Splendid Isolation

This one made me shake my head.

Chicago is one of the most expensive cities to reside in the United States, with Angel Reese revealing she’s also a victim of those high costs, as her WNBA salary does not cover her $8,000-a-month rent.

Oh, the poor thing.

This is something I happen to know quite a bit about, because as Longtime Readers will recall, I used to live in Chicago.

“But where did you live, Kim?  That makes a difference.”

Connie and I lived in a 10th-floor apartment in Lakeview, a few blocks from Wrigley Field, which afforded us views of both Lake Michigan to the east, and the city skyline to the south.

Dawn over Lake Michigan.

That’s the John Hancock Building in the distance on the left.  Both pics were taken on a glum fall day soon after we’d moved in.

The apartment itself was massive:  around 2,800 sq.ft (3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms), it also had a basement lockup storage unit, free use of the laundromat, also in the basement, and 18-hour/day garbage pickup from the trashcan outside the goods elevator out the back door.  It was also beautiful, with bay windows and solid brick.masonry walls which were so thick, they actually impeded the wifi signal.  There were only two apartments on each floor.

It was so beautiful that when we had a couple of clients over for drinks during a conference, one — a wealthy owner of a chain of grocery stores — looked over at his wife and said, “We could do this”, and she nodded in agreement.  It was truly a place to be proud of, and only the business need to move to Dallas after 9/11 got us out of there.

At the time (early 2000s), the monthly rent for this wonderful apartment was $3,700 and even with our combined incomes, the only way we could afford it was due to the fact that we’d sold both our cars when moving from the suburbs, and the resultant savings on car payments and insurance (about $1,200 a month) made our apartment affordable.  (And the proximity to both train- and bus routes, not to mention the ubiquitous Chicago cabs, made car ownership irrelevant and unnecessary.  On the few occasions when we needed a car — to venture out of state for a client meeting, for example — there was a Budget rental office four blocks away.)

Anyway, I went online and checked on the current (2024) rentals in that building, and they’ve gone up, all right:  to $4,200 per month, just over half of what that WNBA tart is being charged.

Which begs the question:  what kind of apartment is she living in, at that rent?

I don’t know, but I can guess: some swanky modern high-rise apartment in the Loop, Streeterville or Near North neighborhoods.  Or maybe even a lakeside penthouse apartment just north of the Golden Mile.  Whatever, it’s probably too big for her, and definitely not worth what she gets paid as a WNBA player.

The point about living in Chicago, as we discovered when we looked into it, is that yes, you can pay a lot of money to live in the city;  but if you just lower your expectations a little and make a small compromise here and there, you can find affordable digs a-plenty.

Our apartment in Lakeview was just such a compromise, and I think that everyone could agree that it was not too great a sacrifice to have made.

The 20-year-old Angel Reese has clearly never bothered to look into such a compromise because her several sponsorship deals pay the bills, and not her WNBA salary (which is less than a fifth of my and Connie’s joint income at the time).  In ten years’ time, her career at an end and the sponsorships having vanished, we’ll no doubt be reading about Angel Reese having to live in her car and eating dog food — unless, of course, she manages to snag some rich dude who can afford her.

Not the best outlook, but hey.  According to the article, she has a (paid) “financial advisor” who, on this basis, ought to be fired.