Southwest Side mall goes dark in five weeks, a housing portal clears committee, and the mayor is still telling Springfield to do its homework — all in the same Monday. This is Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily — I'm Sarah, Brian's here — and today all that housing-and-schools throat-clearing finally comes with votes and addresses attached. Ford City closing June 22, one housing ordinance headed to City Council, and Johnson saying no school closings — three stories, and for once each one has something real on the line. We'll see how long those stakes hold. Here's 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 the BUILD Plan breakdown — Pritzker's statewide housing package, first floated in February, now running through Springfield with actual bill deadlines on it. The University of Illinois put a number on the hole: 142,000 units short today, 227,000 needed over five years. And that Evanston two-flat photo in the piece is doing some serious work — that's the missing middle that got banned after the fact in suburbs that now want to talk about affordability. If you want to unwind that, state preemption is the move, and that's exactly where the BUILD Plan is pointed. This is landing in the same Springfield queue as the home equity theft reform bills we flagged last week — Pritzker's got multiple housing-adjacent packages moving in the same session window, and now it's just a question of what gets floor time before the deadline. Cityscape's point is the tell here: the bills that survive are usually the ones that annoy the fewest suburbs, which means the preemption teeth tend to get trimmed first. Here's Corli Jay at Chicago Reader:
A tool to make finding affordable housing easier to locate may soon be a reality after the Committee on Housing and Real Estate advanced an ordinance to pilot a centralized online affordable housing portal.“We’ve all heard the issues with how difficult it is to find affordable housing in Chicago and to navigate the multiple systems of waitlists,” Maria Hadden, 49th Ward alderperson and a sponsor of the Accountable Housing and Anti-Discrimination Waitlist Act (AHAD) ordinance, said while introducing the substitute ordinance in the committee meeting on May 13.
Committee on Housing and Real Estate advanced the AHAD ordinance Tuesday — full City Council vote is Wednesday the 20th. Maria Hadden has been carrying this since 2021, and the Chicago Housing Initiative's Don Washington basically said out loud that it took five years because of the city's 'shifting politics.' That's a polite way of saying aldermanic prerogative ate five years of people's housing searches. One centralized portal — wait times, property info, rental applications all in one place instead of families bouncing between five different lists. That's not flashy, but that's the kind of infrastructure that actually changes somebody's week. Hadden's fingerprints are all over it, and it deserves the credit. Here's my question: this is a pilot. In Chicago, 'pilot' can mean citywide rollout, or it can mean one ward quietly runs it until the political wind shifts again. The BUILD Plan is stuck in the same Springfield-dependency trap the mayor's running on schools — who makes sure this portal actually scales? And compare that with Compass trying to run a velvet-rope housing market, with information hoarded at the top. This ordinance is the opposite: open the information, put it where renters can actually find it. Wednesday's vote will tell you which way this council is facing. Block Club Chicago writes:
WEST LAWN — Ford City Mall, a Southwest Side fixture recently labeled a “death trap” by local officials, will close June 22, officials said Friday. The decision comes one month after city officials filed an emergency motion asking a Cook County judge to force all tenants and occupants to evacuate the mall, 7601 S. Cicero Ave., citing a defective fire suppression system that posed an “imminent health and safety risk,” Kristen Cabanban, a spokesperson for the Law Department, previously told Block Club.
Ford City Mall closes June 22 — emergency court motion, defective fire suppression, the city calling it an imminent safety risk. Block Club's got the rest of it: open wiring, flooding, a possible sinkhole from unidentified leaks. This isn't a slow retail fade, it's a condemned building that somehow still had sixteen tenants in it. And one of those tenants is JCPenney — the last one left in the city — and it just renewed a five-year lease. That's the part that stings. West Lawn loses its last anchor, Cicero Avenue loses a jobs node, and the building holding that corner together is now a court case. The 1901 Project conversation from earlier this spring belongs right next to this. Committee members had 'considerable concerns' about handing out tax incentives to stabilize a commercial anchor — well, here's what no stabilization looks like. A dead mall on the Southwest Side has none of the Loop's investor mystique. Nobody's lining up to convert 7601 South Cicero. Ford City also fed CTA ridership on those Southwest Side routes — routes we flagged earlier this week as already undercounted. Pull a destination anchor off that corridor and the ridership math gets worse before anybody fixes the methodology. Here's Alice Yin and Jake Sheridan at Chicago Tribune:
During an interview with the Tribune ahead of his three-year mark in office, the mayor responded to questions on planned cuts to teaching positions in the next school year by saying the nation’s fourth-largest school district needs to spend more, not less. Throughout the sit-down, Johnson also stuck to his talking points on Chicago needing more progressive taxation while continuing to refuse to say if he will run for a second term next year.
Johnson sat down with the Tribune ahead of his three-year mark and came out swinging against CPS staff cuts — the same cuts being floated by the leadership structure he put in place. He's now publicly denouncing a budget proposal from people he helped install, which is a posture, not a plan. And his frame is Black enrollment — he's saying cutting teaching positions pushes Black families out. That's not a budget argument, that's a reelection argument, and it's the clearest signal he's sent all week even if he still won't say the words 'second term.' The deficit is still $732 million. School closings are off the table, per Johnson himself. Progressive taxation is a Springfield ask that isn't moving. 'You can't cut your way to success' is a great line — somebody tell me what the math looks like on the other side of it. Last week we were asking whether he'd ever own a position publicly on this. He has now. That's progress. But owning 'I'm against bad things' with no closing move on the $732 million is a new problem, not a solution. If Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily helps you keep up with the city, take a moment to subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. It's a small thing that helps more people find the show.
You'll find links to all of today's stories in the show notes, if you want to dig further into anything we covered.
That's Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.