EIA's own state table: Illinois average residential electricity went from 18.58 to 23.85 cents per kilowatt-hour, May 2025 to May 2026 - a 28 percent jump, the largest of the fifty states and DC, while the national average rose 6. Every sector paid more. The table doesn't say why, and neither do we.
7.1 million recorded violations since mid-2014, from a fleet that has held still: 300 cameras at about 150 intersections. The counts peaked in 2023 and have eased since - the opposite path from the speed cameras we counted this week. Lake Shore Drive and Belmont leads at 74 a day.
20.6 million recorded violations since 2014. We summed all 490,578 daily camera records: the 2021 six-mph threshold nearly quadrupled the count, 2025 saw the biggest jump in cameras recording, 2026 is running 17 percent ahead - and ten locations account for three violations in ten.
Illinois audits found border agents with access to license-plate camera data, against state law. We counted the footprint: at least 116 Chicagoland police agencies with documented Flock plate-reader use, and one suburb's own disclosure page listing 463 organizations that can search its cameras.
New York City's rent board set 2026-27 stabilized increases at zero; a 1997 Illinois law bars Chicago from controlling private rents at all. We counted the lever Chicago does publish: 598 city-supported affordable rental developments, 29,550 listed units, a third of them senior housing.
We classified 3,016 Chicago restaurant addresses where an inspector recorded an Out of Business finding since 2019. 56 percent had a newly observed food-business license within two years - and the four areas with the most emptied addresses, the Near North Side, the Loop, Lake View and the Near West Side, all sit below that rate.
Fourteen states and more than one hundred local governments have weighed pausing data centers since the start of 2026. Chicago's building-permit file shows 92 data-center permits and $492 million in reported construction cost since 2015 - including a seven-story office building cleared this July for conversion.
A correction and a recount. In July this page said Chicago’s recorded house sales ran 23 percent ahead of last year through April. Cook County’s sales file has since added 1,147 sales to the 2025 side, and the same comparison now reads 4,129 against 4,376, 5.6 percent fewer. The median recorded price held at both readings: $340,000 in 2025, $360,000 in 2026.
We read all 856 ADU-related building permits since Chicago's pilot began and counted conservatively: 201 ADU permits in five-plus years, two-thirds of them in five North Side areas. The citywide expansion went live in April 2026 - this count is its baseline.
We matched every tax-year-2025 Chicago house appeal across both stages, parcel by parcel. The Assessor granted no reduction to five in six parcels that appealed; 93% of those later appeared at the Board of Review, and 42.5% received the reduction there. The 2026 appeal season opened July 27.
