No breaking news today. Just four documents saying the quiet part City Hall keeps saying out loud. This is Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: an upzoning study, a cop-staffing deep-dive, a single bus route, and the school board math. The common denominator is what the data says versus what they tell you it says. And every one of these points to the same question. We start with zoning. Start with the Freemark study, Urban Affairs Review, 2020. Chicago's 2013 upzoning raised property values — and produced almost no new construction. Which is exactly the trap we cheered our way into on June 12th. Strip parking mandates, lower the build cost, and if nothing gets built, the landowner just pockets a fatter rent roll. So forget whether looser rules feel good. Show us the mechanism: what makes this round actually break ground when 2013 didn't? Nobody's answered that yet. And remember the Ethics Committee flunking four of eleven categories? This is exactly the kind of result a committee with real teeth would catch — value goes up, no housing, who pocketed the gain. HUD already flagged aldermanic prerogative as a civil-rights problem. Value capture without a single new unit — that's the machine they were pointing at. Cops. The Matrix Consulting study — commissioned by Council in February 2024 — found CPD overstaffed at desks. So when the mayor and aldermen say 'more cops on the street,' the honest answer starts with redeployment, not another hiring class. Right — move the desk officer to the corner. And the only question that matters: who actually holds that lever? Does Council have anything but a press release? February 2024 to results 'earlier this year.' Same twelve-to-eighteen-month gear ratio we watch on everything in this city. But credit where it's due — this study exists, and it has findings. For once, an oversight product actually delivered. Makes the Ethics Board's silence look even worse. The CTA. There's a frequency-and-reliability breakdown on Route 82 — scheduled trips versus delivered trips. One named route, not a system average. This is the instrument we kept asking for. GTFS data, scheduled frequency against what actually showed up. It gets past the ninety-percent-of-pre-COVID line and asks for the delivered count. Which is the whole point of granularity. You can't hide a missing bus inside a citywide percentage. And CPS. The Board of Education page confirms it — eleven mayoral appointees, ten elected, fully elected by 2027. So today the structure is right there in statute. Eleven to ten. Which reframes Monday's ballot-challenge fight. The mayor holds the majority either way — the brawl is over the elected ten, not the whole table. After years of fighting for an elected board, that's a sharper read than we had. Urban Affairs Review, with Yonah Slifkin Freemark:
What are the local-level impacts of zoning change? I study recent Chicago upzonings that increased allowed densities and reduced parking requirements in a manner exogenous of development plans and neighborhood characteristics. To evaluate outcomes, I use difference-in-differences tests on property transaction prices and housing-unit construction permits. I detect significant, robust increases in values for transactions on parcels that received a boost in allowed building size.
Yonah Freemark's study in Urban Affairs Review, 2020 — he looked at Chicago's 2013 upzoning, the one that raised allowed density and cut parking minimums. Difference-in-differences on transaction prices and permits. Values went up on the upzoned parcels. Construction? Didn't follow. So land got more valuable and nothing got built. That's the windfall going straight to whoever already owns the dirt — not a single new unit for anybody trying to rent on that block. Which is the uncomfortable part. We cheered the parking-mandate reform on June 12th. If looser rules raised prices last time without producing housing, somebody owes us the mechanism for why round two is different. City Hall hasn't offered one. And HUD already flagged the aldermanic veto as the thing strangling housing in disinvested wards. You loosen the rules at the citywide level, the ward still controls whether the shovel hits the ground. Value capture without construction — that's exactly the trap Freemark measured. When city leaders say Chicago needs more cops, what do we actually know about how many sworn officers are on neighborhood patrol versus pushing paper somewhere — and who even controls where they go? There's real data now, which is new. City Council commissioned the Matrix Consulting Group staffing study in February 2024, and the results landed earlier this year. The Sun-Times says it found CPD overstaffed at desks and under-supervised on the streets — pretty damning for a department that, per the Better Government Association's budget snapshot, takes 20 and a half percent of all city departmental budgets. The consent decree, the federal court order governing CPD reform, also required a separate deployment study. Per WTTW, that one said police brass need to fundamentally change how officers get assigned to so-called high-demand areas. As for who moves the pieces: CPD command staff have that authority, but union contracts and overtime allocations make it messy. The Inspector General's live dashboard tracks sworn-member overtime by unit, so you can at least see where the bodies are really going versus where they're budgeted to be. The study says add more officers, but if the problem is also where existing officers are deployed, what's actually stopping them from moving people around right now? That's the tension the Sun-Times flagged: even when the will is there, union contracts and budget constraints make redeployment politically and contractually hard. CPD has a pilot called Unity of Command — now expanded from three districts to eight — that tries to keep officers on consistent beats with consistent supervisors, per the department's announcement. That's at least a structural move toward the patrol-first model the studies recommend. The thing to watch is whether City Council funds the civilian backfill Matrix called for. Swapping desk cops for civilian employees could free up sworn officers for patrol without hiring a single new one. Here's Equity82:
The term reliability refers to the actual service delivered, measured by a variety of metrics listed in the Appendix. Using these metrics, the authors determined that just 9 percent of CTA bus routes are in compliance with agency reliability standards.
Here's the key number in this report — just 9 percent of CTA bus routes meet the agency's own reliability standards. Not a national average, not somebody's vibe. The CTA's own GTFS data, the CTA's own schedules. And it's smart how they split it — scheduled frequency is what the CTA promises, reliability is what actually shows up. Route 82 is the test case. Promised trips versus delivered trips, on one named route. Scheduled frequency versus delivered reliability — that's the exact gap riders on the 82 feel every morning standing at the stop. The schedule says ten minutes, the bus says whenever. And this is the tool I want. GTFS data, route by route. When the CTA brags about ninety percent of pre-COVID service, you check the delivered count on the 82 instead of swallowing the system-wide spin. Nine percent compliance, though. Brian, when ninety-one percent of the system is missing the standard the agency wrote for itself, the problem is bigger than one route. Here's Chicago Public Schools:
The Chicago Board of Education ("Board") is a hybrid governing body with 11 members appointed by the mayor and 10 elected members. The Board is responsible for the oversight of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). CPS is committed to transparency, and working with the Board is a vital part of ensuring that every action we take is thoughtful, equitable, and meets our high standards of excellence and integrity.
Eleven appointed by Brandon Johnson, ten elected. Do the math — the mayor still holds the majority of that table after all the years people fought for an elected board. Right, and the page is careful to say all eleven appointees have a direct CPS connection — parents, educators, former students. That's the framing CPS wants you to read. So the ballot challenges we've all been watching? Those are fights over the ten seats. The mayor's eleven aren't on any ballot — they get a structural lock either way. And the statutory path gets to a fully elected board by 2027. So this hybrid is a transition object — a snapshot of a board that won't exist in two years. You still need to know exactly where the power sits while it lasts. Sean Harden is president, Angel Velez is vice president out of District 9A. Names matter, but the count matters more — eleven beats ten on every split vote. Got thoughts on today’s stories, a tip we should follow, or a correction we need to hear? Send us a note at chicagodailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We read every message.
You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can dig into the original reporting there.
That’s Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.