When your house is on fire, the last thing you want to hear is someone saying your grass isn’t cut. Yet that’s not too different from what the businesses that create most American jobs are hearing from city officials in Chicago these days.
Chicago’s small business owners, a class already struggling to survive the worst recession in decades, are being ordered by the city to spend thousands of dollars on fancy new fences and more shrubs and plants to spruce up Chicago’s streets.
Katie Fretland told readers about the new fence notices embedded in Chicago’s landscape ordinance last week when the orders started flowing. Katie, a CNC city hall repoter, followed up on her story by hitting the streets to hear what small business owners thought of the idea. She got an earful and you can, too, by reading her report in the Chicago pages of The New York Times Friday. Wrought iron anyone?
With all of the controversy raging about the potential impact of Gov. Pat Quinn’s budget on the state’s schools, the CNC’s Crystal Yednak reports that school officials in places like suburban Elgin don’t have the luxury of endless debate and head scratching. The bleak predictions about state spending may materialize months from now, but school officials must craft budgets now that insure their school districts aren’t stuck with teachers they can’t afford when reality hits. The result is not good news for the state’s employment picture, or the state’s taxpayers, or the, well, never mind. Read Crystal’s report to see what might happen.
For years now, the nation’s demographers have scrutinized census data, projecting population trends, documenting power shifts and telling white America that its days of numerical superiority were numbered. So CNC Columnist Jim Warren unearthed a former Loyola University demographer who had found some interesting trends when looking at the population of non-Hispanic white children and women of child bearing age. Although the guy now lives in New Hampshire, Warren asked him to do some special, exclusive number crunching of the data for Chicago and Cook County. What did he find? Jim’s column is always interesting and this week is no exception.
Enough of all this doom! Recessions are terrible things but they’re not all bad. Just look at all of those empty store fronts around the city are you are liable to find something new and refreshing — pop-up art galleries. Kathy Kleiman, one of the CNC’s freelancers, reports on a cultural trend that has surfaced in Chicago as well as New York and Paris– a place, I believe, that inspired Mayor Daley to ring Chicago with wrought iron fences. Kathy talked to one building owner who decided to let some local artists use his vacant storefront windows to display their work instead of covering them with vinyl coatings emblazoned with ads for Gatorade. The result? The answer is in the Chicago pages of The New York Times Friday.
The Chicago News Cooperative produces two pages of local news for The New York Times twice a week, on Friday and Sunday. To read past stories and columns simply go to www.chicagonewscoop.org. We love ideas from readers and we are dedicated to bringing you quality public service journalism on the city’s government, schools and culture. We are as dedicated to journalism as we are to the readers of our pages and our web site now being planned.