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The presidential center is expected to open in 2025 but began driving up prices in the neighborhood even before breaking ground in 2021. Woodlawn — first a community of Dutch farmers in the mid-19th century, then home to Black migrants from the South starting in the early 1900s — is just west of the presidential center’s Jackson Park site. Stroll through the rapidly gentrifying community to see stately greystones and brick houses from a bygone era coexisting with modern low-rise condominiums.
Summary and audio linked here.
Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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Woodlawn had 10 murders last year. Gentrification only goes so far in a neighborhood with double-digit murders every year.