By Steve Rhodes

The city council today passed the Lincoln Yards project, as well as its overshadowed unofficial partner, The 78.
Along with the Near South Side, the city is showing once again that it can create new neighborhoods out of thin air when and where it wants to.
Now, it’s true, these projects are in locations developers deem desirable – adjacent to the city’s most valuable property.
But . . .

Imagine an abandoned lakefront or riverfront site on the North Side that was more than 1.5 times the size of Grant Park. A mayor or mayoral candidate wouldn’t be allowed to be silent about it.

— Lee Bey📷 (@LEEBEY) March 29, 2019

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Posted on April 9, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

Early warning: I’ll be on “Hitting Left with Klonsky Brothers” this Friday at 11 a.m., along with Ra Joy of the Lightfoot transition team, among other things. Listen at 105.5 FM or stream it at Lumpen Radio.

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Posted on April 9, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

Here’s a thread on the big doings at City Hall today regarding Lincoln Yards. Start here – and keep going!

Loud cheers erupt as Ald. Pat O’Connor announces no vote will be taken today on Lincoln Yards and the 78 — but will schedule another meeting for Wednesday morning — before the full City Council meeting give the mayor and the mayor-elect a chance to work out an agreement.

— The Daily Line (@thedailylinechi) April 8, 2019

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Posted on April 8, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

For completists, there was no column on Thursday or Friday. Now I’m going back to sleep. See you on Monday.

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Posted on April 6, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

Chicago has elected as its mayor a black woman with a white wife and a daughter who lives in my neighborhood, loves craft beer and eats at Taqueria Moran. Also the first time since I moved here in 1992 that a mayoral candidate I voted for won. Now we hold her accountable. https://t.co/fhxZqGwqtH

— Beachwood Reporter (@BeachwoodReport) April 3, 2019

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Posted on April 3, 2019

I’m going to vote, and then I’m going to get my traditional post-voting donut and coffee. I’ll be on Twitter the rest of the day and night, and I might get a campaign notebook posted here later today, we’ll see.
Afternoon adds:
* Who’s With Who? Find out which mayoral candidate your alderman supports.
* Polling place scene report.

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Posted on April 2, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

“Chicago mayoral candidates Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle capped a final weekend of campaigning by fanning out across the city to reach voters everywhere from behind a bar in South Chicago and on the streets of Little Village to the tables of a Lakeview restaurant and the aisles of a Pullman Walmart,” the Tribune reports.
Let’s dig in.

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Posted on April 1, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

“Rahm Emanuel had been mayor for two years when, in 2013, he announced the closure of nearly 50 elementary schools saddled with shrinking enrollment. A tsunami-scale backlash followed,” the Tribune says in an editorial.

Parents complained they were losing the bonds they and their children had created with their schools’ teachers, principals and other students. Many families living amid gang violence worried their children would have to cross gang turf lines to get to their new schools. The Chicago Teachers Union called the move “a real horror for people.”
What would have been scarier? This: keeping half-empty schools open for a dwindling roster of students, and pouring taxpayer dollars into those schools when that money could improve schoolkids’ education elsewhere.
The mayor and the Chicago Board of Education were right to shut those schools.

It’s as if the conclusions of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research were never reported – and they barely were. I’ve complained since day two of that report that it was only reported on, lightly, on day one and forgotten. This is how easily history is ignored, rewritten and repurposed to serve ideological needs of those who don’t deign to traffic in facts that get in the way of their preconceived and passionately held notions. Shame on you, Tribune editorial board.

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Posted on March 30, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

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Posted on March 28, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

Here’s what I wrote in an e-mail to a friend this morning:
“Coverage of the Smollett case has been disgraceful from the beginning, and on all sides of it. I’m trying to think of one person who’s acted honorably . . . not Smollett, but also not the CPD, City Hall or the CCSAO. None of them! Not those who jumped on the story because of the alleged MAGA stuff, which the CPD says was never reported to them, nor those who seemed to particularly revel in the exposure of a hoax and took extra glee in it in a way I suspect wouldn’t have occurred had the subject been a straight white man, and are particularly butt-hurt today, as if the system is otherwise straight. Nor the journos crying about how Smollett ‘gave the city a black eye,’ as if a hate crime could never happen here! They want our reputation back! Kim Foxx stuck her paws in it in a completely untoward way, the CPD lied and leaked all the way through, Smollett is an ass, those brothers were complicit, and the mayor is the biggest hypocrite of them all. There is no hero here, only a cast of villains. That’s my take so far, anyway.”

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Posted on March 27, 2019