Cook County's last two property tax deadlines ran late, and the county says the next will too. CPS says it is short $250 million; the Treasurer's office says at most $80 million. Either way, the schools are borrowing while they wait.
The flames took 30 hours; deciding who could rebuild took three years. The 1872 march on the Common Council, the businessmen's relief ledger, the fire-limits compromise, and the class map it drew.
The Great Chicago Fire, mapped: how it crossed the river twice, the 30-hour timeline, the disputed toll, the deadlier fire the same night, and where it survives in daily Chicago.
Ten Chicago bars licensed to serve until 4 a.m., every one a short walk from the 24-hour Red Line. Verified against city licence records and each bar’s own posted hours, with the ones that shut at two flagged.
The Census Bureau put April new-home sales 6.2 percent below March, and printed a margin of error of 12.8 beside it. By the agency's own test neither that change nor the year-over-year one is statistically significant. Chicago's deed and permit records are counts rather than estimates: median prices up 18 to 29 percent off their 2023 floor, permits at a five-year high, sales up 22 percent on a like-for-like January-to-April window. Plus the 59 percent collapse we nearly published, and why it was an artifact.
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.
