Chicago's assessment roll opened at $49.46 billion and closed $3.85 billion lighter. Commercial property holds 39 percent of the city's assessed value and collected 86 percent of the reductions. Against its own value it was cut 17.0 percent; residential 1.3. Why that is not the whole story.
We read every Cook County Board of Review decision on a Chicago house for the 2025 tax year. Appeals filed without an attorney won 59.5% of the time; appeals filed with one won 38.9%. The gap holds in every price bracket and all five years we checked.
Chicago tests its beach water every swimming day and raises a yellow flag when the reading hits 1,000. We counted 9,524 lakefront tests since 2021. The flag flies at 63rd Street seven times as often as at North Avenue, and it is not a north-south story.
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.
We timed 883,837 Chicago 311 requests for eight street-level services, filed January 2024 through mid-June 2026: a dark traffic signal closed in a median 3 hours, a garbage cart in 15.9 days, and potholes ranged from under a day in the Loop to 26 days in Hermosa. By year and by community area.
