Chicago -
By Steve Rhodes
1. Minority Neighborhoods Pay Higher Car Insurance Premiums Than White Areas With the Same Risk.
“Our analysis of premiums and payouts in California, Illinois, Texas and Missouri shows that some major insurers charge minority neighborhoods as much as 30 percent more than other areas with similar accident costs,” ProPublica reports, in conjunction with Consumer Reports.
The investigation opens with the story of Chicagoan Otis Nash:
Posted on April 5, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
1. Alderman Says Emanuel Prioritizes Flowers And More Bike Lanes Over Violence.
Chicago Ald. Leslie Hairston says her latest proposals to provide intervention programs to fight violence have received no support – and squarely blamed Mayor Rahm Emanuel Friday with some pointed words.
“I place that at the heels of the mayor who refuses to fund intervention programs and, when given the opportunity with the resources, chooses to fund flowers and more bike lanes,” Hairston said.
Hairston is essentially right in the sense that the city would be throwing everything it had into the best anti-violence programs there are – neighborhood investment, affordable housing, desegregation, unclosing schools – with a budget that was exactly upside down of the mayor’s priorities if he was as urgent (and thoughtful) about the issue as he claims to be.
I’m not convinced, though, of short-term intervention efforts such as CeaseFire, if that’s what she’s talking about. Let’s read on.
Posted on April 4, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
From Mike Allen’s Top 10 for Axios on Sunday:
A bearish view of the fight ahead in “Crucial lessons from the last tax reform,” by Jeff Birnbaum (president of BGR Public Relations, and co-author with Alan Murray of Showdown at Gucci Gulch, about the 1986 tax reform), on the WashPost Sunday Opinion page:
* “Tax reform is complicated, painful and personal by design.”
* “Tax reform was launched in 1985 with a scene that’s almost unimaginable today: a televised speech by Reagan, a Republican, followed by a Democratic response by Dan Rostenkowski, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, endorsing the president’s initiative.”
Ah, yes, the good ol’ days when Rosty and Ronnie dispensed with ideology and worked together for the good of the nation.
At least that’s what Official Washington – and Official Chicago – has wanted you to believe for years. The reporting shows something different – not that Rosty and Ronnie didn’t work together, but that they did so to sell out their blue-collar and middle-class constituents.
Posted on April 3, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
“The leader of a Chicago-based environmental group said a ‘perfect storm’ of funding problems will force it to close for good on Friday,” WBEZ reports.
“Over the past 16 years, Chicago Wilderness doled out more than $11 million in grants to nearly 200 conservation groups and businesses in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan, said Chicago Wilderness Executive Director Suzanne Malec-McKenna.
“The funding went toward initiatives like protecting ecosystems around the southern shores of Lake Michigan to native plant and animal conservation.”
Rauner’s role: “The funding started to decline the last few years, Malec-McKenna said, largely thanks to Illinois’ state budget woes that resulted in cuts to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.”
Posted on March 31, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
Let’s interact with the news.
1. The Jesus And Mary Chain: ‘Pop Is Dreadful. Switch On A Radio, I Guarantee It’ll Be Garbage.’
I always hate seeing this familiar refrain, as if what gets played on the radio hasn’t mostly been garbage for decades. That’s never where the best music is found. It sucks, but it’s true. If only the complainers in the industry would do something about it, like buy a chain of radio stations or put some dollars behind efforts like our local CHIRP Radio, which is pretty excellent. We could five more stations like it in the market – if we should even care about over-the-air radio anymore. (CHIRP is planning to launch terrestrially at 107.1FM sometime this year.)
Posted on March 30, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
The key excerpt from the Metropolitan Planning Council’s The Cost of Segregation, which is getting a fair amount of media buzz:
Chicago’s present-day segregation did not occur overnight and it was not a process that occurred “naturally.” Private and public policies and programs built our divides: Restrictive housing covenants. Urban renewal. Redlining. Predatory lending and the massive foreclosures that followed. Illegal discrimination against housing voucher holders. It is not merely by chance that public school quality closely follows the racial composition of the student body, or that after the housing bubble, property values have recovered or even risen in well-to-do, largely white communities while they remain well below for much the South and West sides of Chicago.
It didn’t occur naturally, and it won’t be solved naturally.
*
Overlay this report with those of the Police Accountability Task Force, the U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the Chicago Police Department, and every map of Chicago illustrating socioeconomic well-being, public health issues, poverty, violence, school closings, mortality, economic development and neighborhood vitality, and you see Chicago, and America, for what it is: Cruel and ultimately indifferent.
To which I say to our political and civic leaders: Where’s the plan?
Posted on March 29, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
“The tradition of Chicago City Council members enjoying near-complete control over property zoning questions within their wards took a hit Monday when a powerful Southwest Side alderman stepped in to at least temporarily halt a project favored by a colleague in a Northwest Side neighborhood,” the Tribune reports (notebook item, because not as important as artificial news about a fake, meaningless prediction; scroll down).
“Ald. John Arena, 45th, was ushering through the Zoning Committee a controversial plan to rezone a parcel in Jefferson Park for construction of a self-storage facility.”
That in itself is a bizarre move by Ed Burke, the alderman who stepped in to halt the project, but here’s what particularly caught my eye:
Posted on March 28, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
“Chicago blues will soon have a downtown museum dedicated to telling its story. The Chicago Blues Experience, a privately run, 50,000-square-foot facility, is slated to open in spring 2019 near Millennium Park,” Crain’s reports.
Not to be too obvious, but shouldn’t the museum be in, oh, say, Bronzeville, where it might spur some economic development in a neighborhood that needs it, not to mention closer to its roots – perhaps a walking tour could be included. Nobody ever learns, the city suffers, and people scratch their heads at the seemingly unsolvable problems we have that are eminently solvable.
Or am I missing something?
Posted on March 27, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
Passages from the latest interview of the greatest artist of all time:
“I was born in Duluth – industrial town, ship yards, ore docks, grain elevators, mainline train yards, switching yards. It’s on the banks of Lake Superior, built on granite rock. Lot of fog horns, sailors, loggers, storms, blizzards. My mom says there were food shortages, food rationing, hardly any gas, electricity cutting off – everything metal in your house you gave to the war effort. It was a dark place, even in the light of day – curfews, gloomy, lonely, all that sort of stuff – we lived there till I was about five, till the end of the war.”
Posted on March 24, 2017
By Steve Rhodes
The point of an anecdotal lead is to give a human, or specific, example that people can relate to as a way to explain an overall trend without starting your story with a bunch of cold, dry stats.
The anecdotal lead so often goes astray, however, when instead of the describing the typical, it describes an extreme, an outlier. Or it describes something that has nothing to do with the data at hand at all.
Such as this from the Tribune’s “Chicago Area Leads U.S. In Population Loss, Sees Drop For 2nd Year In A Row:”
Posted on March 23, 2017
