Welcome to Chicago 312: 3 Headlines. 1 Big Question. 2 Red Flags. Every Wednesday. Subscribe here.

What To Know This Week: Lead’s still in Chicago’s water, Rush is caving to Trump, granny flats are almost legal, billionaires are skipping taxes, and AI is giving people cancer. Great stuff all around.

Let’s get into it.

3 Headlines: Lead Water, Granny Houses, And Hospitals Selling Out Trans YouthBecause They’re Afraid of Risk

1. Chicago Still Hasn’t Warned 93% of People They Might Be Drinking Lead

Grist/WBEZ: The City of Chicago failed to notify over 90% of residents that their tap water might be contaminated with lead — eight months after a federal deadline. In fact, they knew which homes were most at risk, and still didn’t tell people. Some letters linked to broken websites. Others just never arrived.

Why It Matters: Meanwhile, in cities like Milwaukee and Detroit, officials sent over 100,000 notices in a single day. Chicago? 3,000 per week. At this rate, we won’t finish until 2027. Why?

2. Rush Sells Out Trans Youth to Stay in Trump’s Good Graces

Block Club: Rush Medical Center just confirmed it has stopped accepting new youth patients for gender-affirming care — following in the footsteps of Lurie and UI Health. That means fewer safe options, longer waits, and more fear for trans youth across Chicago.

It’s a major act of cowardice: with Trump’s administration is threatening to pull federal funding from hospitals that provide this care, and Rush received $73 million in federal grants last year. So rather than fight for its patients, it caved. Rush didn’t just pause care. It cut off lifesaving treatment for trans youth under political pressure with no public explanation, no community process, and no plan to restore services.

On Thursday, activists will rally near Rush to demand care for all. Because our lives aren’t bargaining chips. And we refuse to be silent while institutions sell us out to keep their grants.

Why It Matters: A major Chicago hospital cutting off gender-affirming care while claiming to support the LGBTQ+ community, is the most point blank showing of how little they care about trans rights. Fighting back against this move is about standing against collaboration. On Thursday, activists will rally near Rush to demand care for all.

3. Aldermanic Prerogative Is Cracking — And the Housing Fight Is Wide Open

Sun-Times: For the first time in decades, Chicago is poised to legalize accessory dwelling units — granny flats, coach houses, and backyard apartments — across the city. This City Council vote could crack open the door to real affordability and housing access. A fight that’s been locked down since 1957 is now — maybe — shifting, and not dying in committee.

The fight to legalize ADUs citywide cracks open aldermanic prerogative—because for 70 years, this unwritten rule let individual aldermen quietly block multi-unit housing and affordable rentals, fueling segregation and displacement one zoning stall at a time. Aldermanic prerogative isn’t just a zoning quirk — it’s a decades-old system of political control that’s been used to block affordable housing, protect segregation, and keep power hyper-local and unaccountable. Still: deregulation set by developers isn’t the same thing as affordability, and though aldermanic prerogative has been the backdoor mechanism for enforcing segregation in Chicago for decades, in the right hands, it’s also become a tool for organizing, one of the only levers left to fight for real equity in land use while the city stalls on systemic reform.

Why It Matters: The Left can’t afford to let YIMBYs, developers, and consultants take over a fight without a deeper analysis, but if this thing can freaking pass, there’s real coalition possibility here. PS — it won’t get a vote today, so there’s more to do…..

1 Big Question: How Do We Start Real Conversations About Revenue in Chicago? “Tax the Rich” Hits More Than You’d Think…

Most people have no idea what the Cook County Board of Review does. But every year, this three-member panel hears hundreds of thousands of property tax appeals, many filed by attorneys representing luxury developers, commercial landlords, and billion-dollar nonprofits who are trying to shave millions off their bills. And they often succeed.

That money doesn’t disappear. It gets shifted onto homeowners, renters, and small businesses—people without lawyers or consultants. Years ago, I wrote about how this works in the nonprofit exemption process—a maze of three government agencies where power and ambiguity always seem to benefit the biggest institutions. This is the same story, and why Cook County’s revenue system feels rigged from every angle. One appeal at a time, wealth moves upward.

