The largest of the city’s existing shelters is the Inn of Chicago, at 162 E. Ohio St., with 1,398 migrants. That is followed by the former Standard Club in the South Loop (1,084); shuttered Wadsworth Elementary School (588); Daley College (415); Wright College (383); Piotrowski Park (200); Brands Park (144); North Park Village (125); YMCA in Douglas (248) and YMCA in West Ridge (148).

“There’s 10,800 old folk like me walking down 67th Street, walking in the park — and we wnat to stay in the hood!” said Linda Jennings, a homeowner in South Shore, speaking to her fear of falling behind on mortgage payments. She said condominium buildings like hers, if they fall into receivership, have been brought up by developers and subdivided into high-value rental units.

“If the state’s attorney’s office wasn’t constantly downgrading charges, and accepting pleas to make cases probation-able … if they instead pushed the issue, and held these criminals accountable, we’d have a young man still alive in this community…” said New Lenox Mayor Tim Baldermann. He also pointed to what he sees as shortcomings in Gov. JB Pritzker’s leadership, saying Pritzker has not offered long-term solutions or plans to combatting violent crime.

Gatewood joined the Johnson administration June 1, after two years as the director of the Illinois Justice Project, where he advocated for the SAFE-T Act, and pushed Chicago officials to fix a broken program designed to keep teens who commit minor crimes out of jail. He said “top-down” solutions imposed on neighborhoods that have suffered from disinvestment for decades will not be effective.

State Rep. La Shawn Ford says since profits from events go to the Chicago Park District’s general operations fund, the financial gains from Riot Fest in Douglass Park don’t help his constituents directly. He has proposed a 2% community benefits tax.

LeadCare Cook County is initially targeting suburban home-based child care services, ensuring that these facilities have access to clean and uncontaminated water.

Since December, there have been more than half a dozen reported drownings where young men were reported missing days before their bodies were tragically discovered. A number of earlier cases have also been flagged in social media reports, some dating back to early 2022.

Overall, crime across the city is up by 38% since Johnson took over at City Hall in April, as Chicago Police Department statistics show aggravated batteries (17%), burglaries (12%) and car thefts (153%) are also all sharply on the rise compared to last year.

A Chicago police spokesperson said four juveniles were among those arrested: one for aggravated battery to a police officer, two for resisting arrest, and one for reckless conduct. Videos posted to the app showed people twerking on moving cars, a tow truck, and in front of an ambulance that had its lights and sirens activated

Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s “Pension Advance Fund” order attempts to establish a new city fund and direct the placement of revenues into it, a move that likely would require City Council budget action. Several of Lightfoot’s outgoing orders attempt to set far-reaching policy agendas that would long outlast Lighftoot’s term in office and commit her successor to the outgoing mayor’s agenda.

“(Pastor Corey) Brooks is a conservative living in a progressive city. Unlike Wright, Jackson, Sharpton, Pritzker, and Johnson, Brooks believes upward mobility is achieved through personal industry, completing an education, and acquiring economic opportunity, not dependency on government largesse. Unlike the race hustling clergy and left-wing politicians, Brooks does not see race as a detriment to socioeconomic mobility…Moreover, in contrast to clergy and progressive lawmakers, Brooks is a firm believer in market capitalism as the foremost economic system to uplift and create individual and generational wealth.”

“Even Chicago’s then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who rarely turned to free market principles, implicitly recognized the power of market incentives in K-12 education when she begged the Chicago Public Schools to reopen like their parochial counterparts. Her public health department found no negative impacts from reopening Catholic schools, but the mayor’s call to follow the science was dismissed by the city’s powerful teachers’ union, which elected to go on strike, even into 2022.”

The program, called One Summer Chicago, is a longtime staple of City Hall’s approach to summer violence and youth enrichment that serves youth ages 14 to 24. It has shrunk from employing 31,552 young people in 2019 to 20,544 kids last year, according to city figures. Johnson said Monday that the program is on track to hire 2,000 additional youth compared to its 2022 levels. He said, “As a teacher, I’ve looked into the eyes of children every single day who longed for hope. I’ve seen what the lack of opportunity looks like, and that’s what drives me today.”

In May, more than 800 tenants were evicted from their places of residence; That’s the highest number of evictions enforced in a single month by the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in the last four years. Overall, in 2022, landlords submitted about 29,000 eviction filings — just 300 fewer than the 2019 total and a number roughly equivalent to the population of a suburb like Highland Park or Niles.

Carlishia Hood, 35, and her son had been charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of 32-year-old Jeremy Brown June 18. Cell phone video showed Hood and the victim in line and waiting for food when they began arguing. Hood’s soon later pulled out a firearm and shot the victim in the back.

Crown recently spearheaded an initiative by the Civic Committee to raise tens of millions of dollars over the next several years to work with organizations and local leaders to help fight crime in Chicago; The idea is that collaboration is key to making Chicago the best it can be. Earlier this month, Crown said the hope is to improve safety throughout the city — including for his employees, and for tourists who support Chicago businesses.

John Bouman, executive director of Legal Action Chicago: The Supreme Court unanimously held that the excess market value is a species of property that no government can take away without just compensation. It is also clear that this whole system needs a reform that not only protects equity, but also keeps more people in their homes.

On June 21, a Chicago real estate agent sent a newsletter to 20,000 people that addressed a sore subject: people leaving the city because of crime and other problems. He urged people to stay and help heal the city’s ills. The newsletter is the latest flashpoint in a contentious debate citywide and more specifically in real estate circles. Are people leaving Chicago and, if they are, is it because of crime?

Last weekend, at least 75 people were shot, 14 fatally, in gun violence across Chicago, police said.

“As of 2021, the State Universities Retirement System of Illinois had some of the largest real estate holdings among public pensions. But its biggest investments were in broad-based funds run by professional real estate experts. A few very large pension systems, including California’s and Canada’s, have built in-house teams of real estate pros capable of conducting due diligence on big projects.”

But there’s no fix in at the office, the assessor’s office insists. In fact, Kaegi said the decrease was a corrective counterbalance to a massive assessment hike his house received when he took the unusual step of tattling on himself three years ago, resulting in his family paying more per square foot than neighbors in comparable homes.

“The recent attacks on immigrant workers in Chicago and throughout Illinois are peeling the mask off the identity politics rhetoric of the Democrat Party.”