Taste of Chicago: Our favorite recent local writing
June 2025 edition
Welcome to our third edition of Taste of Chicago, where we highlight some of the best writing we’ve come across over the past few months. Enjoy!
Chicago(land) Specific
The $265 million tech bill: How a plan to streamline Cook County, state computer systems led to massive costs and delays. Chicago Tribune / David Jackson, A.D. Quinn, and Kristen Axtman. This is a great investigative report featuring cost overruns, slow timelines and bungled project management - all focused on an unsexy part of government with an important but hidden impact on the public. In other words, a laundry list of the themes we’ve highlighted in the past as issues we need to solve in Chicago.
As Johnson administration touts ‘Cut the Tape,’ affordable housing developers want faster progress. Chicago Tribune / Lizzie Kane. This a really clear explanation of the challenges the Johnson administration faces with the Cut the Tape initiative. Some of these hangups are of its own making (like the Housing Commissioner going on record to defend rules that mandate countertop sizes in affordable developments). But others aren’t – Aldermen love to complain about generic “red tape,” but are rarely willing to give up any of the control that would be needed for things like ADU legalisation or the elimination of mandatory parking minimums.
Chicago posts 7th largest population increase in nation, part of a growth spurt that also lifted many suburbs. Chicago Tribune / Robert McCoppin, Jake Sheridan, Kori Rumore, and Molly Morrow. It’s great that Chicago is growing again - although, given how important immigration is to that growth, the prospect of a Trump crackdown poses some risks going forward. This piece also does a nice job of explaining the pattern of growth in the suburbs, where the population is declining in areas like Evanston and Schaumberg, but exploding in outer ring suburbs like Hamphsire and Plainfield.
In Illinois, an invisible boundary determines how dirty and costly your electricity is. Chicago Tribune / John Lippert. This article does a nice job explaining the energy market that divides Illinois, with one grid (and a lot more nuclear power) serving Northern Illinois, and another grid (with a lot more coal and gas) that serves the rest of the state. Historically, the cheap, stable nuclear power in the northern part of the state has been a major economic asset, and helped support the jobs in the energy-intensive manufacturing industries. Unfortunately, we’re on track for rising energy bills in both regions, as energy demand rises (in part thanks to the proliferation of data centers) and coal and gas plants are phased out.
A quarter of Chicago high schoolers missed more than a month of school last year. Chalkbeat Chicago / Sarah Karp and Mila Koumpilova. A great (and very depressing) story about the decline in CPS attendance rates post-pandemic… even as graduation rates continued to climb. It’s encouraging to hear the stories of principals, teachers and students who are coming around to more demanding attendance standards. The story also illustrates a classic challenge inherent to any large organization – any metric that’s both used as an institutional success metric and controllable by the institution in question (like grades or graduation rates), is at risk of being gamed over time.
Chicago’s murder drop ‘mirrors a lot of big cities,’ a leading crime data analyst says. WBEZ / Chip Mitchell. Year to date, murders in Chicago are down 23% in Chicago. That’s wonderful news for the city. But credit to WBEZ for running down the national expert in real time crime data, Jeff Asher, who points out that that decline is in line with other big cities. Kudos to Mayor Johnson for not screwing this one up (plenty of critics asserted that he would), but you should keep the national figures in mind when the Mayor and Police Superintendent credit their specific policies for declines in crime.
‘Granny flats’ are illegal to build in most of Chicago —and political gridlock is keeping it that way. Illinois Answers Project / Alex Nitkin. Even when a reform to build housing is almost uniformly popular (Money for homeowners! Intergenerational living!), it can quickly get submarined by Alders who insist that even the most minor of changes must be subject to their sign off. Now, citywide ADUs are caught between a Mayor’s Office that is insisting on uniform citywide legalization (which is absolutely, positively the right policy goal), and a City Council that seems intent on a weaker compromise - or no progress at all.
The Original Lake Shore Drive. The Brick & Wheel / Emily Hugan. “David Burnham never shied away from boldness. He famously said, “Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work.”... Tens of millions of dollars spent on minor changes to LSD are these so-called “little plans.” So little, they seem to intentionally avoid stirring men’s blood. No bold transit options, no traffic calming measures, just the same toxic highway. IDOT, given a monumental task and more than a decade to plan it, wants to preserve our concrete barrier to lakefront access, but with slightly nicer landscaping. Big whoop.”
Illinois legislators left Springfield without funding public transit (for now). Here’s what that means for CTA, Metra, Pace Chicago Tribune / Talia Soglin and Jeremy Gorner. A helpful summary of where we’re at on transit reform: big cuts are coming in January, unless the legislature reconvenes this summer or finds the money in the fall veto session - and more votes will be required after we blew past the May 31st deadline. We’ll have a lot more on this topic in the coming months. It’s frustrating and concerning that the legislature didn’t come to a deal. It’s also infuriating that the transit agencies’ strategy basically amounted to playing a high-stakes game of chicken with the General Assembly, rather than even attempting to be proactive about addressing existing service and financial problems.
National Links
Here Is Everything That Has Changed Since Congestion Pricing Started in New York New York Times / The Upshot. It’s not always easy to extrapolate from NYC-specific policy changes to other cities - it’s pretty unique in the context of the United States - but it’s hard not to look at the initial results of the congestion pricing experiment in Manhattan as a huge, huge positive for the city. Worth reading if you’d like to learn more.
How to fix crime in New York City. Statecraft / Santi Ruiz and Peter Moskos. Moskos is an interesting guy - the Venn Diagram of “Harvard sociology PhD” and “Baltimore City police officer” is pretty small - and his in-the-weeds overview of how New York City made great strides solving their crime issues has great lessons for our similar problems here in Chicago, particularly as it relates to the “boring, behind-the-scenes stuff” regarding basic departmental efficiencies.
Abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Look, just because every other substack or podcast in the world has already covered the book doesn’t mean we can’t tell you to read it too, okay?
Research Corner
The Unintended Consequences of Measure ULA. UCLA / Michael Manville and Mott Smith. Credit to Austin Berg at the Last Ward for highlighting this one. This is a new study looking at the impact on Los Angeles’s Measure ULA (or the ‘mansion tax’), which is broadly similar to what the Bring Chicago Home initiative would’ve instituted here in Chicago. The study outlines a really deleterious impact on property transfers, new construction (both market-rate and affordable construction), and property tax revenue to Los Angeles. I feel compelled to point out one of our first posts at A City That Works was opposing the BCH referendum - and it’s good to see further evidence showing that we avoided a bad outcome.
The High Cost of Producing Multifamily Housing in California. RAND Corporation / Jason Ward and Luke Schlake. Credit to the authors here for some painstaking data collection to breakout affordable/vs market rate construction costs in California, Colorado and Texas. There’s a ton of interesting findings (including the fact that a subsidized unit in California is four times more expensive per square foot to build than a market rate unit in Texas). Most relevant for Chicago are the findings that speed drives lower costs, and that environmental/energy efficiency requirements are one of the major drivers of higher costs in California (second only to seismic resiliency requirements).