Springfield says it wants more housing, CPS says it wants to stop the leaks — and both are learning the same lesson: announcing reform is easy, doing it is the hard part. You're listening to The Chicago Daily Fix. I'm Cassidy, Devin's here, and today we're getting into what Illinois's BUILD plan actually means for neighborhoods, not just what the press release wants it to mean. And the school board kicking off a leak witch hunt instead of, I don't know, fixing schools? That one has some nerve to it. Housing and accountability — two things Chicago will never be short on opinions about. Let's get into it. From Steven Vance at Chicago Cityscape:
Illinois is closer than it has ever been to passing a serious statewide housing reform package. Governor JB Pritzker's **BUILD Plan** — short for *Building Up Illinois Development* — was the centerpiece of his February “State of the State” address, and a package of proposals was simultaneously introduced. If any meaningful slice of it passes, it will reshape where and how new homes can be built across Chicago and the surrounding region.
Chicago Cityscape's Steven Vance has a deep breakdown of Governor Pritzker's BUILD plan — Building Up Illinois Development — and if even part of it gets through Springfield, it changes where housing gets built across Chicagoland. 142,000 units short statewide. That's not a housing market, that's a crisis with a ribbon on it. And the kicker is places like Evanston literally banned two-flats and three-flats — the exact homes that kept working-class people in neighborhoods for generations. Vance's point is that the whole package matters. You can't just grab the easy pieces and call it reform. Springfield has a deadline problem and the suburbs have a density problem, which, honestly, is the same problem with better branding. Suburban municipalities blocking density while complaining about affordability is maybe the most Chicago-area thing imaginable. Pritzker putting this in the State of the State at least puts some heat on them. Chicago Tribune writes:
A law firm hired by the Chicago Board of Education has come up empty in its effort to identify the sources of two separate media leaks, one of which revealed the names of finalists in the school district’s CEO search last fall. The board’s law firm, Salvatore Prescott Porter & Porter, interviewed most of the 21 board members and reviewed their emails, but found “insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion,” according to a report released by the board office late Thursday.
Chicago Board of Education spent roughly twenty-eight thousand dollars hiring a law firm to find out who leaked to the press — and the official answer is: nobody knows. The firm interviewed most of the twenty-one board members, reviewed emails, and found nothing actionable. Twenty-eight grand to investigate WBEZ doing its job. Sarah Karp breaks a story on the CEO search finalists and the board's response is to hire lawyers to hunt the source? That's not governance, that's intimidation theater. Board President Sean Harden says the leaks "eroded trust." Sure. But a twenty-eight-thousand-dollar witch hunt that turns up nothing probably doesn't help either. Credit to the Tribune for pressing on the cost — the board office didn't even answer that question. We've put links to every story we touched on today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can dig in a little more there.
That's The Chicago Daily Fix for this Monday. Thanks for listening. This is a Lantern Podcast.