During the pandemic, with the shelter in place order, we rarely go to stores. We’ve had everything from groceries to beer delivered, and now, candy.

For Easter, my wife gave the girls and I each a specialized bag of candy, beautifully wrapped in cellophane with pretty stickers, from Amy’s Candy Bar, here in Ravenswood. I got the Sour Gummi Mix and fell in love with the Rainbow Pieces.

The Sour Gummi Bears were great, but the texture of the Sour Gummi Worms always throws me. The same thing with the Sour Gummi Oct0pi, they just don’t feel right going down. The true gem of the sour mix was the stuffed pieces of licorice, they were divine. So much so, that this week we called Amy and inquired about getting a bag of those sour-stuffed “Rainbow Pieces,” exclusively. Luckily, the answer was, “Yes!”

I have always loved gnawing on mouth-puckering sour belts, so we took our chances on a bag of the Sour Rainbow Licorice Belts. Tart strawberry, green apple, blue raspberry, and tutti fruity explode in your mouth, with a chewy texture that you can’t get enough of.

If you’re a chocolate connoisseur, Amy has a few things I can’t forget to mention. The Ballpark Crunch is one of the best crunchy sweets I’ve ever had. Take a pack of this to Wrigley and your friends will never stop asking you what that “chocolate potato chip thing” was?

“Take me out to the ball game! The perfect crunch combination of potato chips, peanuts, and pretzels is caught in a blend of Belgian milk and dark chocolate. This customer favorite is always a win. Handcrafted in our kitchen.” -Chef Amy Hansen

My wife loves the Chocolate Malt Balls, and my daughters love the Peanut Butter Balls. For something totally texturally different, try the Chocolate Covered Swedish Fish.

Just check the website, where you will find several things you’ll want to order. They can do curbside during this time of need, or they can deliver that sour bliss you’ve been craving, depending upon where you live. #SupportLocal

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The Mayo posted, then deleted a tweet noting Pence was warned about the hospital’s policy — but didn’t follow it.

Vice-President Pence who has led the task force

Did not follow the guidelines he’s preaching of course.

Though the Mayo did ask

Him to please wear a mask,

Refusing he  proved  he’s the butt of a horse.

The Chicago real estate market seems to be settling into a routine with Covid-19. Realtors are using Zoom to conduct open houses and showings, everyone is wearing masks and gloves and keeping their distance from each other, and some home buyers and sellers are just holding off for the time being.

I’ve been trying to figure out how much holding off is going on over the last few weeks and it’s recently been looking like a 60 – 70% decline in contracts and new listings. However, this week is going to be a bit tougher to interpret because Easter came a week earlier this year and some home sellers won’t list the week before Easter – they prefer to wait a week. This means that listings are depressed the week before Easter and then bunched up the week after. When Easter in two different years falls in two different weeks it makes it much harder to compare the data. But let’s give it a try.

For the week ending April 18 (week after Easter in 2020 but week before Easter in 2019):

Detached Homes

• New listings were down 37% from last year to 246 homes
• Contract activity was down 38% to 181
• Inventory in absolute terms was down 15% to 2771 homes
• However, in relative terms inventory was actually up from 11.1 weeks of supply to 15.3 weeks

Attached Homes

• New listings were down 47% to 351 homes
• Contract activity was down 68% to 154
• Inventory in absolute terms was down 10% to 4943 homes
• Inventory in relative terms was up from 11.4 weeks of supply to 32.1 weeks – a bit higher than last week

So the question is whether or not the smaller decline in detached home activity signals an improvement or is it just an Easter effect?  If it’s an Easter effect then why didn’t we see it in attached home contract activity? We won’t know until next week but there’s another possibility that we need to be on the lookout for. Is it possible that the coronavirus has just made condos less appealing – i.e. do you want to share a building with possibly infected people?

According to a recent survey from the National Association of Realtors 73% of realtors report that home buyers have either delayed or cancelled their home search and 63% report that home sellers have either delayed or cancelled their home sale as a result of the coronavirus. So the data above are not surprising in light of these survey results.

The Mortgage Market

I was about to say that mortgage rates have stabilized in the last few weeks but they just jumped up again. Check out nerdwallet’s mortgage rate trend graph below:

Mortgage rates continue to fluctuate, though not as wildly as in March

However, another, possibly more significant, change is underway in the mortgage market in response to the rapidly rising risk of lending in the current environment. Several large mortgage lenders are tightening their credit standards, reducing the availability of loans to all but the most qualified borrowers. For instance, JP Morgan Chase now has a minimum 700 credit score and 20% down payment requirement. They are also temporarily pausing providing home equity lines of credit. US Bank and Wells Fargo have made similar restrictive moves. There are still plenty of other alternatives available to home buyers but if those also start to evaporate it will have a negative impact on the Chicago real estate market.

