In March, Chicago’s housing department introduced a preservation fund for condos and co-ops for South Shore residents that will provide grants to homeowners for repairs to their units and to homeowner associations for building maintenance. Rep. Robin Kelly said that she also requested $2 million in federal earmarks for the South Shore pilot program.

The race for mayor is a crowded field so far, as six other candidates have announced their intention to challenge current Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who last week announced her re-election campagin.

“The jails in this country are at the intersection of racism and poverty, and the idea that just because you’re poor, you should stay in jail until your case is disposed of, it seems to me, is profoundly unjust,” Preckwinkle said. “We moved away in our criminal justice system from cash bail for those kinds of (petty) offenses. And I think that’s smart public policy.”

Chicago’s convention industry is up and running again but falling behind other cities in the race to revive trade shows, corporate meetings and other business gatherings. A new report from meetings analytics firm Knowland says that 21 of the 25 largest U.S. convention and trade show markets are on track to return to 2019 levels of events and attendance by 2024—including several that will achieve the mark this or next year—but that Chicago is in a small group of laggards that won’t fully recover until at least 2025.

“The consequence is that the city’s Black and Latinx residents are farther from the region’s economic center, which is increasingly in closer proximity to white residents,” the report states. “School closings and the shutting down of public housing developments occurred in communities that have experienced the greatest population loss in recent decades. In the absence of public investments to replace these neighborhood pillars, communities lost tens of thousands of residents.”

Emanuel famously closed 50 Chicago Public schools in one fell swoop. Many remain vacant nearly a decade later, and 14 are still owned by the district. Planning and Development Commissioner Maurice Cox’s said re-purposing parts of closed schools — such as the kitchen or gym — would help a community without “having to marshal all of the resources that it takes to renovate an entire school.”

The May 2020 fire, which started in the basement, took about 30 firefighters and six hours to put out. Only about 50 items were salvageable out of the shop’s collection of 10,000 items. It was a total loss, but it was no comparison to the loss of Floyd’s life “and the countless other Black lives lost,” Flesch said at the time.

Chicago’s real estate industry is preparing for a fight over a proposal to more than triple the transfer tax on any property sold for more than $1 million. The proposal — called Bring Chicago Home — would create a non-binding referendum that would ask the Chicago City Council to increase real estate transfer taxes to 2.65 percent from 0.75 percent, according to Crain’s. The extra income would go toward helping the homeless.

Efforts to open those pools have been hampered by a nationwide shortage of lifeguards and exacerbated locally by a lifeguard scandal that forced Mike Kelly to resign as parks superintendent. Attempts to lure lifeguard applicants with $500 bonuses apparently haven’t been enough — by Wednesday evening the Park District bumped them up to $600.

At the end of March, 44 buildings of more than 200,000 square feet, a record-breaking 23.7 million square feet in total, were underway across the Chicago metropolitan area, according to Colliers International. The industrial vacancy rate fell ”by more than a full percentage point to 2.61%, a record low by a wide margin,” Colliers reported.

A new report cites evidence of the sector’s recovery, such as tourism-related employment returning to 60% of pre-pandemic levels and a sharp turnaround in bookings at the city’s hotels, which yielded a 163% increase in tax revenue compared with 2020. By the end of 2021, average room rates were 90% of pre-pandemic levels, the report said.