818,888 Chicago crashes since 2019, sorted by the hour they happened. The hour that produces the most crashes and the hour when a crash is most likely to kill someone sit twelve hours apart, and darkness does not explain the gap.
Seven bus routes are carrying more riders than they did in 2019; only three L stations are. We ran every CTA route and station through the same January-to-May window, per service day, and the split runs along one line: whether the route goes downtown.
We put the federal mortgage record next to Cook County’s deed record for 2025. At least 1,532 homes sold at or under $100,000; lenders wrote 289 purchase mortgages that size in the whole city. In West Englewood, 124 such homes sold and four small purchase mortgages were written. Corrected September 30, 2026: the first count was incomplete and included parking spaces.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (Public Law 119-101) became law on July 11, 2026 without the president’s signature. We set four parts of it against the county’s deed file, the federal mortgage record, the city’s permit file and its inspection record. The small-mortgage sections match Chicago’s records most closely; the deed record can say little about the investor ban. Corrected September 30, 2026, against the enacted text.
Forty-four buildings are on the city's published scofflaw list. Four have been on every list for four and a half years, the oldest case was filed in 2016, and fourteen of them sit in a single community area. The record, read as the court docket it is.
Chicago recorded 106,593 building-code violations in 2018 and 49,377 in 2025 — with almost exactly the same inspector budget. The city's code enforcement quietly halved after 2020 and never came back, complaint response hardest of all, in nearly every neighborhood.
Traffic signals get fixed in three hours; a garbage cart takes fifteen days; and the pothole map has a geography all its own. We put a stopwatch on two and a half years of Chicago's 311 files, for all eight everyday services, in all 77 community areas.
Companies bought 13 percent of the Chicago homes sold from 2018 through 2022 and 46 percent of the ones resold by their buyers within two years. The buyer names on 245,849 recorded sales, sorted: single-building condominium buyouts, house-by-house buyers, a nonprofit receiver and a relocation firm. Recomputed September 30, 2026, with five corrections to the July version.
Cook County’s tax rolls show 7,875 fewer two-to-six-flats in Chicago than in 2006. Of the 13,049 parcels that left the count, 6,208 are now classed as single-family houses, 2,729 as vacant land, and 2,084 were retired with condominium units recorded within 12 meters of the same spot. In higher-priced areas most are now houses; in lower-priced areas most are vacant land. Recomputed September 30, 2026, with corrections to the July version.
Five market signals scored from public records in all 77 Chicago community areas: house prices, two-to-six-flat prices, company buyers, new-construction permits and new business licenses. Three areas west and south of downtown show four of five; Logan Square, Avondale and the Lower West Side show none. Recomputed September 30, 2026, on the county’s updated sales file, with a correction to the company-buyer share.
