High taxes - 12/29/2019

Pros - close to Chicago, has Parkland community college and lots of places to eat. There is a train station downtown that is really good. Beautiful deciduous trees and old houses. Cons - close to Chicago because this also means the influx of gangs, nothing really much to offer if you are an avid outdoor person. Property taxes are so high. Lots of big beautiful houses but check what the property taxes are before you buy. Urbana is even worse. There was a great downtown when I was a kid but Market Place Mall killed that. Now Market Place Mall is having trouble. They are trying to bring a Chicago gentrified vibe into the downtown. So it’s better then it was but still struggling. Parking is hard to find. I grew up in Champaign and it’s not a great place to grow up. The school system is poor, theres lots of crime. Central High School is the worst! There were gang fights when I went there and no facilities like a track for kids. We used to have to go to west side park for PE. The town is pretty much divided into three sections. The north end - primarily African American (actual daily gunfire and gang activity), the transitional section which is where I lived (getting to be a mix of rentals and getting run down) and the McMansion section. Crime rate is very high, based on FBI data. It ranks higher then 88% of towns similar in size. Most of the housing in the transitional section is being bought and turned into rentals for the U of I students. The only thing keeping the town alive is the U of I.

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10/10 - 12/7/2017

I wonderful city with great culture.

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Nice place to live but you wouldn't want to visit - 9/19/2017

Actually it's barely a nice place to live. The pros: Not terribly expensive - at one point the least expensive place to live in the country among modest sized cities. Accessible - you can ride your bike from one end of the city to the other in about half an hour. Something of an intellectual climate - it's a college town plus a large medical center (Health Alliance - a regional HMO plus its hospitals etc). A great place for an education - seriously. U of I is a world-class research center (and occasionally teaches pretty well). We'll see if they survive the decimation of their foreign student income. The cons: You're quite a ways from civilization. As one of the transplants-in-denial (there are a lot of them) said "It's okay here, but for anything important we go home to Chicago". You can find them on the road to "someplace interesting" on Fridays or at the airport waiting for the private jet. The general community is astoundingly clique-ish and stratified. If you hated middle school you'll find this place a misery. It combines the worst parts of "Real Housewives" and paradigmatic near-Ozark small town judgement and bigotry. I've had any number of colleagues and people I've known who've moved here comment on how ridiculously hard it is to make friends here. Race relations: You can read up on that in other comments - I've lived in a lot of places, but this one really has a "wrong side of the tracks". The north part of the city is almost entirely African-American and often poor and crime-ridden, and is separated by a set of occasionally-used tracks that split the town. The overall poverty rate is 19.2%, well above the national rate. Contrast that with the Champaign Country Club that is ringed with McMansions (and which doesn't pay city taxes since it's been carefully excluded from the city along with several of those houses), private schools, any number of the other "golf communities" - one of which was recently purchased by the university on behalf of a few influential residents - and various homogenous beige enclaves of housing outside the city limits. Lack of recreation: If you like to go out to eat you're in heaven. That's it. Well, you can drink a lot but that's it. No outdoor recreation worth mentioning (except golf) and little that could be considered outdoor sports beyond shooting at things. The cultural events on campus are genuinely third-tier except for some few exceptional concerts once in a while. Or you can sit in front of a television. Weather: Minnesota winters and Mississippi summers. No kidding. Look at Sperling's own climate index: 40. Well below the national average and pay attention to the "hot and humid days" part of that. Also the average wind speed here is 10 knots. That's 24/7. It's almost never calm and usually very windy. Bifurcated economy: Urbana has posed itself as a hip-ish community with a lot of services and funky stuff ... and no tax base to support it, plus a dismal capacity to attract new business. Most of the residents are on fixed incomes of one sort or another. Remember that poverty rate. The largest employer, Carle, has successfully fought off it's challenges to being a non-profit, so it pays no taxes on its enormous facilities. The result: Rising residential property taxes to pay for it all. Champaign has gone completely the other way. Tax abeyance for everyone who starts a business. The result? Lots of businesses, a huge, appalling mall-sprawl, and rising residential property taxes to pay for it all. Have a look at the new stores being built, then ask yourself why so many existing facilities are standing vacant. Yes, there is a huge surplus of commercial property here, but they continue to build. Why? See the tax abeyance above. Rising costs of living: The university has hit on the brilliant idea of converting its land-grant acreage into a research park of sorts. The venture capital rollover, coupled with the massive influx of foreign students - desperately needed by an inept administration to stay ahead of the U's costs of operation in the face of faltering government support - has created the beginnings of an economic churn - new money after new money and this won't help the quality of life...though there are some hilarious moments with teenage scions driving their Lamborghinis to WalMart. While they still could. Now they, and the money they brought, are gone. The long-term prospects of this are not going to be pretty for everyone but the realtors, who infest Sperlings and keep trying to boost their sales. Too bad that property values don't even keep up with inflation. Oh, and for all the taxes that aren't paid in these days of COVID, there are only 39 registered ICU beds in the county (for ~210,000 people). Think about that.

