Tag Archives: Chicago region

Industry and urban life lead to the disappearance of a flower in Chicago

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The case of thismia americana illustrates how human development can affect plants:

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In 1912, then a botany student at the University of Chicago, she was collecting moss in a swampy prairie at what is now 119th Street and Torrence Avenue when she happened upon this small, strange plant.

At the time of Pfeiffer’s discovery, there were only 18 known species in the Thismia genus, the most similar being Thismia rodwayi, a plant native to Australia and New Zealand. Thismia americana was the first of its genus found in the Northern Hemisphere…

However, in 1914, Pfeiffer reported a barn was built atop the site where Thismia americana was found. According to a journal entry, Pfeiffer last saw the plant in 1916…

“We’re very unlikely to ever find Thismia [americana] there again, because the history of that site is that it was a wetland complex, and then humans filled it in with a bunch of construction debris, soil, concrete, slag from the steel industry,” says Harry Kuttner, Calumet program manager at the Wetlands Initiative.

Nevertheless, scientists hope that Thismia americana could be found again. Over the past decades, organizations around Chicago have taken steps to restore the city’s green spaces, including Indian Ridge Marsh Park, where Thismia americana was discovered.

The story of this flower is one reminder of what was once there. So is the flooding that can arise after major rains.

The Chicago area has been under construction for two plus centuries now as European and American visitors came to the region and sought to build permanent settlements. This work can involve altering the landscape for human activities. Wetlands across the region were filled in and smoothed over for farming, residences, and industry. There are some wetlands still remaining and often local residents who advocate for keeping them.

As some species disappear, others might do well in sprawl. What plants replaced thismia americana in the ecosystem? How did wetlands adapt? Even as forest preserves as other spaces try to preserve natural areas within the region, the wetlands are not what they once were as human activity has affected the landscape.

Describing in 1857 a small Chicago area community that would later become a larger suburb

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In 1857, C. W. Richmond and H. F. Vallette described the small Illinois community of Cottage Hill:

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The village of Cottage Hill is pleasantly situated on the line of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, sixteen miles west from Chicago. The first settler here was J. L. Hovey, who came from Painesville, Ohio. He built a small house in 1843, which he kept as a hotel, it being favorably known by the farmers of the Fox and Rock river counties, who then teamed their own produce to Chicago, as the ‘Hill Cottage.’ The ‘Hill’ proper lies half a mile from the railroad, and commands as fine a prospect of prairie, cultivated farms, groves, cottages, and railroad trains, as one could desire to behold. This place being but 15 1-2 miles from the centre of business in Chicago; having good water, pure air, and railroad trains hourly passing – all of which stop here – must soon become known to those who would find for themselves and families, at a convenient distance from the city, a retreat from the noise and dust of its hot and crowded streets. (194)

This sounds like a suburb. A beautiful natural setting. Railroad access to Chicago. A small community. Away from the hustle and bustle of the big city.

However, at the time of the description, Cottage Hill (later Elmhurst) had very few people. The 1870 Census counted 329 residents. The train line offers access to Chicago but it is less than a decade old at this point. Commuting to Chicago is limited.

Elmhurst today is quite different. It has over 46,000 residents and the median household income is over $149,000. There is little open land on which to build. There is still greenery – laws, trees, parks – and road and train access to Chicago.

What this suggests to me is that long before the mass suburbanization of the twentieth century (Elmhurst had the highest percentage population increase in the 1920s), Americans had a suburban ideal. Even in the 1850s these two writers had a sense of the contrast between Cottage Hill and Chicago. They may not have envisioned the suburbs looking like they do today but some of the key elements are there long before suburban populations swelled.

Chicago suburbs to compete with Chicago to supply municipal water needs with Lake Michigan water

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Earlier this week, a group of Chicago suburbs announced plans to pump and distribute Lake Michigan water. This would put them in competition with the water supplied by the city of Chicago:

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The DuPage commission alone is paying Chicago’s Department of Water Management $130 million this year, commission Chair Jim Zay told the Tribune Publishing-owned Daily Herald. The DuPage consortium is Chicago’s single largest wholesale customer, accounting for 15% of the city water system’s annual operating revenue, according to Fitch Ratings.

