It’s a great day to get out there and clear some drains, Chicago

Reading Wuthering Heights and gotta say it I’m confused how they’re making a romance movie about this, when (~60% through) it seems best summarized as “BPD girl with a weak constitution and her abusive paramour screw up their own lives and also everyone else’s.”

Conor's not on Bluesky, but he's got a *really* good Op-Ed in the Tribune today about teacher pensions. www.chicagotribune.com/2026/02/06/o...

Reading both of these at the same time and lots of interesting nuggets / comparisons - among them, the questionable existence of “Greeks” as a useful category for at least ~1,000 years between these two events.

Of course, it's also good to just not make people do 100 page reports that no one reads for routine City business.

This is a great example of Good Abundance imo: EDSs are required of private entities, so one could think of shrinking their footprint as "cutting regulations." But bc the City relies on private nonprofits, etc, to build housing, it's really increasing state capacity! bsky.app/profile/rsda...

A lot going on here so bear with me but... Saturday and Sunday run way closer to their pre-covid numbers than weekdays do, especially in the summer and fall. They're much more sensitive to seasonality than weekdays. Monday and Friday run slightly behind Wed-Thurs but follow the same annual trends.

Need a name for this mid-rise infill multifam typology all over wealthy urban developing world neighborhoods (Tehran, Hanoi, Mexico City, Lima): lobby half a story above grade, sloped garage to the side. Ugly, inaccessible, garage-driven, but ubiquitous – must be efficient for fitting a lot of cars.

Sanctions-busting hero Hamed Zarepoor has uploaded tons of new Google Street View shots of Tehran. He used to only have the main streets, but now there are lots of side streets. You can see what the city actually looks like, not just what architects wished it looked like:

coming soon to @chicagocityscape.com: this chart showing new construction homes permitted per ward per year the * asterisk indicates that the ward saw fewer than 100 homes in the 8-year period shown

and bus ridership was nearly flat YoY.

The rate of growth slowed down considerably last year. For rail, the O'Hare branch was the only line making big YoY gains.

The sharp high income-low income border running N-S through Edgewater and Uptown just east of the lake is Broadway. That's the context for the furor over the Broadway rezoning, which has come 90% from the dark blue tracts

Hoping to see some Uptown folks at tomorrow's meeting (5:30pm, 4737 N. Sheridan) about the Sarah's Circle Permanent Supportive Housing development tomorrow!

Also - share any CDMX urbanism recommendations! (Not my first trip though I’m with family so I can’t just go look at buildings and streets the whole time!)

Chinese electric cars with ranges of 240 miles advertised for ~$20,000 at the Mexico City Airport - gonna be a tough decade for the American/European auto industry…

A really welcome reinvention of a fairly standard five story infill apartment building from a newish local architecture firm, Org chicagoyimby.com/2024/10/plan...

Elizabeth would be a great infill station location to reduce some 1/2 mile walks to the nearest L stop in this increasingly densely populated area.

CTA [Blue Line Automation!] when??

Honestly they should try to figure out how to automate the blue line with that money. There will be so much work for the operators on the others…

Is one possible reason for LIHTC projects' higher per unit costs in Chicago vs. market projects that they so often seem to be six stories? My understanding is that's where you can no longer do type III construction and there's a cost discontinuity chicagoyimby.com/2025/10/exte...

Community meeting about this tonight at the Center on Halsted at 5:30PM - come join us!

It's cool that when they think the audience is progressive, the Edgewater residents organizing against the Broadway rezoning say they're fighting gentrification, but otherwise they're pretty open about what they're worrying about

Finally got something out of my head that's been there a while: A capsule history of the mid-density Chicago apartment building daniel-kay-hertz.ghost.io/the-life-dea...

About 1% of US railway mileage is electrified, with only tiny steps taken to electrify more in recent years (Caltrain) www.fastcompany.com/91178844/ind...

Read an article about the RPM TIF's high revenue generation (due to seeing it linked in City That Works news roundup @rsday.bsky.social @conordurkin.bsky.social) and it made me wonder... perhaps CTA should just use the TIF funding as a dedicated fund for local capital projects without fed funding.

Malice, incompetence, or a secret third thing: on bureaucracy daniel-kay-hertz.ghost.io/malice-incom...

North Side folks without plans tonight - come hear me talk about Zoning and Development and tell us what you think we should be doing more [or less]!! Submit any pre-meeting questions you want answered through the link below: airtable.com/appd482bRGwK...

Stone pavings of Helsinki I really would like to know the per sqm cost, the construction and maintenance budget, and who funds what and how because the quality of soil treatment in new developments is incredible. In Montréal, we can't even afford to use stone in our most iconic main street.

Chicago’s Divvy bikeshare shattered records in August: 🥇Highest month in program history: 995K rides 🥇Highest month for e-bikes: 500K+ rides 🥇Highest month for scooters: 200K+ rides The City's efforts to make Divvy more affordable & accessible are paying off!

Just got the hottest ticket in Chicago events.bloomberglive.com/event/9d5b2d...

How could you not support someone with such excellent taste in television???

Argyle, Wilson, and Cermak (Chinatown) are consistently three of the best-recovered CTA stops, while the rest of the Red Line sits at varying levels of average.

The hits keep coming: Another proactive rezoning to B-3 (5-6 stories) on Cottage Grove in Bronzeville between 43rd and 47th

They should have done this for Lincoln Yards and the 78.

What’s happening to the CTA here!? Would be super curious to see this broken down by line. Also wonder what the 2019 stats would look like.

On the one hand this station looks cool and accessibility retrofits (not just elevators but wider platforms etc.) are much needed. On the other hand its hard to see us getting construction costs under control *at all* if a single station renovation costs $440M. blockclubchicago.org/2025/08/20/s...

California is so backward we first need to eliminate ***helicopter*** parking mandates???

More than three years after I went to my first community meeting about this, Clark Street Bike Lanes (Montrose to Winnemac) are finally happening!

This is in no way a dunk, but reading the blurbs of From Boom to Bubble makes it clear how much the discourse has changed - “overbuilding” discourse is the post-recession era replaced by emphasis on its opposite. The question is which part of today’s discourse will be the same in ~10 years!

This bungalow for sale in the 13th Ward has a pre-ADU: - separate kitchen & bathroom in the basement - compliant basement ceiling height - a separate entrance from the outside to the basement without having to go through the main floor Why block the homeowner from renting the basement out?

846 marks the highest CTA Rail staffing levels since 2019. Solid flagger class too. On pace to hit those pre-pandemic numbers just in time for the fiscal cliff to hit.

I wrote about how to get deeply affordable housing, and the duality of housing programs daniel-kay-hertz.ghost.io/how-to-get-d...

For all the HHN fans out there you can thank local advocacy groups like @betterstreetschicago.org and activists like @foxyjewishmama.bsky.social for winning faster buses and safer bike lanes so hopefully the only horrors you have are on purpose and fun.

The rolling dismount #RealBiker

One thing that is interesting here: It doesn't seem like the modern conception of aldermanic prerogative had taken hold yet. No one would ever say this today--it assumes that the decision is the administration's, which they would have to fight to overturn, as opposed to the other way around

"If passed, Baltimore would join dozens of places around the country that already have eliminated minimum parking requirements." www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/tr...