We’re always fascinated to hear and see outside opinions about our beloved city.  While sometimes  we don’t always agree with their view, it’s a good way to take stock in our beliefs.  That’s why were excited to see what we learn from a new CNN unscripted mini-series about Chicago:

Executive produced by Robert Redford and Laura Michalchyshyn of Sundance Productions, and award-winning filmmakers Marc Levin and Mark Benjamin of BCTV, CHICAGOLAND is a non-scripted, eight-part original series about a heartland American city.  It is as authentic an American city as there is, and the series will explore where politics and policy meet real people’s lives – in a city generating change and innovation in social policy, education, and public safety – to meet national and local challenges.

Beginning in early 2014, viewers will watch the riveting, real-life drama of a city looking to unite at this critical moment in the city’s history.   In the aftermath of a countrywide economic collapse, Chicago faces the challenges of improving its public education system, and neighborhood and youth safety.  Can the city’s leaders, communities, and residents come together in ways that expand opportunities and allow aspirations to be realized?

Chicago’s Mega-Loop (which is defined as 10 square miles roughly from Cermak Road to North Avenue and from the lakefront to Ashland Avenue) is booming according to a recent article in Crain’s Chicago:

The Chicago Loop long has been one of the world’s greatest job centers, of course. For much of its history, though, downtown emptied out after office hours. And as the city aged and its population declined, the suburbs rose to become the preferred home to generations of young families and the tollways became employment corridors of their own.

In recent years, those trends have reversed. After decades of watching the suburbs boom (often at the city’s expense), Chicago now is outperforming the surrounding area by almost any measure—jobs, income, retail sales and residential property values, to name a few—despite the loss of 200,000 people in the 2010 census.

The city is so hot that this expanded downtown is adding residents faster than any other urban core in America, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

“In the year 2020, no matter how many condos are built or sold, Chicago is likely to be a nest of center-city affluence unequaled in size—or even approached—by anyplace in America,” journalist Alan Ehrenhalt writes in “The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.”

Because it’s fun to dream, we bring you this lovely segment from CBS’s Sunday Morning.  If you got $32+ million, we’ve got a property (and vodka business investment opportunity) for you: