Especially since the pandemic began, sitting down to read the daily newspaper in print form has been the highlight of my days. The reliable Chicago Tribune carrier leaves the paper outside the door early every morning. After breakfast, I make a pot of tea and settle into my reading chair for what’s become a long, leisurely ritual in these months of isolation.

The ritual may die out with my generation. Two in five people over age 65 read printed newspapers, according to the Pew Research Center, but not even one younger person in five does. Younger people prefer to get their news on their smartphones and laptops, where it’s available wherever they are and updated more than once a day. 

Newspaper reading would have been a habit of mine even if I hadn’t started my career as a reporter. My parents subscribed to both the Chicago Tribune and the hometown Joliet Herald-News, so I grew up thinking that a household typically read a daily newspaper or two. 

I’ve been a Tribune subscriber since I returned to the Chicago area 35 years ago. I resented the constantly increasing cost until I saw firsthand how the newspaper industry was declining as online news proliferated. My brother, the sports editor at the Herald-News for 35 years, lost his full-time staff. I did a five-year stint at the Herald-News in the late 1980s. The editor for whom I worked was let go when the features department was eliminated. Two of my friends stuck it out longer than I but, as the paper’s ownership changed repeatedly, left for more secure communication jobs. 

More than 2,000 US newspapers disappeared in the last 15 years, according to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Others switched to online only. Those still with print editions created websites.

I could read a replica of the printed Chicago Tribune online, but I enjoy seeing a full-size broadsheet. I prefer to scroll with my eyes rather than my fingers. I like feeling newsprint in my hands and hearing the crinkle of pages being folded. 

The digital edition contains the full text, yet I don’t read it thoroughly when away from home. Maybe I associate online reading with quick takes and clicking on only what interests me, for I skip many stories and read few others to the end.  

Wishing for a resurgence of print is futile, and I’ll even admit that digital has some benefits, including saving trees. Format is a personal preference; what matters are that the public has access to trustworthy local news and that trained journalists can find jobs. Today responsible news organizations are up against online sources with dubious commitment to ethical reporting and news standards. 

Digital journalism has also proven not a sure bet; many news sites have made less money from digital advertising than expected, according to the Poynter Institute. Since I’m not an expert on the news industry, I can’t predict what formats are likely to be viable. I’m just happy that a meaty newspaper is delivered to me daily. 

With so much free time during the pandemic, I’ve been reading sections of the printed edition that I used to skip, finding that the letters to the editor are often well written and thoughtful, the business pages aren’t just about the stock market, and the sports section is more than a rehash of yesterday’s games. Paying less than $1 a day, I wonder how I ever thought the newspaper was getting expensive. However much the price increases, I now think of a subscription as a contribution to print journalism, which hopefully will last out my lifetime. 

*****

REMEMBERING A FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE

My friend and former colleague Vickie, who died last Tuesday at only 54, was a private person, so she would have wanted this tribute to be kept short.

Vickie was an exceptional graphic designer whose interests ranged well beyond the visual. She sent me tips and newsletters about both human and cat nutrition and suggested off-the-beaten-path places that she and her husband, Doug, had enjoyed. My go-to person with gardening questions, Vickie identified plants from my sketchy descriptions and gave me perennials from her yard. She passed on what she learned about the feline digestive problems our cats shared. Belonging to both our publications department’s book group and a Great Books group, she schooled me in the Great Books philosophy. 

Working with Vickie meant never worrying about anything slipping through the cracks. Her meticulousness, computer expertise, and design savvy awed her coworkers. Her humor amused us. The courage with which she handled illness, and her acceptance at the end, offer an inspiring model. 

Vickie was up for joining our book group’s last Zoom meeting on audio. Chatting and joking, she gave us the gift of sounding like her calm self when we all knew we were saying goodbye.

Chicago is an urban lasagna, a city of layers: multi-level Wacker Drive; skyscraper apartments stacked one over the other; River Point tower — one million square feet of office space suspended above a public park above active Metra and Amtrak rails above the Blue Line.

Then there are the unseen layers: history itself. A recent Chicago Tribune photo of seven-year-old girls skating with their moms in Hyde Park evoked 1893 for me.

The Skating Rink at Midway Plaisance Park ices over what was the site of the biggest carnival attraction at the World’s Columbian Exposition: the world’s first Ferris wheel. Fair planners in Chicago wanted to one-up Paris’s 1889 Exposition Universelle, with its iconic Eiffel Tower.