Meanwhile, over 1,000 mostly Black homeowners in Cook County have lost their homes—and all their equity—through a tax foreclosure system so brutal the Supreme Court called it unconstitutional. Illinois lawmakers punted on reform again this year, even as thousands more homes teeter on the edge.

When Assessor Fritz Kaegi took office, he committed to transparency and fairer commercial assessments. And he delivered—until appeals started flowing back through the Board. And the Board granted the reductions. One key player right now is Samantha Steele, appointed to the Board in 2022 after her predecessor was removed in a cloud of scandal. Steele was sold as a reformer, but she’s a former real estate attorney with ties to the same consultants who profit from the appeals system. Since taking office, she’s raised big money from developers, aligned with party insiders, and kept the system humming. But right now, the system humming means Chicago’s property tax system is crushing working-class homeowners and letting luxury developers cash out.

Because of a lot of Chicago Scandal, Steele has been in the news lately**, and it’s possible that we could see an open run for this seat. It could be a lever for organizing—not just adjudicating—revenue justice in Cook County.

But if someone DID run for this seat, or challenged Steele, it would have to be about power— part of a broader demand for a real progressive revenue strategy in Cook County.

That means a challenger who can bring:

• A real political base and set of organizational relationships, that can cut through the media silence and make voters care about a race they’ve never heard of, who would stand behind them in the most boring meetings ever,

• A public program for reform: full data transparency, published audits of reductions, and hard caps on consultant-driven appeals,

• A narrative that connects tax justice to daily life: “Why does my rent keep rising while a River North tower gets a $3M write-down?”

This board is where the rich go to un-tax themselves. If we’re serious about progressive revenue, which we should be—taxing the rich, funding services people actually use, and building a city that isn’t hollowed out year after year—we have to start reckoning with this board.

2 Red Flags Stressing Me Out Today:

1. More AI Means More Cancer

American Prospect: Tech billionaires are building AI data centers that are literally poisoning people in poor, majority-Black communities like South Memphis. Artificial intelligence requires a staggering amount of power, and thanks to Trump’s repeal of Biden’s clean energy subsidies, that power is increasingly coming from methane turbines, coal plants, and backup diesel generators — all of which pump carcinogenic pollutants into the air.

Why It Matters: This is the shape of modern sacrifice zones: Silicon Valley’s promise of progress, built on infrastructure that will make tens of thousands of people sicker.

The AI industry has sold us on a future full of miraculous cures. But for many Americans, the most likely medical outcome of AI expansion is this.

2. Let’s… Not Do This

Why It Matters: “Protecting trans people” isn’t the empty identity politics issue that Rahm Emanuel wants you to believe it is: it’s truly a litmus test of whether or not a candidate is willing to actually run on the things that matter to most people — healthcare that isn’t heinous, the fact that billionaires are running everything, and that most ‘bold vision’ policies at this point require transformation and looking beyond “how we’ve always done things” — including who is part of progressive politics. It’s also particularly resonant as a barometer for their stance on healthcare, one of the most profound bipartisan domestic failures of US policy and politics over the last 30 years (besides uh… you know. The whole war machine). Calling this out not just because it’s bad, but because it will lose.

See you next Wednesday.

Coming Soon: For the next week or two I’m less online (who knew it was possible?) and traveling, but still trying to have conversations about what Chicago progressives are thinking about, need more of, and want to fight about — especially as we move into a real circus of an election season.

There’s lots coming up in terms of Q+As, longer explainers, and, as we head into fall, a new phase for this newsletter.

🌟 Help keep Chicago 312 going. This newsletter runs on the energy of people who read it, forward it, yell at me after they read it, and send me every Maria Pappas media appearance. You’re the real MVPs. Good luck out there.

_{All typos are intentional 4D chess.}

PS — A beautiful video of the city

** As I got deeper on this, it seems actually just as likely, in spite of the corruption charges, that Steele vacates the seat to run for Kaegi's role. As they say — Lol. LMAO, even.