Chicago's big systems are all hitting the wall at once — schools, transit, public safety, real estate — and somehow the bill always finds the same people. This is Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: CPS staring at a deficit that could gut classrooms, a nine-figure tax break moving through City Council, and a CTA ridership number that just got a very interesting rewrite. Hard math, yeah. And the people who catch it first are the ones who can least afford a tax lawyer or a lobbyist. Alright, let’s get into it. Chicago Sun-Times, with Sarah Karp and Emmanuel Camarillo:
Chicago Public Schools told principals Tuesday that the district is planning to cut the number of regular teachers who work in schools next year, a change that will result in bigger class sizes. CPS is raising the student-to-teacher ratio it uses to provide funding to schools by 1 for every grade.
Sun-Times and WBEZ are reporting CPS is cutting teacher positions and bumping class sizes as part of the push to close a $723 million deficit. Principals got the word Tuesday. Upwards of 700 teachers by their analysis, though CPS still isn’t giving a firm number. So the move is simple enough: raise the student-to-teacher ratio by one across every grade. And, of course, that lands hardest in schools that were already stretched thin. The North Shore is not getting hit with this. To be fair, CPS says it’s increasing spending on special education teachers, so this isn’t a pure slash. But the main point still stands: there’ll be fewer adults in general ed classrooms next fall. Credit to Sarah Karp for pulling this out of principals’ inboxes before CPS could massage it. That’s the story — the district told principals first and clearly hoped nobody noticed. AOL writes:
CHICAGO — Alders advanced a $54.7 million tax break out of committee Monday asked for by the developers of a $7 billion plan to reshape 55 acres around the United Center with housing, retail, entertainment space and a public plaza. The plan, called the 1901 Project, is one of the biggest developments in Chicago history and was given final City Council approval in February 2025.
The 1901 Project is back in the news. Committee moved Monday to advance a $54.7 million property tax break for the Reinsdorf and Wirtz families — the Class 7B incentive they say they need to actually break ground on the $7 billion United Center redevelopment. Seven billion dollars. And they need a fifty-five million tax cut to get started? The Reinsdorfs and Wirtzes are not exactly short on places to go find capital. To be fair, the alders didn’t just wave it through — there were real questions in committee. But “considerable concerns” turning into a committee pass is a very Chicago sentence. Chicago Sun-Times writes:
It looks like Chicago will have to get through another surge of summer violence without gunshot detection technology. That much was evident after a City Council hearing Tuesday that produced more questions than answers. Opposition alderpersons were hoping to learn why it’s taking Mayor Brandon Johnson so long to find a replacement for gunshot detection technology after he canceled the ShotSpotter contract shortly after taking office.
So Brandon Johnson canceled ShotSpotter when he took office, promised a replacement, and now here we are in summer 2026 — and the city’s chief procurement officer showed up to a Council hearing and basically said, “we can’t answer that.” Aldermen got stonewalled at their own oversight hearing. This is the part that gets me. The neighborhoods that were actually covered by ShotSpotter — South and West Side blocks — are heading into summer with nothing. No replacement, no timeline, just “open procurement process.” That is not an answer. Credit to the Sun-Times for staying on it. Johnson’s been mayor three-plus years now, and at some point “we’re working on it” stops being a transition and starts being the policy. From Ellen Steinke at Streetsblog Chicago:
Chicago’s transit use may be more robust — and more geographically unequal — than previous public data suggested. That was one of the clearest takeaways at the May 5th Chi Hack Night as CTA officials spent more than an hour walking transit advocates, civic technologists, and curious Chicagoans through a major overhaul of how the agency counts ridership.
Streetsblog’s Ellen Steinke caught this one at Chi Hack Night. CTA quietly revised its 2025 ridership count upward by 19 million trips — not because more people started riding, but because they changed how they count. And the biggest corrections hit South and West Side routes. The 87th Street bus is up more than 20 percent. So while people were writing those neighborhoods off as transit dead zones, the data was just wrong. There’s also a jump in what CTA is now calling “underpaid” rides — reduced fares, short fares, no fares. That could mean a lot of things, and I’d want the methodology before I start drawing conclusions about fare evasion versus, say, broken fareboxes. Right — because if your farebox on the 79th Street bus eats cards half the time, that’s a CTA infrastructure problem, not a rider problem. Don’t let them use bad data to justify a crackdown. Brooklee Han, writing in HousingWire:
Zillow has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) and Compass, alleging the Chicagoland MLS and the nation’s largest brokerage conspired to withhold listing data and pressure Zillow to carry private “hidden” listings nationwide, according to a company announcement.
Zillow just filed a federal antitrust suit in Chicago against MRED — that’s the Chicagoland MLS — and Compass. Zillow says they basically told it: carry our private listings nationwide or we cut off your data feed. Sherman Act, treble damages, the whole package. So Compass wants to run a velvet-rope housing market where only buyers with the right agent even know a home exists? That’s not innovation. That’s a squeeze on regular people trying to buy in this city. And the timing matters. Zillow says this escalated after April 2025, when Zillow put up its own policy requiring listings to go public before agents can pocket them. MRED and Compass apparently hated that. I’m not exactly a Zillow superfan, but if the MLS serving this whole metro is being used to protect one brokerage’s private network, that’s a neighborhood problem. Buyers lose information, sellers lose bidders, and Compass wins. You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something stuck with you, they’re there for a closer read.
That’s Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Wednesday. This is a Lantern Podcast.