WTTW News
The city is bracing itself for extreme weather, with the temperature predicted to drop into negative digits for a number of days. During cold snaps like this, many eyes turn toward our unhoused neighbors. This year, homelessness is a crisis within a crisis the pandemic and it has people and institutions pivoting to add resources to protect people experiencing homelessness from this life-threatening cold, as it should. But when the cold abates and shifts back to more moderate winter temperatures, those resources will recede, and success will be measured by how few people were physically harmed rather than how many people are no longer homeless.
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This afternoon will be cloudy with a high around 31 degrees. Tonight’s low will be near 19 degrees. Tomorrow will be sunny with a high around 32 degrees.
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Chicago is contracting with an online health care service to allow residents to schedule vaccinations at city sites, though there is still an extremely limited number of shots available and users potentially will get no more than a response promising to send an email when appointments open up.
The city says eligible residents, including those 65 and older and essential workers, can sign up through a site or app operated by Zocdoc, a New York-based medical appointment service. It can be accessed at www.zocdoc.com/vaccine or by downloading the app, which is available from Apple and Google app stores.
Sun-Times file
The City Council moved Wednesday to preserve affordable housing and slow gentrification that has displaced so many long-time residents of Pilsen and the neighborhoods of Logan Square, Wicker Park, Humboldt Park and Bucktown around the wildly popular 606 trail.
The “anti-deconversion” ordinances championed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot would generally make it more difficult for owners and developers of property on certain blocks to turn their multi-unit buildings into expensive single-family homes that only exacerbate Chicago’s affordable housing crisis.
The 606 protections were approved in conjunction with a two-month extension of anti-demolition rules. That will buy time for the city and local aldermen to finalize a more sweeping protection plan that includes “demolition impact fees.”
Brian Ernst/Sun-Times
If someone wants to put up a building in Chicago, the process can be as muddy as our baseball diamonds in the spring thaw. Whether and how the developer needs a zoning change can be tricky enough, and then there’s the towering question of “aldermanic prerogative.”
It’s a political courtesy City Council members allow one another. If a particular alderman doesn’t want something approved in his or her ward, the others are unlikely to vote it through.
It confers enormous power not only on aldermen but on community groups able to raise a fuss. At its best, it’s a veto for something a neighborhood doesn’t want; at its worst, it reinforces segregation. It’s also given some aldermen cover to solicit bribes.