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City is past its prime but still decent - 8/23/2011

I grew up in C-U (Champaign-Urbana) overall it is a good place to live but there are some caveats about the place. C-U is a University town and without the Universty it would probably be another dying midwest town. It does have an airport at Willard, and better yet, it has a good train station, the lines from which run up to Chicago, and down through Southern Illinois and on to New Orleans. Besides the students, the local demographics seems to me to be that of an aging town. There are lots of retirees of the university who remain in the town tied to a health insurance racket called Carle Care (which is really just a eugenics and money making operation run by Carle hospital - biggest racket going in C-U at the moment). Many of the neighborhoods were built during post WW2 boom and are aging and way past their prime, so a lot of these neighborhoods are starting to get really run down. What used to be really nice, happy neighborhoods when I was a kid are now looking like ghettos. At the same token there has been a lot of outward expansion and development of new neighborhood suburbs, so you see in C-U the classic inner city rot and outward expansion of newer suburbs that so many other cities are seeing. All activity around the city center around the University, there are lots of restaurants, clubs, venues for entertainment. There is a huge shopping area on North Neil street. If you like window shopping, and coffee shops, C-U has plenty of that in the downtown area by the train station which is the nicest I've seen anywhere. I am a product of Urbana High School and I don't know how much the education has changed there over the years, but from what I hear it is pretty good, and it wasn't bad when I went. Many of the children to that attend these schools are the sons and daughter of U of I staff, so education expectations are pretty high. C-U does have a dirt that seems to be getting worse in recent years. The race relations there is really bad. It was never really all that good even when I was young, but it seems to have gotten much worse, it is a highly segregated place. I don't know all causes of this, but the so-called 'polar bear hunting' attacks that had occurred around the city sure did not help, and even the local TV weatherman got beat up. Also, the winters there are very harsh and unforgiving, and the summers are super hot. It seems like in C-U only spring is the most comfortable time of the year, because the weather seems pretty extreme there. Anyway, I hope you all found this enlightening, I don't have much more to say about the place for now....

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Going to find about it - 3/9/2011

I need to know about the city.

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if your not a collage student - 2/23/2010

Don't move hear i have been stuck hear 4 years!. if you are a bartender or work any kind of hospitality the pay is for the students $4.85 hour and they will only hire students! this area is for the collage only there is nothing to do here and housing is high priced. I have lived in Arizona, Florida, this is far worst place to live! "I'm wanting to move to new mexico"

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Family Town - 7/29/2009

Champaign is a wonderful place to raise a family. Often you miss the big city excitement. But there are TONS of restaurants. The movie theatre's are very nice. Good colleges. Middle and highschool's could do a little better, but they do have good private schools for reasonable prices. I have been all over the country and I do love it for my family. Once the kids are gone, we will rethink staying here though!

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champaign, illinois - 7/10/2008

Champaign-urbana is a great place to raise a family, the cost of living is fairly inexpensive, it`s not hard to gain employment, and the college sports keeps our town busy in the fall.

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Champaign=okay - 7/7/2008

Nice sized town, good for art and cultural activities. Weather is not great, winters are long, cold and dark. Summers are hot and humid. Traffic is terrible for a medium sized town. Good place for college sports. Housing is affordable.

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Best of both worlds! - 2/5/2007

I've lived in the Champaign area for a decade, and I can't imagine living anywhere else. The University of Illinois is a constant hub of activity, from Division 1 collegiate sports to cerebral lecture opportunities and fantastic museums. Downtown Champaign offers great nightlife and unique boutiques in a pedestrian-friendly environment. This area is big enough to have a great amount of diversity, but small enough that the owners of the stores you patronize will remember your name and greet you with a smile. It's a terrific place to live and work!

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Still Racial Attacks? - 7/23/2006

I went to college there in the 90s; at the time, many black gangs were targeting single white men walking at night and attacking them. Naturally, this was overlooked by the press as the victims obviously deserved it because they're white. Does this sort of thing still happen in enlighted Champaign? Champaign is definitely an American crap town!

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Champaign's bad - 7/14/2006

Crime is on the rise. Violent crimes (murders) have more than doubled in the year.

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Good and bad - 3/5/2006

Pros: Low cost of living, educated population, improved downtown nightlife, the Krannert Center of the Performing Arts is very nice, there are university related sporting events, some interesting neighborhoods in the downtown area with brick-paved streets and large hardwood trees. Cons: Lack of interesting outdoor recreation, the southern U of I campus smells like cow feces, the Northwest part of town has a putrid, rot smell that comes from A.C. Humco (a local soybean processing plant), lack of gainful employment despite the presence of the University, the weather can be harsh if you are not used to winters in the midwest.

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