CHICAGO — The glitz of downtown, the influx of tech jobs, the tourist dollars pouring into city coffers: None of those things are keeping many in Chicago’s black neighborhoods from loading their belongings into car trunks and moving vans and seeking better lives someplace else.

As Chicagoans go to the polls Tuesday to choose a new mayor in one of the most wide-open elections the nation’s third-largest city has experienced in generations, many African-Americans have cast their votes another way: They have moved out.

Downtown Chicago is booming, its skyline dotted with construction cranes. Yet residents only a few miles to the south and west still wrestle with entrenched gang violence, miserable job prospects and shuttered schools — some of the still-being-identified forces, experts say, that are pushing black Chicagoans to pack up and get out.

Of the nation’s largest five cities, only Chicago saw its population decline in 2017, the third year in a row. Overall, the drops in this city of 2.7 million residents are only slight. But the trend is alarming to city leaders, and demographers say it reveals a larger truth: Black residents are leaving by the thousands each year even as new white residents flow in.

The Rev. Ira Acree said members of his West Side congregation have begun approaching him in growing numbers to say goodbye; last fall, he said, his own daughter moved to Texas. “It’s like, where does this end?” Acree said. “For our community, it’s a state of emergency.”

Chicago stands at a pivotal crossroads, and with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision not to seek a third term, its next leader must contend with a long-standing sense of division between a booming economic core and forgotten neighborhoods.

“People are frustrated and they’re saying, ‘We’ve just had enough. No more mayors for the 1 percent. This city belongs to all of us, not just the people who live in the Gold Coast,'” Sharon Fairley, a former federal prosecutor who also led an agency that oversees Chicago police, said of the hurdles ahead for whoever becomes the next mayor. “The biggest challenge that anyone coming into this position now is facing is generating a feeling of inclusiveness.”

At the same time, other challenges loom large. Residents say they are weary from years of tax hikes and fee increases, but the next mayor will need to come up with another $1 billion in the next four years to continue pulling the city out of a pension crisis, a process for which Emanuel has been credited with shepherding.

Crime and violence remain persistent problems even as the city wrestles with a history of troubled relations between its police force and its residents — problems that reached an apex during Emanuel’s turbulent eight years in office.

“There’s a set of crises that need to be addressed simultaneously when each one of them, alone, is a bear,” said Rep. Jesús G. García, a Democrat who forced Emanuel into a runoff for mayor in 2015 before running for the House last fall. “There’s so much on the line for the city of Chicago. The next four years are going to be a very, very critical time. It could be a turning point, for the better or for the worse.”

Chicago is accustomed to elections in which the outcome is all but certain before the first vote is cast. But this time, there’s a blur of 14 candidates who want to be mayor and no clear favorite. It’s only the fourth time in a century that an incumbent isn’t on the ballot and in at least one of those elections, eight years ago, the winner, Emanuel, seemed preordained.

A who’s who of Chicago politics has stepped forward and Chicago seems, mainly, confused. Polls show no one near the 50 percent mark needed to avoid a second election — a runoff is expected in April — and lots of Chicagoans said they were undecided with only days to go.

“No one has really captured the imagination of the city,” said David Axelrod, a longtime Chicagoan and political strategist. “It is generating kind of a ho-hum from voters, but this is an election of real consequence.”

In a contest that is technically nonpartisan, though Democrats reliably win, there’s a Daley, the brother and son of Chicago’s famed earlier mayors, who ran this place for 43 of the last 63 years.

There’s a county board president with strong union backing.

There’s a New York native who was hired (and fired) by Emanuel to lead the Chicago Police Department; a former leader of the Chicago public schools; a community activist endorsed by Chance the Rapper; and on and on.

The odd and chaotic campaign has played out amid a more standard plot for this city: A corruption scandal is simultaneously unfolding at City Hall, a place all too familiar with corruption scandals. That has left many of the candidates rushing to distance themselves from Chicago’s most powerful alderman, Ed Burke, who was charged last month with a federal crime and whose wiretapped phones have become a topic of wonder and worry on the campaign trail.

The past months have been a marathon of forums, some with the whole crowd of mayoral candidates crushed onto a single stage. Some political analysts wonder whether the result may be truly surprising, propelling some unlikely, low-vote candidate into a runoff election to run Chicago by virtue of happenstance and the spreading of the city’s 1.5 million registered voters across so many candidates. Chicago’s population is split approximately into thirds — white, black and Latino.

Emanuel, who stunned the city in September when he announced that the mayor’s office “is not a job for a lifetime” and that he would not run again, has steered clear of weighing in publicly on the race.

Before his announcement, he was facing a wide field of people who said they would challenge him, as well as criticism over a tenure that included conflicts over police conduct, street violence, and the closings of schools on the city’s South and West sides. And Emanuel’s policies have remained a focal point for criticism from some who now hope to succeed him.

Emanuel has been credited by fiscal experts with pressing to solve some of the city’s most troubling financial woes, in part by raising taxes and fees. For years, the city’s underfunded pension systems have loomed, and fallout from that became clear when Moody’s Investors Service in 2015 downgraded the city’s rating to junk status. His administration put all four of the city’s pension funds on a route to stability, fiscal experts said, but the next mayor will need to find additional revenue by 2023, when the city’s mandatory annual contribution jumps by $1 billion.

“There’s been an overreliance on property taxes,” said Michele Smith, an alderman representing a ward that includes the well-to-do Lincoln Park neighborhood, on the city’s North Side.

Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a watchdog group, said the incoming mayor faced a conundrum. Earlier mayors had already “tapped out every recognizable commodity,” he said, leaving the next mayor with few places to turn for new sources of revenue and, it seems, with little patience from the public.

All along the campaign trail, candidates have been asked to come up with a solution to Chicago’s intransigent problem with violence, an issue that Emanuel wrestled with throughout his tenure. Shootings and homicides have dropped some over the last few years from the city’s most vexing period, but, with more than 550 homicides in 2018, Chicago had far more killings than in the nation’s two larger cities, New York and Los Angeles.

“There are so many layers to this violence now,” said Cleopatra Cowley, the mother of Hadiya Pendleton, a high school student who was fatally shot in a South Side park only days after performing at festivities for President Barack Obama’s inauguration to a second term in 2013.

All the while, tensions between residents, particularly in African-American neighborhoods on the West and South sides, and the Chicago police have mounted. Few events defined Emanuel’s time as mayor more than the months of outrage that followed the shooting of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, and the eventual release of a police video that showed Van Dyke firing into Laquan 16 times.

As a result of the case, a new mayor will arrive as Chicago is under the terms of a consent decree, requiring a negotiated overhaul of the troubled Police Department.

“The next mayor is going to be scrutinized for how they deal with the Police Department and how they deal with the communities,” said Ja’Mal Green, a community organizer on the South Side. “Many people are going to expect the next mayor to come in and move things quicker.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.