The threat to Chicago is several years away; the DuPage commission is contracted to buy water from the city until 2041. But that’s how long it would take to secure approvals, financing and build the competing system anyway.

The backers of the suburban plan complain that Chicago in the past has raised its rates suddenly and exorbitantly and that more recently the city’s service hasn’t been sufficiently reliable. “They don’t put anything back into the system; that’s the problem,” the Herald quoted Zay as saying. “This year we’ll pay them $130 million, and they put nothing in for infrastructure.”…

And if these suburban officials conclude that the risk of continuing to do business with Chicago for generations to come is greater than executing this complex and expansive infrastructure project, that’s their prerogative. To our minds, it’s not an easy call.

This reminds me of two features of American suburbs:

  1. One leading reason suburban communities stopped approving annexation of their community into big cities in the late 1800s had to do with utilities. Once costs of supplying electricity, water, gas, and other needed resources decreased, suburbs developed their own systems rather than join the city to enjoy the benefits of their systems.
  2. Suburbs and their residents like local government. Even as the competing suburban water system would be administered by suburban officials, they would prefer that local control rather than having the big city control the water. This does not mean all the suburbs will agree about how to go about the water business but they probably believe they would rather have decisions in the hands of suburbanites rather than city people.

In other words, this move to have suburbs supply Lake Michigan water is part of longstanding patterns. Yes, it involves a lot of money and effort. But the suburbs think it is worthwhile compared to relying on the big city.

The inches of rain that would make flooding in Chicago likely

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Amid summer storms, here is how much water could lead to flooding in Chicago:

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Designed many decades ago, Chicago’s sewers can handle 2 inches of rain in a 24-hour period before flooding becomes likely. The storms of 2023 dumped 8 to 9 inches of rain over short periods of time. About a month’s worth of rain was dumped across Chicago during the recent July Fourth weekend.

This is a clear statement of how much rain Chicago’s system can handle. At this point, Chicago has been incorporated almost 200 years. Throughout that history, residents and the local government has worked to address infrastructure needs. Built along a lake and a river, water has always been part of the equation. Access to the Great Lakes and the Atlantic plus access to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico provided opportunities. Flooding, shorelines, weather, sewer systems, and drinking water provided challenges. With millions of people living in the region plus millions more passing through, water infrastructure has been important from the beginning.

As this article notes, efforts to address current water issues have to contend with the decades of previous efforts. Whether constructing massive reservoirs or putting in block by block water storage, the work takes place on top of existing systems. And if development patterns change or weather patterns change or new options become available, efforts can go beyond maintenance to reconfiguring how a large region deals with storm water.

The Chicago area Deep Tunnel system worked in the most recent rains?

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The Chicago area was hit last week by numerous storms that dumped inches of rain. In a metropolitan area, where does all this rain water go? The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago described what happened in an email yesterday:

As the Chicago area grew on the shore of Lake Michigan and inland across swamps, prairie, and forests, where would all the water go? Urban development and suburban sprawl tends to flatten landscapes, eliminating natural settings that help drain water. Humans can adjust, adding retention ponds and drainage flows and permeable surfaces and setting aside some land to be open or “natural.”

The results are cited above. Multiple storms lead to inches of rain. The ground was soaked and storm sewers were full. The water has to go somewhere. Some of it ends up in a former quarry with over 7 billion gallons of water. Drivers who passed over the watery quarry posted pictures on social media. It also ends up in other reservoirs and in local waterways.

For the residents of the region, this hopefully led to fewer flooded streets and basements. (Though I saw plenty of pictures of this as well.) All that engineering and money hopefully drained the water away from everyday human activity. Water may be a precious resource but too much water can disturb metropolitan activity so the engineering and water mitigation efforts will continue.

