Politics & Power Quote by Jane Byrne

A line like this lands with the clipped urgency of triage: Byrne isn’t merely lamenting “suburban flight,” she’s declaring it a budgetary emergency and a political failure. The phrase “can no longer afford” is doing double duty. It’s a fiscal warning to taxpayers and business leaders, but it’s also a moral indictment, implying the city has been subsidizing its own decline through choices that push people out.

The key move is the word “policies.” Byrne shifts blame away from some vague force of “demographics” and onto government decisions: taxes, zoning, policing, school investment, patronage, neighborhood neglect. “Hasten” suggests the exodus isn’t inevitable; it’s being accelerated by mismanagement. That framing turns a structural, long-running metropolitan trend into something a mayor can plausibly reverse, which is exactly what an executive wants when asking for new authority or painful reforms.

The subtext is racial and class-coded without being explicit. “Persons” keeps it technocratic, but everyone in late-20th-century Chicago understood who was leaving: middle-class families and employers, disproportionately white, taking property-tax base and political influence with them. “Distant suburbs” carries a sting of abandonment, a sense that the city isn’t just losing residents but losing them to a different jurisdiction that gets the benefits without paying the costs.

Byrne’s intent, then, is to sell a reset: stop rewarding disinvestment, stop governing as if decline is normal, and treat retention as survival. It’s pragmatic, but it also reads as a demand for loyalty from a metropolis that feels its center hollowing out.