“Sports teams always justify such public investment by claiming their new stadiums will produce all sorts of new benefits for the people of a town. Revenue will flow into municipal budgets! But when it comes to football stadiums that host just 10 or so games a year, studies show that does not happen. Stadiums are not reliable builders of local economies.”

“We’re not seeing truckloads of guns, we’re not seeing 100, 200, 300 guns in a crate that are ending up in someone’s hands. Typically, what we see from straw purchasing is you know, one or two guns at a time,” said John Lausch, US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. “The ones we’re really interested in are, are they putting it to the hands of someone who they believe is going to commit a crime? Somebody who they know is a gang member. Somebody who has a significant violent criminal history who is likely to use that

The problems with staying are clear. At 61,500 capacity, Soldier Field is the NFL’s oldest stadium and one of the smallest. By contrast, the 326-acre Arlington Park property, home to a racetrack that recently shut down, would give the Bears the option to join with developers to add shopping, dining, entertainment and so forth.

Any new policy would have to be included in the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) contract. “It’s a risk management issue, and we’re going to keep fighting for [more control] in arbitration,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said.

The data show a gap between the combined unemployment rate of the New York, Los Angeles and Chicago metropolitan areas and that of the rest of the country that’s been much bigger during the pandemic than at any other time since 1990. Removing those three metro areas from the picture delivers an unemployment rate of 4.9%, less than the 5.3% national figure but not enough to dramatically revise one’s picture of the U.S. economy.

This biennial directly addresses why massive swaths of the South and West Side are so available. “Let’s be clear,” says contributor Paola Aguirre of Chicago-based Borderless Studio, “The ‘Available City’ only exists because of racism. The only reason we have all this vacant land is because resources have been continually extracted from our Black and Brown communities for decades.”