Designed and built by Pittsburgh engineer George Washington Gale Ferris Jr, the Chicago Wheel began to take shape the winter before the fair. Workers thawed the ground with jets of steam. A massive grillage of steel and concrete supported the 71-ton wheel, its size impressive even by today’s standards. Each of its 40 cars could carry 60 people, enough to spin as many as 2,160 riders at a time. Compare that to the 2016 Centennial Wheel at Navy Pier, which can twirl a maximum load of only 414 passengers in its intimate gondolas. The top of Navy Pier’s wheel reaches 196 feet, but the original Ferris Wheel soared to 264 feet — about a quarter of the height of the static Eiffel Tower but taller than all but a couple structures in Chicago at the time, offering kinetic, eye-popping views.

View from the Ferris Wheel of the brand-new University of Chicago campus

The wheel outlasted the fair into the following spring, when it was dismantled and later rebuilt at an amusement park in the 2600 block of North Clark Street, now occupied by a McDonald’s — another layer of history. At that location the wheel made an appearance in a 1896 film shot by the Lumiere Brothers, but by 1903 it was dismantled again and shipped to St. Louis for that city’s 1904 fair, after which it met its end by dynamite.

Apple Michigan Avenue; photo by Eric Allix Rogers

Seeing the photo of the ice rink on the Midway, I thought of other Chicago stories hidden below ground. Apple Michigan Avenue, the snazzy emporium of all things Apple designed by Foster + Partners and completed in 2017, occupies the spot where after the Revolutionary War Chicago’s first non-indigenous settler, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, established a trading post and married Kitiwaha, a Potowatami local.

Wigwam convention center

The Sauganash Hotel, which sprang up in 1831, has been called Chicago’s first hotel — although Chicago wasn’t incorporated until 1837. That hotel made way in 1860 for the Wigwam convention center, where Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president. The wood-framed Wigwam was a temporary structure that held on for a few years after the convention, when it was demolished to make room for something else. Today the Chicago Landmark plaque that marks the spot is affixed to 191 N. Wacker, an elegant 2002 office tower designed by KPF.

Chicago’s history is layered all around us. I won’t go on about it — OK, just a quick peek under the Stevenson Expressway for vestiges of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, later supplanted by the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

I’m not complaining about these changes. I’m glad that the park district operates a skating rink on the site of the world’s first Ferris wheel, and I understand why Apple would covet the same spot on the Chicago River that made Point du Sable want to put down roots. Sometimes the old must make room for the new.

Accepting transience is the bargain we make for being alive, a feeling heightened during this time of pandemic. What more can we do than look at lives lost and celebrate them? That first Ferris wheel was grand in its day. A community skating rink is grand in its own way.

Manny is a handsome and opinionated, eight-year-old, 16-pound, male black and tan Min Pin/Corgi-mix looking for a loving guardian.
This boy is a love with some people but, has a tendency for aggression with others. For those he knows and loves, he rolls on his back for belly rubs. Sadly, he is also a fear-biter.

That’s why Manny has been waiting at the Famous Fido shelter for six and a half years. He has potential if only the right, dog-loving patient person willing and able to manage his behavior would come forward.

Manny is healthy, neutered, up-to-date on vaccines, heartworm-tested and microchipped.

His adoption fee of $250 benefits the Famous Fido Rescue.

To meet and possibly adopt Manny, please fill out the application for adoption at https://famousfidorescue.org/dog-adoption-application/.

You can follow up on your application by e-mailing Tina at [email protected] to set up an appointment to meet him.

He is currently at the Famous Fido Shelter at 3124 W. Irving Park in Chicago, Illinois.

As the Case Shiller index proved last week home prices across the nation, along with the Chicago metro area, have been taking off recently, with appreciation rates hitting multi-year highs. So, when Zillow and Pulsenomics recently did their 4th quarter survey of real estate experts it was no surprise that their national home price forecast moved up significantly from the 3rd quarter survey.

First, please note that the 4th quarter survey extends the outlook by one year – into 2025, which you can see in the graph below. The cumulative home price appreciation forecast through 2024 was raised from 16.3% last quarter to 22.1% now. A good chunk of that came from the forced realization that 2020 was already realizing higher appreciation than last forecast. Now the 2020 forecast is for 6.3% appreciation vs. 3.7% last quarter. In addition, 2021 home prices are now projected to grow by 4.2% whereas last quarter the experts were projecting 2.6%. Get the picture?

The forecast for US home prices has improved again as actual appreciation hits multi-year highs

Chicago Area Home Price Outlook

The outlook for Chicago area home prices has similarly improved since the last time I checked. However, for this perspective I have to go to John Dolan of Home Price Futures since the home price expectations survey doesn’t go down to the metro area. John is the market maker for the Case Shiller home price index futures and he provided the graph below. It looks much better than it did last time. What that graph tells us is that the futures market is anticipating 11.8% appreciation through the end of 2024. That is obviously a far cry from the 22.1% appreciation forecast for the nation by the real estate experts. But that shouldn’t be too big of a surprise since Chicago has been lagging the nation for years now.

