The average Chicagoan lives 71.5 years–but where are the average Chicagoans? According to Natalie Pardo in the Chicago Reporter (April), “The mostly white, middle-class residents on the city’s Northwest Side can expect to live 75 to 80 years. For the mostly poor African Americans on the South Side, the life expectancy is around 60 years.” Moreover, white death rates have plummeted from 681 per 100,000 in 1980 to 468 today, while African-American death rates have gone down only slightly, from 884 to 858.
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“Almost every one of the best movies is, at its heart, about real estate,” writes Stephen Malpezzi in the “Illinois Real Estate Letter” (Winter). “To begin with, virtually every Western ever made is about property rights….If the hero is not putting up a fence (or taking it down), the villain is stealing someone else’s land.”
Oh, that must be why the mayor wants to take away their powers. Elizabeth Duffrin writes in Catalyst (April): “Only six of 237 principals whose contracts expire this school year were not retained by their local school councils.”
“States are definitely the lavatories of democracy,” cracks Libertarian Party spokesman Bill Winter in a recent press release decrying a proposed South Carolina law that would make it a felony to buy or sell urine “with intent to defraud a drug screening test.”