#RealEstate #ChicagoRealEstate #Coronavirus

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.

While coronavirus dominates the news, the presidential election campaign has taken a back seat. I was going to write this post right after the Illinois primary, but that time was also when the state’s stay-at-home order started.

This year’s presidential primaries, along with the rise of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party, had me thinking about where I fit on the political spectrum. I never before would have called myself a political moderate, but my opinions aligned with the so-called moderates like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

Since the description felt undesirable — too cautious, too neutral — I reminded myself that the Democratic Party has moved to the left and may have changed more than I have.

My rating on the Pew Research Center’s political typology quiz is still solidly liberal. But the quiz is unnuanced, with each question offering a choice between two extreme positions. And it didn’t ask, for example, about eliminating private health insurance or getting rid of fossil fuels in a decade.

Off the top of my head, I can come up with quite a few issues on which I disagree with the leftmost wing of the Democratic Party, represented by Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

As I’ve written before, an eventual single-payer, government-run health insurance system would be okay with me, but it shouldn’t be shoved down people’s throats. In the near future, a public option could be one choice. People who like their employer-provided insurance could keep it.

On immigration, it seems a country should exercise some control over who comes in, and if ICE were abolished, we’d need an enforcement agency to replace it.

Making community colleges free is reasonable, considering that they often serve students who can’t afford expensive universities or are seeking vocational programs. I don’t see why four-year public universities should be free for all of a state’s residents, however. Those who can afford to should pay.

About student debt I feel similarly: I’d have means requirements for loan forgiveness.

We need bold action to combat climate change, but I doubt that a conversion to 100 percent clean, renewable energy is achievable by the Green New Deal’s target date of 2030.

There are more than ideological differences, however, to my reservations about Sanders’s positions. I couldn’t fathom how he expected the majority of the country to buy in to his proposals and to be willing to pay to enact them. As NPR’s Scott Detrow has suggested, maybe the Democrats divide is “practical versus ideological” rather than moderate versus progressive. Those on the far left are motivated by ideology. Those characterized as more moderate are focused on attainability.

Pragmatism is characteristic of the “progressive new guard,” one of six wings into which Perry Bacon Jr. divided today’s Democratic Party in a FiveThirtyEight article. It’s the wing I most identify with. Bacon observed that this group is more likely to talk about Medicare for All as an aspiration than as an immediate goal. It believes that election success requires courting everyone, from the white working class to radical activists.

So, “progressive new guard” could be my pigeonhole, although in conversation I’m more likely to say something understandable, perhaps “practical liberal.”

To the left of the progressive new guard, Bacon puts the super progressive (Oscasio-Cortez) and the very progressive (Sanders, Elizabeth Warren). To the right are the progressive old guard (Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer), moderate (his examples are House members I’ve ever heard of), and conservative (West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin).

Bacon’s article was published a year ago. While considering his divisions, I decided that this is a poor time to look for what separates Democrats from one another. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to figure out that I’m this and not that, especially in 2020, when the important thing is for Democrats to be unified to defeat Donald Trump.

*****

ANTI-TRUMP QUOTATIONS: 111TH IN AN ONGOING SERIES

“The president did essentially tell people to poison themselves because he thought it was a good idea. Only an impossibly stupid person would think this was a good idea, but we have an impossibly stupid person running our country.”
—Martin Longman, Washington Monthly

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker regards a court challenge against his stay-home order as a cheap political stunt.

No, Guv, it’s the exercise of a legitimate constitutional right by a citizen to free himself, and by extension the rest of us, from your controversial public policy to confine Illinoisans in their homes until the end of next month.

You are unilaterally extending your emergency coronavirus shutdown to May

Judge Michael D. McHaney

30 without a by-your-leave from anyone else in the three branches of Illinois government. Not from the courts. Not from the Legislature. As if “separation of powers” was not to be found in the state constitution.

So Rep. Darren Bailey (R-Xenia) was right to go make you defend your policy in court and Clay County Circuit Court Judge Michael McHaney was right to find enough merit in Bailey’s suit to issue a temporary restraining order so the challenge could be heard on its merits.

And the media, displaying extraordinary incompetence or blatant bias grossly underreported the existence of the suit, as if it were of no consequence.

Now a second lawmaker, State Rep. John Cabello (R-Rockford) has filed his own suit in Winnebago County Circuit Court to block the stay-home order. Unlike Bailey’s suit, Cabello asks that the decision not just to him but “all citizens.”

