• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, June 14, 2016

Following younger workers returning to the cities, McDonald’s yesterday announced that it was relocating its global headquarters from suburban Oak Brook, Ill., to the space in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood that once contained Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios. 

“We are a brand on the move in more ways than one,” McDonald’s president and CEO Steve Easterbrook said in a statement announcing that the transition to 1045 W. Randolph St. would be completed by Spring 2018. 

“Moving our headquarters to Chicago is another significant step in our journey to build a better McDonald’s. This world-class environment will continue to drive business momentum by getting us even closer to customers, encouraging innovation and ensuring great talent is excited about where they work,” he said.

Put another way, as Mae Rice does parenthetically for Chicagoist: “Subtext: No one liked working in Oak Brook.”

The Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal is a bit kinder to the ’burbs and their allure to folks who like to rake leaves, but he essentially winds up in the same place. “There have been advantages to standing tall among the trees for McDonald's the last 45 years, employing about 2,000 people in a community of around 8,000 where it is the only Fortune 500 company,” he points out. 

“But the company's goals are more diverse than they were in the early 1970s and, so too, are the people it needs to guide it toward them. Any bright young person willing to even consider taking on the negatives of living anywhere near Chicago these days is bound to figure he or she might as well actually be where the other bright young people are, not a half-hour or more from them.”

McDonald’s was based in Chicago from 1955 to 1971. “I can't wait to break ground and cut the ribbon,” current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement.  

Bloomberg’s Tim Jones ledes with a different perspective on the Windy City: “The number of Chicagoans murdered this year is up more than 50%. Pension debt tops $20 billion, and taxes are soaring. Illinois’s governor calls the city’s government corrupt and its financially teetering schools 'crumbling prisons.'”

But, he points out, Motorola Solutions, Kraft Heinz and ConAgra Foods have also recently announced they are moving their headquarters or major offices into Chicago. “They’re following the labor force and they don’t want to be in the cornfields, out of sight and out of mind — they want to be where the action is,” Donald Haider, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, tells Jones.

“The current shift in favor of more urban office space began around 2010 when the parent of United Airlines started relocating to downtown Chicago from Elk Grove Village,” Steve Stratton, international director of JLL, a commercial real estate services company, tells the Associated Press. And not just in the Midwest.

“Downtown areas typically have better access to public transportation, which can make them more appealing to young professionals. General Electric Co., for example, announced earlier this year that it would move to Boston from its sprawling suburban Connecticut campus,” according to the AP.

“It's a race for talent,” says Stratton.

In a January analysis in The Week titled “This Is How The Suburbs Die,” Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote: “The elite in our culture have almost always viewed the suburbs with some contempt. They are places scrubbed of physical danger at the cost of mediocrity, soulless consumerism, and despair.” But in recent times, gentrification in cities is “pushing the poor into the suburbs” — leading to “a shift to more European model, of fantastically wealthy cities and increasingly–slummy suburbs.”

McDonald’s move back to Chicago has been rumored for some time. Most recently, “the move ends speculation that began nearly two weeks ago with a report in Crain’s Chicago Business,” write Mitch Dudek and Fran Spielman for the Chicago Sun-Times. “Oak Brook village manager Rick Ginex said he got a call about 9:55 a.m. Monday morning from a McDonald’s executive confirming the move; that was about five minutes before the company issued its news release.”

But Ginex, perhaps taking his cue from conflicted empty nesters everywhere, wished them “nothing but the best.”