The Chicago Bears, like numerous pro sports teams, on their way to being a suburban team

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As the Chicago Bears plan for a new stadium, it appears one fact is clear: they will end up playing in the suburbs of the city of Chicago. While the current battle for the stadium may appear to be between Illinois and Indiana, the team ends up in the suburbs of the Chicago region either way. And they would not be alone in inhabiting a suburban stadium: twelve NFL teams already play in the suburbs. (For comparison, several MLB teams play in the suburbs, three NHL teams play in the suburbs, and only one NBA team plays in the suburbs.)

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But you could argue that the Chicago Bears were already a suburban team even though they played in the city at Wrigley Field and then Soldier Field. The team has had its headquarters in suburban Lake Forest for decades. The McCaskey family lives in the Chicago suburbs, with Virginia McCaskey passing away in 2025 after residing in Des Plaines for decades.

And many of the team’s fans are suburbanites. The city of Chicago peaked in population in the 1950 census with over 3.6 million residents. As the city’s population declined, the metropolitan region continued to grow. In the 2020 census, the metropolitan statistical area had over 9.6 million residents, meaning that over two-thirds of the region’s population was in the suburbs. Who is tuning in to the games? Who is buying tickets and merchandise? Who is weighing in with their opinions about where the Bears should play? (And this is true across American metropolitan regions: stadiums may be in big cities but the majority of residents and fans are in the suburbs.)

The Chicago Bears will likely be playing in the suburbs soon enough. This will echo what has already happened numerous times over in the region: residents and businesses moved out of the city to the suburbs, setting up life or operations where the majority of residents live.

The Chicago area leading the way in warehouses

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The Chicago region has become a center for warehouses in recent decades:

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Few places in the nation have been transformed so completely so quickly. Since 2000, retail giants and developers have erected more than 146 million square feet of warehouse space in the Chicago area — equivalent in size to roughly 1,400 Home Depot stores…

But Chicago is in a different league. The warehouse boom in the Chicago suburbs took off in earnest in the early 2000s with the construction of the CenterPoint Intermodal Center, the largest inland port in North America, where trucks and trains swap goods. It sits just outside Elwood, a Will County town of roughly 2,200 residents. In 2015, Amazon opened its first Illinois warehouse, in Joliet.

For a study about warehouses and pollution, researcher Gaige Kerr examined real estate listings from the commercial data company CoStar and determined that there were roughly 6,800 warehouses in the Chicago area as of 2022. Their combined square footage eclipsed that of warehouse space in the Los Angeles metropolitan area — home to the nation’s two largest shipping ports — by 13%.

Of the nation’s 25 largest metro areas, Chicago had the most warehouse square footage per person, Kerr found.

The article goes on to describe the effects on local communities and residents. See an earlier post about some of these effects in the town of Elwood. Is it good to have all these warehouses? Some local residents do not think so. All the people who order online and expect quick deliveries may disagree.

At the same time, these figures cited above tell an important story: the Chicago area is now full of warehouses. With the changes in the retail industry, outlying areas in the Chicago region became home to facilities and vehicles that could quickly transport goods.

These changes build on advantages the Chicago area already had. It is located in the central part of the United States. It is connected via waterways to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. It was an early railroad center and has one of the busiest airports. It is the third largest metropolitan region in the US.

Would any city or metropolitan areas want to be known for warehouses? It is less glamorous than other industries. One figure might be interesting to add what is already reported here: how much do these facilities add to the local economy?

More Chicago suburbs now have majority-minority populations

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Analysis from WBEZ shows more Chicago suburbs have a majority of nonwhite residents:

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Skokie is one of more than thirty Chicago-area suburbs that have shifted from majority-white communities to majority non-white ones in the past two decades, according to a WBEZ analysis of demographic data for nearly 300 suburbs in Cook County and the five collar counties from 2005 to 2024…

Between 2015 and 2024, 18 suburbs flipped from majority-white to majority non-white, up from 12 during the prior 10-year period spanning 2005 through 2014.

