Tag Archives: Chicago region

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.

Fatal car crashes on six Chicago area highways rank among the most in the country

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A report from a law firm looking at the highways with the most fatal accidents in the last three years puts six Chicago area roadways among the country’s top 100:

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Here are the highways numbered by their national rank and with the number of fatal accidents listed at the end:

4. I-94 in Cook County, 52

20. I-80 in Lake County, 33

41. I-57 in Cook County, 26

53. I-290 in Cook County, 24

89. I-294 in Cook County, 21

89. I-90 in Cook County, 21

Driving is one of the riskiest behaviors Americans regularly engage in given the number of accidents and deaths that occur each year. One estimate of 2024 fatal crashes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggested just under 40,000 people died last year.

But to get around metropolitan areas in the United States almost requires using highways. Driving is required in most places and people might be able to avoid faster roads for specific destinations or shorter trips. However, completing a lot of trips – whether suburb to suburb or in and out of major population centers – will involve highway travel.

There are already numerous efforts to make highway driving safer. Vehicle features. Signs. Public service announcements. Traffic enforcement. Are there other methods to try or is this more of a question of public will – are people willing to change driving habits and our public infrastructure in order to reduce the number of deaths?

The prevalence of industry in 19th century American suburbs

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In recently reading The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl, I noted this in a chapter on the Town of Lake which was annexed into Chicago in 1889:

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The U.S. census reported that the number of suburban jobs rose after 1850 and accelerated after 1880, so that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, suburban employment constituted one-third of all manufacturing employment in America. Ignoring those jobs beyond the central business district means ignoning blue-collar workers and ignoring one of the leading forces for suburbanization in America. (75)

A large part of the American Dream of suburbia involves single-family homes. But the story of suburbia also includes industry and jobs. In this book, historian Elaine Lewinnek highlights the move of industry to suburban areas outside of what was then the Chicago city limits and how working people followed those jobs. They often ended up in small, single-family homes close to new factories and meatpacking facilities.

Why did industry move to the suburbs? Land was cheaper. They could build large facilities. The downsides of industry – noise, smells, pollution – affected fewer people and the land uses faced fewer regulations in suburban areas.

The one statistic that jumped out at me in the paragraph above was that “one-third of all manufacturing employment” was in the suburbs. Some of those suburban areas became part of the city, as they did in Chicago. But industrial suburbs continued, such as in places like Gary, Indiana, as did suburban employment. When the most common commuting trip in the United States today is suburb to suburb, this is part of that legacy of suburban industry and work.

Some suburbs are indeed bedroom communities with limited or no commercial and industrial land uses but the suburbs as a whole have lots of business activity.

No Kings protests throughout the Chicago suburbs

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In the last decade or so, protests in the United States do not just take place in big cities. For example, the No Kings website listed over 30 gatherings in the suburbs of Chicago:

The website listed 7 sites in Chicago itself, including the primary site in the Loop which drew over 100,000 people. But people in the region had plenty of options where they could join others. Some of these locations are close to the city while others are on the edges of the metropolitan region. From what I can see on the map, most residents were with 10-15 miles of a protest site and many could access multiple options.

Three related thoughts:

  1. The portrayals of suburbia in the postwar era tended to emphasize its conservative or Republican bent. This may have been true in numerous places but is harder to sustain these days with suburbs closer to cities often leaning Democratic and suburbs on the suburban edges often leaning Republican.
  2. It would be interesting to look more closely at these suburban protest sites. Where can people gather in the suburbs for political purposes? Suburban downtowns or city halls? Shopping areas or busy streets? Public parks and public spaces? Which places helped increase the solidarity among those gathered and which ones helped them reach others who did not come?
  3. The suburbs are built around driving. How many protesters around the Chicago region drove, parked, and then protested? Protests tend to happen on foot but people have to be able to get there and options are limited in some suburban settings.