own garage, and pay it off in under five years if you quit buying pricey cars and taking expensive vacations.
Then There Was No Parking
Everyone of the parking lots at/near/around the train yards where express trains picked up were “over subscribed.” At the Aurora Route 59 station developers built a massive apartment complex with tiny, even by Chicago Loop standards, apartments. As I recall there was some kind of gerbil tube to cross the tracks and come out in the station. The older stations didn’t have this option. Single family homes got built near them and 50% of the “market price” for those homes was being able to walk to the train.
Then The Trains Got Full
You can only add so many cars before you have people unloading on the tracks outside of Union Station. Lots of people standing in the entryway of each car because there were no seats. Some people relocated out to the train station with the first express train stop so they could get a seat. There simply wasn’t enough capacity.
Lots more tech companies started moving to “the burbs.” Office rent was atrocious in Chicago and you couldn’t get workers. Some companies in Chicago finally abandoned “the three month contract” and started signing 12+ month contracts out of the gate. It was an attempt to get people to relocate to the city.
They started pitching “it’s cheaper to just lease an apartment for a year.” Well, no. Financially it is stupid. If you own a home in the suburbs or another state and you direct rent an apartment in your own name, you cannot expense it as business travel because now it is an official residence. Unless you have the worst marriage in the world, only going home no the weekend for a day and a half is a recipe for divorce, which is most definitely not cheap.
Cost of Housing Matters
MBAs trying “price skills” and pay next to nothing for them, but your minimum billing rate is determined by housing costs. Doesn’t matter if you are flipping burgers at McDonalds, cleaning the toilets in an office, or writing the software for a new surgical robot, your billing rate is the same due to the cost of corporate housing. Follow the link for the three part blog post.
Non-English speakers have been badgering me this past week, to the point of emailing, texting (human beings do not text!), and calling on Sunday wanting me to take a C++ Linux contract at TransUnion. The week of the 19th is when the DNC is at the United Center. TransUnion is close enough to be within one of the security perimeters. Even if it is not, the bulk of the streets will be blocked off by Secret Service/FBI/local police.
I’m guessing the “must start within two weeks” stress point is because someone’s paperwork didn’t pass Secret Service inspection and they’ve been renditioned by Homeland Security. Either that or someone is about to be fired and they don’t know it.
I should have taken a screen shot when I looked last week. None of those < $4K/month things are actually available until late September at the earliest. Most appear to be listed just for show, like those super cheap one bedroom apartments advertised on the sign outside of a complex yet don’t exist.
Last week there were lots of $13K-$15K units and a few $6500/month. Your first week on-site must cover the entire month of corporate housing plus parking plus maid service. (They always make you take maid service to ensure you’re not cooking Crystal Meth or something.) You can move into the $10,900 unit this week if you want, parking is extra.
6500 + 150 + 120 = 6770 / 40 = 169.25
That’s what your rate has to be. You sign a one month lease initially knowing it could all go south the first week when you find out what the gig is really like.
Street Closures in Chicago
The biggest problem with Chicago isn’t the Black Lives Matter riots or the shootings that make great headlines for agenda pushers. It’s the (&^)(*&)ing street closings. Every weekend roughly one third of the streets are closed. Sometimes they are closed for weeks when NASCAR, the DNC, or insert-event-here comes to town.
Nothing is worse than those *(&^)*(&)ing 5K runs and their rolling street closures!
“Take public transportation”
I am so sick of hearing that bullshit. That’s not an option for people living in the middle of nowhere. In a post-COVID world, most people moved out to nowhere. I happen to have grown up here. It’s not my fault your managers can only manage by walking around, because that is not effective management.
You try to return to your Corporate Housing unit late Sunday afternoon and cannot get anywhere near that $14K/month unit because the streets are closed for “a run.” No, there isn’t free parking anywhere in the city where you could wait it out. I idled around the city for 3+ hours and had to buy a $1000 alternator for my Avalon.
Pathetic Billing Rates
Most 100% remote contracts pay more than companies in Chicago want to pay for on-site work. It’s a fact. Companies in Chicago and other major cities feasted on illegal alien IT workers brought in by the Indian firms. The Department of Labor recently (after ignoring the problem for decades) stepped up wage enforcement leading to The Great Visa Worker Purge. That’s why we had news stories about tens of thousands of “tech workers” being laid off at Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. and the national unemployment rate went down. They had to replace them with U.S. Citizens.
In a sad reality that is unique to John Deere, CAT, Marmon, Baxter, and companies in the Chicago Loop, they now expect U.S. Citizens to work for illegal alien billing rates of $35-$55/hr 100% on-site. They expect to get embedded systems people that are in demand everywhere for a billing rate that is at least $30/hr below their 100% remote billing rate. Unless you are cadaver testing or require some extremely specialized/regulated items, there is no reason to go on-site. You all bought VPN or other security software hosted in “the cloud” thinking you were so smart cutting costs. Well, since you can’t even tell what server it is running on in what country, there is no reason for us to be in your office.
Safety
Once you get past the age of 25 the “thrill” of living in Chicago is pretty much over. The novelty of being able to walk to a play after work and bar hopping without a vehicle have worn off. Today nobody feels safe. I’ve spoken with other people who used to work in various professions in the Loop, even some black people I know. For the past decade nobody has felt safe. During my yoot we felt safe walking past Cabrini-Green at night.
Today you don’t feel safe. Homeless and homeless camps everywhere. People used to just beg or try to sell you Streetwise. Now they will accost you. Years ago the high end places where the “house” Chardonnay is $60/bottle would be full until almost closing time. About an hour after dark you can sit anywhere you want now. Nobody feels safe.
Rather than fixing the problem with public housing, they tore the projects down. WBEZ has a multi-part podcast somewhere of a person interviewing people who were living in Cabrini-Green. Despite all of the horrific stories, these people liked it. They had community. Some had hourly wage jobs in the city.
Public housing failed because bleeding hearts got into it. Nobody could be kicked out. Drug addicts could stay for as little as $5/month when “rent based on ability to pay” got implemented. Public housing was intended for people who
- would work jobs
- were too old to work
- physically disabled
- and a small number of otherwise homeless who were supposed to be funneled through mental health and job training to turn them around
Instead, once the bleeding hearts got in charge, it became a dumping ground for society’s excrement. Tearing down public housing rather than purging the problem within public housing is why nobody feels safe in Chicago now.
Summary
Why nobody wants to work in the city of Chicago?
- They can earn more money working 100% remote without losing a significant chunk of their life commuting.
- They can work on-site in a different city for much higher wages and a dramatically lower cost of Corporate Housing.
- Really good high paying jobs moved out to the suburbs where most of them live.
- Unless you need highly specialized or regulated equipment there is no reason to come on-site.
- Nobody feels safe.
Want the real irony?
The professional black people I know, some of whom are good friends, all say the same thing. Back when it was widely known Chicago cops could beat a confession out of anyone, they felt safe in the Loop. We are talking CNAs, nurses, doctors, IT workers, basically, things you had to go to college for all say the same thing. If you didn’t start shit you had nothing to fear.
Even the cheaper places tolerated no shit. Didn’t matter who you were or what you looked like. If you started something they called the cops. If you got indignant with the cops there, you took a beating. What some call violence others call education. Those who learned from this educational process never did that again.