Many suburbs today are no longer the white, middle-class enclaves of the mid-20th century, said Willow Lung, an associate professor of urban studies and planning and director of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network at the University of Maryland…

Overall, an increase of more than 600,000 nonwhite suburban residents over the last two decades completely offset the region’s loss of white suburban residents.

This is part of a nationwide trend where suburbs are increasingly diverse by race, ethnicity, and social class.

At the same time, the final paragraph cited above hints at another change; white suburbanites in the Chicago region leaving for elsewhere. What happens then in these suburbs as populations change? The article describes broad patterns but there are likely also interesting stories of what communities have become as their residents change. This could affect how a community sees itself, amid other possible reactions.

Will these patterns continue in the coming years in the Chicago region with more suburbs becoming majority non-white? And will white residents continue to leave for other suburbs or move out of the region all together? If both continue, how long until the image of “white, middle-class enclaves” of suburbia is no longer common?

Ongoing housing affordability issues in the Chicago region in 2026

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Finding affordable housing is not predicted to get easier this year in the Chicago region:

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While experts said Chicago might see small, incremental improvements in the housing market this year, many said affordability and a lack of homes will define 2026.

“In Illinois, the issue is very acute in the sense that our housing economy hasn’t recovered in the same manner that other states have,” Illinois Realtors CEO Jeff Baker said. “Housing stability, housing affordability, the trickle down affects every other element of our state from economic development to school funding, public safety. It touches everything.”…

Baird & Warner predicts homeowners will see their home values rise this year. It also predicts home listings will continue to be snapped up quickly, with the average number of days on market virtually unchanged. Homes in the Chicago metro area are on the market for an average of 29 days until they’re sold, according to Illinois Realtors…

Pekarsky said Chicago’s housing inventory crunch is even more dire for first-time homebuyers, who often can’t compete with all-cash offers and buyers who have built up equity.

Another possible way to frame this story: a long-standing affordable housing shortage continues in 2026. Sure, COVID may have interrupted plans but it is not like the region had a surplus of affordable housing before that.

The topic of affordable housing does come up in local discussions but then affordable housing is difficult to approve and construct and then can be limited in scale or intended for particular people.

Imagine a different headline: plans and building underway in 2027 to add affordable housing or more housing? What would have to happen in 2026 for that to happen?

Two miles of railroad tracks that could throw off a whole network

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How much does two miles of railroad track matter in the Chicago region?

Trainyards near Chicago, Illinois, as seen from an airplane. by Michelle Frechette is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

To make money on its proposed cross-country railroad, Union Pacific plans to double the number of trains on a 2-mile stretch of track on Chicago’s West Side where workers still throw switches by hand and trains crawl across century-old bridges at less than 15 miles per hour.

The railroad plans to add 12 trains per day on these dilapidated tracks, which run along Rockwell Avenue through North Lawndale and West Town.

After reaching Lake Street on the north, the additional trains will turn west and run 13 miles to a Union Pacific rail yard in Melrose Park.

They’ll have to thread their way through 58 passenger trains and up to 24 freight trains, which, according to Metra and Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning data, are running on these same tracks each weekday now.

The railroad importance and bottleneck that is Chicago is on display here. A lot of freight traffic flows to and through the region. A proposed merger of two major railroads means there could be more trains. Can a short stretch of track handle more freight traffic when it already has freight and passenger traffic? Will a railroad merger mean that Metra can no longer use these tracks? Are there any alternate options?

If one could start over in planning the Chicago region and knew what was needed today, how differently would the railroad network be set up? Chicago has a hub and spoke model of passenger lines funneling people into the heart of the city. Freight trains also travel along these lines plus along numerous other lines that bisect and ring the region. Where would the rail yards and intermodal facilities be? Would the lines be put in different places? Could there be designated railroad districts or railroad corridors?

However this merger business ends, I hope the railroad companies, communities, and regional actors can get together and figure out what would serve the Chicago region best in terms of railroad lines and activity.