The outlook for Chicago home prices is much less optimistic than what the experts see for the nation

While Home Prices Surge, Rents Plummet

There are some other interesting nuggets in the supplemental questions section of the quarterly survey. For instance (and this was not a question but rather background information) the graph below shows how rents have diverged from home prices since the pandemic struck. It’s dramatic and it can’t possibly be sustainable simply because low rents will force down the price of investment properties which necessarily leads to lower home prices.

Rents and home prices have recently diverged to the point that the gap cannot be sustainable

Mortgage Forbearance Outcomes

Survey respondents were also asked what they thought would happen to the 2.7 MM homeowners whose mortgages are currently in forbearance (most likely as a result of pandemic induced economic hardship). Fortunately, they only see 18% of those ending in foreclosure and even those might be delayed by up to one year from now.

Survey respondents were fairly optimistic that most mortgages in forbearance would not end up as foreclosures

#RealEstate #ChicagoRealEstate #Coronavirus #HomePrices #Foreclosures #Renting

Gary Lucido is the President of Lucid Realty, the Chicago area’s full service real estate brokerage that offers home buyer rebates and discount commissions. If you want to keep up to date on the Chicago real estate market or get an insider’s view of the seamy underbelly of the real estate industry you can Subscribe to Getting Real by Email using the form below. Please be sure to verify your email address when you receive the verification notice.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes.” 

Those are the words that came out of the mouth of the current president of the United States. They were spoken during a call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In an hour-long call, Donald Trump tried to shake Raffensperger down to change the results of the presidential election in Georgia.

Trump even threatened him with legal consequences:

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

Trump was acting like Marlon Brando in “The Godfather”; making an offer that Brad Raffensperger couldn’t refuse….and yet the Secretary of State did. Little did Trump know that the call was being taped and would be released the next day. I’m pretty sure he didn’t care….he never does.

Maybe what Donald Trump did was illegal and maybe not. You can find plenty of legal opinions that support both cases. But, no question what he did was immoral. It’s something that no president has ever done….and probably never considered doing.

As stunning as the tape was, the reaction from his supporters is just as stunning. It starts with the Chairman of the Georgia Republican party David Shafer. Here’s his first Tweet:
President @realDonaldTrump has filed two lawsuits – federal and state – against @GaSecofState. The telephone conference call @GaSecofStatesecretly recorded was a “confidential settlement discussion” of that litigation, which is still pending.

Is anyone surprised that that is a lie!? There are no pending lawsuits….NONE! But then Shafer doubled down and added in another lie:
The audio published by @TheWashingtonPost is heavily edited and omits the stipulation that all discussions were for the purpose of settling litigation and confidential under federal and state law.

It just makes you want to shake your head. Nothing was edited, nothing was confidential. And yet, that’s not the worst take from a Georgia official.

David Perdue is in a run-off election today to try to retain his seat in the United States Senate. When asked for a reaction about the call from Fox News, here’s his reaction:
“I guess I was raised differently. To have a statewide elected official, regardless of party, tape without disclosing a conversation — private conversation — with the president of the United States, and then leaking it to the press is disgusting.”

Ummm….Dave…didn’t you hear what Trump said to your fellow Georgian? What about that? 
“I didn’t hear anything in that tape that the president hasn’t already said for weeks now since the November election.”

Okay…okay…we knew we were going to hear statements like this from his fellow Republican flunkies. For some reason, they’re still afraid of being attacked on Twitter by a lame-duck president. Or maybe they think Trump will find another flunky to primary them?  But, the ones that really scare me are the regular citizens. Somewhat normal folks like you and me, who really feel that this election has been stolen. They think something is unfairly being taken from them, and they aren’t shy in letting the world know whose side they are on. For example:

Raffyblabber is in big trouble.
What a jerk. He refuses to sit down with the President’s team and compare data.
The GSoS is a SCUMBAG!
Typical spineless RINO.
He’s a child and will grow up fast in prison.
Raffensperger should worry about facing federal charges for recording POTUS regarding the election, since a 2018 Exec. Order made elections matters of national security… on top of Espionage Act of 1917. No GA single-party consent beats that.
Hardcore Never Trumper Criminal.
I hope he is sued for all he has!

And all of that is in one Twitter thread. Notice how many of them are also experts in federal election law, too?

This is a scary time in our country. The repercussions of Trump’s behavior will last for years, if not generations. They say elections have consequences, and this is the consequence of electing Donald Trump four years ago. We always have wondered when Trump would hit rock bottom? This may it…although he still has fifteen days left in his term. Hmmm….how much lower can he get?

Related Post: The Trump administration legacy is one of death

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