Great Cities Institute Releases Updated Hardship Index for Chicago Community Areas with Newly Released Data
The Great Cities Institute (GCI) is proud to release its updated Chicago Community Area Hardship Index, incorporating newly available data from the 2019-2023 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates. This update continues GCI’s commitment to tracking and visualizing socioeconomic hardship across Chicago’s 77 community areas.
The Hardship Index combines six key socioeconomic indicators—unemployment, education, per capita income, poverty, crowded housing, and dependency ratio—to quantify economic challenges across the city’s 77 community areas. These indicators, standardized on a 0 to 100 scale, paint a vivid picture of where Chicago’s most pressing hardships lie.
Since its introduction in 2016, GCI’s Chicago Community Area Hardship Index has served as a valuable tool for policymakers, journalists, and organizations addressing Chicago’s most pressing challenges. Notably, it has been used:
- to compare hardship between cities;
- has served as a resource for journalists and media outlets such as WBEZ, The Chicago Reporter, and ABC 7 to contextualize socioeconomic challenges in their reporting; and
- guided Chicago Public Schools in prioritizing laptop loans during the first year of remote learning.
For the latest update, GCI is releasing the Hardship Index as an interactive online map, accompanied by the data that underpin the calculations.
These indicators were first applied to Chicago’s community areas in 2016 by Matt E. Sweeney and Matthew D. Wilson, adapting the methodology from the “Intercity Hardship Index” developed in 1976 by Richard P. Nathan and Charles F. Adams, Jr.
Key Findings from the 2019-2023 Update
The updated findings highlight a clear spatial clustering of hardship across Chicago:
- Community areas with the highest hardship scores are predominantly concentrated on the South and West Sides, including:
- Riverdale (83.1)
- Fuller Park (74.1)
- West Garfield Park (69.3)
- Areas with low hardship scores are mostly located along Lake Michigan or the North Side, such as:
- Near North Side (8.9)
- Lincoln Park (9.2)
- Lake View (11.6)
The median hardship score for Chicago’s community areas is 43.9, represented by the Lower West Side.
As with all the data, reports, and analysis we release, we hope this can be of use to policy makers, government agencies, foundations and service organizations in determining resource allocation.
