Chicago Foreclosures: Leadership We Don't Want

By JoshMogerman in News on Sep 29, 2012 9:00PM

This is an amazing city. We pass by the world's biggest this and that almost daily without a thought. Biggest water treatment plant in the world, yeah, its here. (Biggest drinking water plant, too). Tallest church, yup, we've got that. And all those boarded up houses, well, they point to some leadership we cannot exactly take pride in. Chicago now leads the nation in home foreclosures.

We have covered the problem on this site, but frankly it is an issue Chicago should be fretting a ton more about. That’s what makes John McCarron’s excellent editorial in the Trib today so important. He answers his own, “What's to be done about the vacants?” question with a call for more aggressive City Hall action before destabilized neighborhoods undercut everything else going on in town:

All the same, Mayor Rahm Emanuel needs to do something. He can open another 50 charter schools, announce more corporate relocations and beam wireless Internet from Howard to 135th Street, But if he doesn't get a handle on those 40,000 vacants, the cancer will spread and viable neighborhoods will be dragged under.

A quick look at our Flickr pool shows that you are documenting the issue around town. After all, its hard to miss 1 in 10 properties going vacant---but it is a lot tougher to get after the problem. If this is to remain an amazing city, we hope Mr. McCarron’s column resonates on LaSalle.