The city's top cop says he's retiring the same week five gunmen open fire outside a River North hotel — and the headline on his exit is 'historic drop in crime.' This is Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily. Snelling's out July 15, a South Side development just cleared council, and Chicago's paying more than anyone to pull lead pipes. We start with the chair that just emptied. If today's show was useful, follow us wherever you're listening — the next one will be waiting. Here's Quinn Myers at Block Club Chicago:
Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling announced Wednesday that he has made the “difficult decision” to retire after three decades on the force, including the last three as the city’s police chief. His last day is July 15. In a statement, Snelling recounted serving in multiple positions since starting as a police officer at 22 years old before rising through the ranks and being tapped for the job by Mayor Brandon Johnson in 2023.
Larry Snelling's out. Thirty years on the force, three as superintendent, last day July 15 — and Mayor Johnson, who tapped him in 2023, still hasn't named who's taking that chair next. The statement leans hard on the résumé — 416 homicides last year, the lowest since 1965. Real number. And in today's rundown, that story sits right next to five gunmen outside a River North hotel at three in the morning. That's the problem: both can be true. The citywide number hits a sixty-year low, and a guy still gets shot dead outside a hotel by five hooded men with long guns. The average went down. The block didn't. So the fight starts July 28, when petition season opens — does Johnson pick a superintendent who knows the South and West Sides, or someone who just plays nice downtown? That pick tells you everything about the next two years. And this hits a mayor who hasn't even formally filed for his own reelection yet. His appointee is walking before petitions open, so now where Johnson stands is a live question, whether he wanted that or not. Ian Achong, writing in Urbanize Chicago:
The Chicago City Council has approved a mixed-use development dubbed Bridgeport Crossing at 3301 S. Justine in McKinley Park. Planned by Sharon Wong, the project site measures over 4 acres at the corner of W. 33rd St and S. Justine St and is an industrial piece of land with an existing warehouse on the site.
So Bridgeport Crossing cleared council — over four acres at 33rd and Justine in McKinley Park. Three buildings, townhomes, a nine-story tower. Same industrial site that turned into a flashpoint for months, and now it's got a green light. It's local developer Sharon Wong, with Kennedy Mann on design, building on a former industrial parcel right up against Bubbly Creek. If you know your Chicago waterways, you don't build condos next to a name like that by accident. But here's what I'm seeing — 67 condominiums, nine townhomes, a retail box. Condos. Townhomes. I don't see the word rent anywhere in this. Another parcel, another developer win, and where's the affordability piece on this one? Sixty-nine parking spaces on the ground floor of Building B, too. So it's for-sale housing and cars — that tells you exactly who this block's being built for. Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, Keerti Gopal, Clayton Aldern, writing in Grist:
No city dealing with a lot of lead pipes spends as much as Chicago does to replace them. With more than 400,000 lead water service lines, Chicago has the largest known inventory of lead pipes of any city in the country. Officials say replacing each one costs about $31,000 on average — more than six times the Environmental Protection Agency’s national estimate of $4,700 a line.
Thirty-one grand a line. The EPA puts the national number at forty-seven hundred — Chicago's paying more than six times that, per Grist and WBEZ. And we're not talking New York prices, or Detroit prices. Detroit's on that same list. Chicago's out here alone. Here's what that price tag actually means. Four hundred thousand lead lines — most in the country — and every wasted dollar is a pipe you don't pull. So a kid on the West Side drinks lead water longer because the city can't figure out its own math. That's where you audit it, though. Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News surveyed eighteen other cities — six to twenty-five grand a line. Somebody in this town needs to explain that gap on the record, not in a press release. And the mandate's twenty years to pull all of 'em. If they sequence this block by block the way Chicago usually spends, the poorest ZIP codes wait the longest. Same story as that West Pullman grocery — the timeline always stretches where the money's thinnest. From Streetsblog Chicago:
From the get-go, Archer project supporters, nearly all of them Southwest Siders and almost none of them previously involved in local politics, showed up to counter-protest. So there have been several months of weekly dueling rallies. That stopped after June 5, when Chicago Department of Transportation Complete Streets Planner Riley O’Neil was fatally “doored” in a non-protected bike lane on Halsted Street in Bridgeport, just a few miles up the road from Brighton Park.
Twenty-nine straight Mondays of rallies outside Julia Ramirez's office — rush hour, every week since December 8 — and the Archer Avengers just... stopped showing up. And Streetsblog names who was behind it: Urban Center, the lobbying group Paul Vallas co-founded, now run by Juan Rangel. That's the part that gets me. Brighton Park — working-class, Latino — and the opposition to the street-safety project there was being promoted by a downtown outfit trying to elect Ramirez's challenger. Residents deserved to know whose money was standing on that corner. Rangel basically said the quiet part out loud in the Tribune — the point was electing Claudia Zuno. Then Zuno shows up at the rallies a week before announcing her campaign. It reads just like what he said it was. And the counter-protesters? Southwest Siders, most of 'em never touched local politics before. They just wanted safer blocks and outlasted the astroturf. Block Club Chicago writes:
RIVER NORTH — A man was killed and another wounded in a shooting Wednesday morning in River North, according to police and the local alderperson. The shooting happened about 3:20 a.m in the 500 block of North State Street, a prominent location for hotels and tourists. Five men, who were “hooded and masked,” got out of a gray Honda Accord and fired shots, Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) said in a statement.
Five men, hooded and masked, get out of a gray Honda Accord — two long guns, three handguns, more than a hundred shell casings on North State Street at 3:20 in the morning. That's from Block Club and Alderman Reilly, who's calling it a targeted gang hit. And this is the same day we're airing a piece with 'historic drop in crime' in the headline. The numbers are real, and that block was a war zone at three a.m. Five hundred block of North State — hotels, tourists, the postcard version of downtown. Reilly's response is more 'late-hour police presence' this holiday weekend. Ten days before Snelling walks out with no interim named. Right — so who's the next superintendent inheriting this? Somebody who knows the South and West Sides, or somebody who looks good standing in front of a downtown hotel? Because a gray Accord and five masked guys don't care about your crime stat. And nobody's in custody. Targeted, Reilly says — the 30-year-old had been targeted before. So the impunity's the story: coordinated, planned, and they drove off. Got a tip, a story idea, or a correction for us? Send a note anytime to chicagodailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We read it, and it helps shape future episodes.
What we're watching next: Larry Snelling's last day as Chicago police superintendent is July 15. And Bridgeport Crossing's developer plans to break ground this summer, with the project slated to finish in July 2028.
You'll find links to every story from today in the show notes, if you want to dig further into anything that caught your ear.
That's Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.