Good morning, Chicago.
Denise Gilmore feels like she’s being taxed out of Humboldt Park.
She and her husband, Willie, have lived on Pierce Avenue since 2010, but in 14 years their property tax bill has ballooned more than 60%. Taxes could hit even harder next year after Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s office increased the home’s value by $60,000.
But some of the Gilmores’ neighbors — whose homes are significantly newer and worth much more — haven’t felt the same pain. That’s in large part because Kaegi’s office regularly misclassifies and undervalues properties throughout Cook County, an Illinois Answers Project and Chicago Tribune investigation found.
Across the street from the Gilmores, an $843,000 two-story farmhouse built in 2021 continues to be categorized by Kaegi’s office as vacant land worth only $44,280. The new homeowners’ 2024 tax bill is only $750.
Kaegi’s administration has known about the problem almost since the day he was sworn into office nearly six years ago.
Still, he has not addressed the issue on a systemic level.
So the Tribune and Illinois Answers conducted its own partial audit using the same tools Kaegi’s office has at its disposal.
Following a nine-month investigation, @illinoisanswers and the Tribune found Kaegi’s office missed at least $444 million in value from a combined 620 properties during the 2023 tax year. The missed properties can be found across the county, from an $11 million mansion on the North Shore to swaths of modest homes in tiny south suburban Lynwood.
Read the full investigation from the Tribune’s A.D. Quig and Illinois Answers Project’s Alex Nitkin and Cam Rodriguez.
Here are the top stories you need to know to start your day.
Subscribe to more newsletters | Puzzles & Games | Today’s eNewspaper edition
A migrant family’s first year in Chicago: sadness, setbacks and ‘beautiful moments’
Last year, the Tribune’s Nell Salzman followed the Mendez family of five — Esperanza, her adult son, Fabian, his girlfriend, and Experanza’s two youngest children, Yuledy and Pedro — on a bus and train from El Paso, Texas, to Chicago last July. They had risked their lives to make it to the United States.
A year later, they find themselves in deep isolation.
Controversial staffing firm to remain in Chicago migrant shelters
When Brandon Johnson became mayor, he condemned an expensive staffing contract for migrant shelters that his administration inherited from his predecessor.
Now with the two-year mark of the city’s asylum-seeker crisis this month, the vendor Favorite Healthcare Staffing has billed over a quarter-billion dollars for running operations at the shelters, and is likely here to stay.
At the 1944 Democratic convention in Chicago, an ailing FDR faced a difficult choice
Delegates to the Democratic National Convention of 1944 traveled to Chicago in passenger cars crowded with GIs headed to the battlefields of World War II. Ahead of the convention, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with party officials in the 51st Street rail yard where his fortified sleeping car, the Ferdinand Magellan, was parked.
Office footprints in the West Loop are shrinking, but companies on the move are seeking top-notch spaces
Companies are shopping for new offices in downtown Chicago, and many are leasing smaller spaces.
How Chicago factors into blockbuster cartel cases against the ‘Chapitos’ and ‘El Mayo’: ‘You’re halfway to everywhere’
When “El Chapo” son Joaquin Guzman Lopez appeared in a Chicago courtroom to face narcotics trafficking charges Tuesday, the city once again landed at the epicenter of the U.S. government’s long-running war on Mexico’s powerful drug cartels.
The intrigue surrounding Guzman Lopez’s improbable arrival on U.S. soil put the spotlight squarely on the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, where leaders of the notoriously violent Sinaloa cartel have been named in a parade of indictments that began more than 15 years ago.
Among them was then-Public Enemy No. 1 Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, the father of Guzman Lopez, who was ultimately convicted by a jury in New York in 2019 and is now serving a life sentence in a Colorado supermax prison.
For multiracial people, questions confusing ancestry and identity are exhausting
During an appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, former President Donald Trump said he hadn’t known that Vice President Kamala Harris — the Democrats’ presumptive nominee after President Joe Biden opted not to seek reelection and endorsed her as his successor — is Black.
The challenges of being multiracial in the United States were highlighted in the face of Trump’s messaging, experts said.
Steve McMichael’s Hall of Fame enshrinement brings joy, relief and hope that ‘he can have some peace now’
When at long last it became Steve McMichael’s turn to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday, the center stage at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium remained empty.
Instead, the video board behind the rows of Hall of Famers in gold polo shirts cut to Homer Glen. There, in the suburban Chicago home where he has been confined as he fights ALS, McMichael watched as wife, Misty, and daughter, Macy, unveiled his bust.
McMichael, the fierce defensive tackle in the middle of the great 1985 Chicago Bears defense, lay motionless in a hospital bed, his gold jacket draping over him as his family and former teammates Jimbo Covert, Richard Dent and Mike Singletary offered their cheers and support for an honor McMichael has been waiting for since he last played in 1994.
Itasca’s Zach Ziemek sets an American record with his 3rd Olympic decathlon
When he crossed the finish line of the 1,500 meters, Ziemek became the first American athlete to complete three Olympic decathlons. And he treated the accomplishment much the way he has pursued his world-class career: quietly, with as little fanfare and fuss as possible.
Column: Bill Veeck boycotted both Chicago ballparks in the last year of his life. Here’s why you shouldn’t do the same.
Back in another era, Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck used to sit in the front row of the center-field bleachers at Wrigley Field with some of his friends, including Otto “Dutch” Denning, writes Paul Sullivan.
This was in 1983, when Veeck was boycotting Comiskey Park over a perceived slight by then-Sox President Eddie Einhorn, who said he and partner Jerry Reinsdorf would make the club a “high-class operation” after taking over the team from Veeck.
Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune
A young man reads a book along the lakefront at Promontory Point on June 4, 2021. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune)
Biblioracle: Why don’t men read novels?
Writing recently at Dazed magazine online, Georgina Elliott asked “Why don’t straight men read novels?”
Elliott explores various theories as to why men aren’t reading novels, including that men are not socialized to read as much as women, lacking reading role models in other men. Elliott also shares a theory that men don’t read novels because they have internalized an ethos that they are expected to be “productive” agents acting in the world, rather than passively experiencing the lives of others through fiction.
Lollapalooza Day 4: Punk sounds, Slow Pulp and an early word on festival safety for 2024
The last day of Lollapalooza Sunday had sun, stubbornly high temps and humidity and a few schedule changes in a musical lineup concluding with singer Melanie Martinez, DJ Ben Böhmer, electronic music duo Zeds Dead and the rock band Blink-182.
The day’s lineup was heavy on punk and alternative tunes, harking back to Lollapalooza’s roots in the ’90s, with Pierce the Veil preceding Blink-182 on the T-Mobile mainstage and a day-opening set on the Bacardi stage by Chicago alternative band Scarlet Demore.