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04/30/2021 08:18 AM EDT
TGIF, Illinois. I’m making pastitsio and dyeing red eggs this weekend. Happy Easter to all who celebrate.
TOP TALKER
Bruce Rauner, photographed during the 2018 gubernatorial campaign, looks back on his embattled time in Springfield, saying politics is “brutally hard it’s nasty, it’s dirty and ugly. | Getty Image
click to enlarge The author, seven years old and at the start of the school year, after a brush with juvenile delinquency Courtesy Maya Dukmasova When I was seven I broke into a house with some older kids one summer. This was in Russia in the 90s, as the society around us was collapsing. The fall of the Soviet Union and the descent of the country into sudden, unregulated capitalism yielded the rapid development of inequality. Seemingly overnight a place in which, for decades, people basically had the same homes, made the same paychecks, and got access to the same opportunities became a place where ostentatious wealth coexisted with grinding poverty. Grannies with college educations were begging for change in the street in threadbare clothes while the latest Mercede
Eviction Since March, the federal, state, and local versions of an eviction moratorium have kept thousands in their homes. While typically there are some 20,000 eviction cases filed every year, as of December 14, only about 6,600 eviction cases have been filed against Chicago residential and commercial tenants and 65 percent of those cases were initiated before the governor issued his first moratorium. Landlords are still allowed to file cases if there s an emergency, but they have to prove that a tenant is a danger to neighbors or is destroying the property. However, the vast majority of eviction proceedings here, as everywhere in the country, start because tenants are behind on their rent, not because they re in violation of their lease.