By:

Steve Cain
Summer, 2023

It still feels like a mad, mad, mad world out there. On the climate front, it’s been quite a summer. We’ve had heat waves, smoke-filled skies, boiling oceans, and flooding rains. In politics, everyone seems to have gone completely nuts. A former President with four indictments (and counting) will probably be the Republican candidate for President in what can only be described as the battle of the geriatrics in 2024. In Chicago, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the CTU is now more or less in control of the city – which is a way of saying the foxes are in charge of the hen house.

By:

Steve Cain
Winter, 2023

I’ve been alternately intrigued and alarmed about recent plans to convert the LaSalle Street corridor in the Central Loop into a mixed-use commercial and residential district. The city says it would like to see a handful of functionally obsolete, half-empty office buildings converted into as many as 2,000 new apartment units and wants to solicit bids from developers to make this happen. But is this a realistic proposal, or is it just a publicity stunt in advance of a competitive election?

By:

Steve Cain
Summer, 2022

By:

Steve Cain
Spring, 2021

I was trying to decide what to write for the Summer Newsletter. I thought about topics like the zombie eviction moratoria – just when you think they are finally dead, they pop back to life yet again… or all those billions of federal relief dollars earmarked for rent relief that were supposed to keep tenants and housing providers alive, but that have been endlessly tied up in red tape and administrative hell... or the elephant in the room – the Delta variant of COVID-19 that is rampaging across the country and that has completely dashed our brief hope that we would be “back to normal” by the Fourth of July.

By:

Steve Cain
Spring, 2021

Five months into 2021, I think we can all agree that things are looking a lot better for the city, the country and the economy than they did this time a year ago. Of course, there is one big reason for this. After a somewhat rocky start, the COVID-19 vaccination program is progressing across the country. As I write this article, more than 50% of all Americans have now received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine. This number continues to rise with every passing day. The expanding vaccination program is having a measurable, beneficial effect on transmissions and hospitalizations. Equally importantly, it is helping people feel more optimistic again about the future.

By:

Steve Cain
Winter, 2021

Buckets of ink have been spilled describing the awful year we just lived through. And yes, it was awful. Who would deny it?

By:

Steve Cain
Summer, 2020

I recently had to do an on-line refresher course on Fair Housing. Everyone in the real estate industry is supposed to know something about Fair Housing – both the legislation, and the shameful history of housing discrimination that made it necessary. Indeed, you cannot hold a real estate license in the state of Illinois without at least a cursory knowledge of this subject. Fair Housing legislation emerged from the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s and is intended to provide a legal back-stop against housing discrimination and the many wrongs it created over a period of decades and even centuries.

By:

Steve Cain
Spring, 2020

It’s still kind of hard to believe how quickly and completely the world has changed, harder still that this change has all occurred in the space of less than two months. We’d been hearing about the mysterious coronavirus that first appeared in Wuhan since the beginning of the year. But, like a lot of news these days, it sounded like something far away and abstract – somebody else’s problem – or so we thought.

By:

Steve Cain
Winter 2020
 

I heard a fun fact about February 2, 2020. If you turn it into a number with no dashes in-between, it becomes a palindrome. It’s also the first time in more than 900 years that a date could be manipulated in this way!

By:

Steve Cain
Fall 2019
 

We are staring down the end of one year and the beginning of another – and not just any year. Twenty-twenty promises to be like no other, with an election looming that will be as momentous as any in recent memory.

By:

Steve Cain
Summer 2019
 

Mike Glasser has been a real Debbie-downer lately. Our illustrious President has been sending out email after gloomy email, mostly having to do with the increasingly hostile political and regulatory environment in which developers and property owners must operate.

Sadly, these emails keep coming because things really do seem to be getting demonstrably worse. One email in particular really got my attention. This was an email with a link to an article that appeared recently in Jacobin magazine which describes itself as a “leading voice of the American left.” The article is entitled, “Developers Want to Destroy Chicago. We Won’t Let Them.” The author is Cristina Groeger.

By:

Steve Cain
Spring 2019
 

It’s been a wild start to the year and much of the news, especially over the past month, has been all about politics. Now, I know I’m supposed to steer clear of politics, but I can’t help myself. Both the local and national media have been obsessed with all things political. And who can blame them? With the release of the Mueller report and a riveting local election, there has been little appetite to talk about anything else.

By:

Steve Cain
Winter 2019
 

Chicago is a proud city with an impressive history – it was the fastest growing American metropolis of the 19th Century. It rose from the ashes of the 1871 fire to become bigger and better than before. It is the birthplace of the skyscraper and deep-dish pizza!

By:

Steve Cain
Fall 2018
 

We live in turbulent times. It seems as if everyone is angry all the time and, increasingly, willing to act on their anger. This was on full display the last week of October when a political zealot and all-around loser living out of a van in South Florida tried to send pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, and then even more so when another, even bigger loser walked into a Synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire. The eleven dead were among a congregation of innocent people peacefully gathered in the presumed safety of their place of worship. This was just the latest of a never-ending string of shootings with semi-automatic weapons that have become as American as apple pie.

By:

Steve Cain
Summer 2018
 

By any measure, the economy is exceptionally strong. The unemployment rate was 3.9% in July and has been below 4.5% for over a year. We have seen an extraordinary run of net job gains which have now continued uninterrupted for almost eight years. The last time we registered a monthly job loss was September 2010. May and June both saw net gains of more than 200,000; in February, the gain was 324,000.

By:

Steve Cain
Spring 2018
 

If you look at a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last ten years, you see an almost unbroken upward trajectory that started early in 2009 at the depth of the Great Recession, and continued until nearly the end of January of this year.

By:

Steve Cain
Winter 2017-18
 

It has been an interesting year in many ways, both good and bad. A turbulent 2017 in Washington spilled over into the New Year with a government shutdown marking the Trump administration’s one year anniversary. Instead of attending a gala celebrating in Mar-a-Lago, President Trump spent his weekend in Washington DC in the wake of the happily brief government shutdown. This came after an especially turbulent and acrimonious week of in-fighting in Congress that came to its seemingly inevitable climax on Friday, January 19. As the clock struck midnight, no 11th hour reprieve could be found to stitch together a divided and polarized nation.