Fueled by big blocks of sublease space that hit the market, the share of available office space in the suburbs increased to 29.7% at the end of September from 28.9% midway through the year, according to real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle. The new vacancy rate is up from 27.3% a year ago and 22.1% when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

A study by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and the To & Through Project, projects that if CPS graduation and college enrollment and completion rates remained the same over the next decade, 30 out of 100 current ninth graders would earn a college credential by the time they are 25. That is a 2.4 percentage point increase over last year and the highest rate on record since researchers began calculating this index in 2013. At that time, the index was 23%.

As of Monday, more than 60,000 applications have been approved since the application period opened Aug. 15, according to FEMA’s website. The amount of FEMA assistance granted for this summer’s flooding is the second-highest amount of aid provided for individual households in a federally declared disaster in Illinois since 2003, the earliest year for which data was available.

The migrant crisis is likely to cost taxpayers $361 million between January and December 2023, an increase of more than 4% in the past week, according to updated financial projections released Thursday by the mayor’s office. the mayor asked the City Council to earmark less than the full projected cost to care for the migrants to acknowledge that the burden should not fall entirely on Chicago taxpayers, Deputy Chief of

“We do not control the number of buses we don’t control the frequency of how they come and we don’t control what the federal government does and does not do even though this is precisely under their jurisdiction,” Cristina Pacione-Zayas, Deputy Chief of Staff, said. “Just in the last week alone we welcomed 63 buses and so even though we are working every single day to open up these shelters we just can’t get in front of it.”

The city reduced the police department by 614 positions and cut funding by 2.7% in 2021 in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Since then, the department has grown in size and spending. While the city maintained staffing levels for 2024 at the same level as the previous year, the city reported a 30% increase in crime in 2022. Murders were down 13% from 804 in 2021 to 699 in 2022, but the city stated property crime drove the spike in crime and was up 44% and violent crime was up 1% in 2022 as compared to 2021.

The first election for half of the 21-member board is set to take place in just one year — November 2024. “Changes of this magnitude are complex, and we are still gathering public input about the best way to transition to a fully-elected school board,” the chair of the senate committee, Sen. Kimberly Lightford, said in a statement.

The measure was introduced by Ald. Debra Silverstein and challenged by Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, writing: “Any resolution that speaks on this matter should, in my opinion, also center the humanity of Palestinians who are confined to an open-air prison and whose lands have been occupied for decades.” Mayor Brandon Johnson said, “I’m going to oversee a meeting that allows for the type of robust conversation to take place so that everybody is very clear about how we must center humanity in this moment.”

State Sen. Willie Preston told neighbors he would vote “no” on any state budget decisions that provide funding for the winterized tent camps. “We can’t spend millions and millions on people who just got here while I step over my people lying in tents. We can’t keep taking on new tasks when we haven’t handled the first ones yet.”

Evanston’s Land Use Commission voted 7-2 against a zoning amendment that would allow concerts and similar events at the planned open-air arena. The panel gave Northwestern some of what it wanted, unanimously approving in a separate vote a planned development authorizing the stadium. But the school insists concert revenue is essential to make the $800 million project viable.

The odds of a Chicagoan becoming a homicide victim last year were three times higher than the odds of that person getting struck by lightning during their lifetime.

More troubling still: Chicago Police Department arrest rates fell to their lowest level in a decade during 2022. Less than 12% of all reported crimes resulted in an arrest, when the average was 22% during the decade.

Demonstrators at the rally and march blamed Israel for what is now an all-out war between the state and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.

Several members of City Council raised concerns about public safety spending as proposed by the mayor. “What we need is to recruit and retain police officers here in Chicago,” said Ald. Silvana Tabares. Ald. Anthony Napolitano added, “We need more coppers on the street. We need to go after crime at a higher level.”

The Chicago Police Department’s Mohammad Darabaih was born in Gaza before moving to Chicago in the 1990s. He learned Monday that two surviving children, two-year-old twins, are now orphaned and two other children are still alive, but severely wounded.

Robinson is looking to add an “s” at the end of the name, to represent famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “We need to make sure that our young people understand its history and be able to live in a community that supports the African American community,” Robinson said.

“It is our hope in a place like Chicago, which has a national reputation, that we’ll be able to demonstrate that we’re able to do this without an increase in crime,” she said. “We are living in a time, if I’m being quite honest, in which conversations around race and justice are being suppressed across the country … and all of that permeates the work that we do in our criminal justice system.”

The $16.6 billion 2024 city budget Mayor Brandon Johnson unveiled Wednesday will “begin the critical investments necessary” to deliver on his campaign slogan to “build a better, stronger Chicago.” But with a $538 million shortfall that’s growing with every arriving busload of migrants, Johnson was hard-pressed to deliver on any of his campaign promises. Complete budget proposal linked here.

According to Mayor Brandon Johnson, the city will balance the 2024 budget by finding $243 million in “expenditure savings” and $321 million thanks to “improved revenue projections,” including more money from the city’s share of state tax revenues, a tax-increment financing surplus and “strategic use of the City’s fund balance.”

“We have gotten to the point where we don’t even have enough shelter beds, even though we are opening a shelter every six days, we just can’t get in front of it,” said Cristina Pacione-Zayas, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff. That $150 million in the 2024 budget proposal comes on top of what has already been spent by the city since migrants started arriving in August 2022.

Will Johnson, of The Harris Poll: “In a poll that we at The Harris Poll conducted in mid-September, 40% of city residents and 54% of adults in suburban Cook County said they don’t feel safe in downtown Chicago…But for Chicago to regain its footing, (Mayor Brandon) Johnson must do all he can to revitalize the city’s majority Black and Hispanic wards and Michigan Avenue and the rest of greater downtown. In fact, revitalized neighborhoods and a