It’s been a very rough few years for the real estate market in Chicago—the ongoing recession and sluggish resale market are unfortunately still news and both buyers and sellers are watching the situation closely for any signs of improve…
With the price of gasoline rising, daily traffic snarls, a desire to live a healthier life and the responsibility to lessen the effect of one's carbon footprint, there are many reasons to own a bike. Buying the bike is just the beginnin…
Chicago is known for having some of the very best urban opportunities in the world—among the best colleges and schools, museums and libraries, as well as some of the finest parks, the most interesting architecture, the most intriguing m…
Fans of the television show Mad Men, set in the mid-1960s, are often shocked by the near-constant presence of smoldering cigarettes in nearly everyone's hands. Indeed, if if you told any of the show's characters that in just a few decad…
It’s no secret that Chicagoans love their dogs. In 2011, DogFriendly.com ranked Chicago the second most dog-friendly city in the United States (Portland, Oregon, ranked number 1). The criteria was based on the number of lodgings, attrac…
As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and for homebuyers, that first impression is almost always the view from the street. No matter how deluxe the accommodations inside, if the property’s ext…
According to the most recent U.S. Census, an estimated 285,000—or roughly 10 percent—of Chicagoland's population is over the age of 65. Older Chicagoans live in all parts of the city, both integrated into their longtime neighborhoods and…
The economy cratered—to use a term in popular parlance at that time—in September 2008, with the collapse of too-big-to-fail Lehman Brothers. While the measures undertaken by the federal government and the Federal Reserve averted complet…
As the economy sputters along and unemployment rates remain steady at more than nine percent, there isn’t call for celebration. Whereas the real estate market was also lumped in with these aforementioned Great Recession causalities, in …
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 136 million tons of construction and demolition waste was generated in 1996, which was the last time these figures were made available, and those numbers have most likely ri…