Happy back to school week. Per usual, a lot happened, so let’s get into it.

This Week: Chicago rents are officially rising faster than anywhere else in America, a 40-year audit of the TIF machine found it did the opposite of its job, and Dolly Parton — patron saint of working 9 to 5 — is gone at 80.

Smart Cities Dive: Do you feel like your rent is too high, even more so than it has been?? Well, Chicago-area rents rose more in the past year than in any of the country's ten biggest metros. More than half of Chicago households rent and over 40% of renters are paying more than 30% of their income on housing.

Why It Matters: One response on the table is Johnson's Protecting Renters Ordinance, introduced this summer, that would include a ban on the junk fees that nearly 80% of renters report paying, an annual registry of every non-owner-occupied rental unit (with fees funding a new enforcement office), just-cause eviction, and a tenant bill of rights covering organizing and retaliation. Landlord groups came out against it almost immediately, and a competing measure from alders landed in July. We’ll see where it goes. Renters are more than half of Chicago: we need city policy that protects them.

WTTW: UIC's Great Cities Institute just released a four-decade audit of Chicago's TIF program: $1.59 billion flowed into the city's 108 TIF funds in 2024, up 51% since 2020. Banks and financial institutions collected over $2 billion in fees and interest, and more than half of all TIF spending since 1984 has gone into downtown or to the neighborhoods ringing the Loop.

Why It Matters: If you barely understand TIFs even after years of trying to figure them out, I think the most important part of the audit is its conclusion: The audit's conclusion is that the program "reinforced the city's historic economic inequities instead of reducing them, with little transparency or accountability." The researchers want independent oversight, expiration dates for TIFs in wealthy areas, and money redirected to small businesses and workforce training.

Block Club: Monday around midday, ICE agents chasing a man pinned his pickup on the Damen ramp in McKinley Park. A crowd showed up with whistles, then a dozen federal vehicles, then batons. DHS says the man "weaponized his pickup truck" by ramming an officer. Ald. Julia Ramirez, who was on the ramp says: "The ICE vehicle was pinned alongside that vehicle. Super dangerous. We're talking about the expressway."

Why It Matters: "Weaponized his vehicle" is the same script DHS used after killing a woman in Minneapolis in January, and after Franklin Park and Brighton Park before that. As ICE continues to be as active as ever with far less media coverage, more moments like this will keep happening.

At Illinois Signal Collective, where we’re working on narrative capacity building across the state, we've been running listening sessions on the Southwest, North, and West sides, asking people one question: where do you get your news? I’ve been surprised to see that even very politically active people say they don't know as much as they want to about what's happening in the school board race, in part because it’s as complicated as the policies governing Chicago schools are.

We've asked a version of this before, but we want to know again as things gear up.

Reply with specific pieces, questions, concerns, or problems.

Wired: More than 15 politicians from across the country have signed the AI Pact, pledging action on data centers and AI safety. A July Fox News poll found 60% of Republicans oppose a data center near them, Annenberg puts overall opposition at 61%. Hopefully more politicians follow.

Dolly Parton died Tuesday at 80. Block Club has Chicago's tribute.

Fourth of twelve kids in the Smokies, in a house that didn't have electricity in the early years, Parton wrote "9 to 5" for a movie where three secretaries kidnap their boss and run the office better without him — still the best song about work ever, in my heart.

She took roughly $10 million in royalties from Whitney Houston's version of "I Will Always Love You" and bought an office complex in a Black neighborhood of Nashville — calling it "the house that Whitney built." She was an ally before it was particularly popular: she wrote "Travelin' Thru" for Transamerica, a movie about a trans woman, in 2005. And the Imagination Library, started in 1995 as a tribute to her father, who never learned to read, has mailed more than 332 million free books to kids under five. RIP.

Good luck out there! Get some sun while you can.

-H

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