Northbrook attorney Michael Ciesla, who started the ball rolling on these challenges, said that the governor should take no comfort in the limited application of Judge McHaney’s to only Bailey.

In “Think the court order only applies to Representative Bailey? Think again,” Ciesla said:

Governor Pritzker knows what most attorneys know: the ruling yesterday, while issued in favor of Representative Bailey, could apply to every citizen in Illinois.  When a state court judge issues an order in Illinois, it in effect becomes a law.  Meaning, Representative Bailey can walk out of his home for any or no reason and cannot be cited or arrested for failure to obey the Governor’s stay at home order….

Since no other court has issued a ruling on the Governor’s Executive Orders, Judge McHaney’s court order is the only ruling on the Executive Orders.  Therefore, precedence has been set by the State court giving negative treatment to the Governor’s Executive Order on isolation and quarantine.

This means every person in Illinois could run to court right now and file a similar lawsuit against the Governor and use the court order to support his/her request for relief from the Governor’s Executive Order for isolation and quarantine….

Ciesla acknowledges that it’s unlikely that the Democrat-controlled would grant such relief, yet, now with a second suit filed and the possibility that more are in the offing, Pritzker will have no choice but to defend his illegal action.

True, the Legislature can come back into session and change the law, giving Pritzker the unfettered powers that he falsely believes to be his, but now, possibly for the first time in America, citizen anger at the shutdown has been granted a legal platform by a judge.

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www.dennisbyrne.net 

My historical novel: Madness: The War of 1812

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(<Special thanks to Terri Ross and Marcin Gulik of Illinois Legal Aid Online for their time and insights)

One of the consequences of COVID-19 has been an increased reliance on legal assistance around issues like unemployment, immigration, and landlord/tenant issues. Engaging the legal system can be intimidating, and language barriers can make the process even more difficult. After creating a Spanish-language version of their site, Illinois Legal Aid Online recently launched Pomoc Prawna IL, a legal information site geared for Polish-speaking individuals in Chicago. We were fortunate enough to speak to Terri Ross, ILAO’s Executive Director, and Marcin Gulik, their Digital Media Director, about the site.

Teri Ross, Executive Director, Illinois Legal Aid Online

Founded in 2001, Illinois Legal Aid Online provides a library of forms and resources to help people navigate the legal system and make the process less daunting. Many people rarely engage in the legal system directly for a variety of reasons. Some people may be unaware of their rights, and others may find the legal system intimidating with its own unique culture and language. ILAO handles a wide variety of legal issues, including family law, unemployment policy, divorce, landlord/tenant issues (ILAO is one of the agencies behind Rentervention), and immigration concerns. In 2012, ILAO developed a Spanish-language version of their site to better meet the needs of the Latinx community in Chicago. Polish Americans are the second largest population in the area, spread out across key Chicago neighborhoods (like Garfield Ridge and Durning) as well as major suburbs (like Naperville, Tinley Park, Oak Lawn, Schaumburg, and Desplaines). Like Spanish-speaking individuals, Polish-speaking individuals in Chicago have a unique set of specific legal issues that Pomoc Prawna works to address.

Launched in June 2019, Pomoc Prawna IL took an assertive approach in engaging the greater community to guide the site’s development. Initially starting with community interviews and observation, ILAO determined what the community needed and what specific barriers/issues Polish-speaking Chicagoans faced on a regular basis. (One great example is that initially, Polish-Americans were concerned with immigration issues, but are facing more employment-based legal issues in the wake of COVID-19).

As Pomoc Prawna IL was developed, volunteers provided testing and feedback which guided how the site was developed. Usability drives site development in terms of ease of finding information as well as the friendliness and intuitive nature of the site. Given ILAO’s extensive library of information and resources, Pomoc Prawna IL wishes to be more than just a simple translation of materials but a more organic resource for an underserved community. As part of maintaining the site, ILAO continues to solicit feedback from Polish-speaking communities throughout Illinois around the site’s usefulness and identifying service gaps.

As a third-generation Polish-American, I grew up with an awareness that there were some huge differences between me and my grandparents in terms of the larger culture. (It also helps that my father was an attorney). Although Chicago has a rich history involving its Polish community (including the Polish Military Medical Team working with the Illinois National Guard during the current COVID-19 crisis), many cultural issues around engaging legal services still exist. With Pomoc Prawna IL, Illinois Legal Aid Online has made a strong effort to address these issues, as well as provide a well-needed resource during these turbulent times.

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And as always, thanks for reading!