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Dennis Rodkin
How Your High School Stacks Up
By Dennis Rodkin
Chicago does a by-the-numbers evaluation of 233 public high schools in the six-county metro area, looking at school spending, as well as teacher experience, test scores, and other academic categories—including an exclusive appraisal of the relationship between money and test scores. Read more
Housing Bulletin—The Link Between Housing and Schools
By Dennis Rodkin

As a real-estate agent in a family of real-estate agents, state representative Karen Yarbrough (D-Maywood) knows all about the close connection between house values and school quality. “When I work with [homebuyers],” she says, “the single most important thing they always ask is, ‘How are the schools?’ You could show them a Frank Lloyd Wright house with all kinds of architectural amenities, but if the community’s schools aren’t good, they will pass it by. There are two basic building blocks of healthy communities: good schools and good housing.” 

That’s why Yarbrough took the lead with state senator Iris Martinez (D-Chicago) in sponsoring the Good Housing Good Schools bill (SB 220) that both houses of the state legislature passed last spring and that...

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Freeze Frame
By Dennis Rodkin
As Chicago's real-estate market began to experience the big chill, homeowners worried that this was the beginning of the next ice age. But as our annual house survey demonstrates, there were a few bright spots in a year that was more frustrating than desperate. Read more
New on the Market—Roomy Contemporary in Chicago’s Bucktown Neighborhood
By Dennis Rodkin

List Price: $2.499 million
The Property: This spacious, newly completed four-story home is one of a planned string of five houses and an eight-unit condo building going up on the 1600 block of North Wolcott Street in Bucktown. The first one finished, this house is a joint project of JODI Development and Ranquist Development. The latter, run by the husband-and-wife team of Bob and Karen Ranquist, has been responsible for some of the finest contemporary architecture in this architecturally savvy...

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Housing Bulletin—Correction of Lincoln Square Data
By Dennis Rodkin

It turns out housing prices in the Lincoln Square neighborhood (on Chicago’s Northwest Side) haven’t been on the two-year roller coaster ride suggested by Chicago’s October issue. Because of a problem with our data, the magazine’s annual real-estate charts reported an artificially large jump in prices in Lincoln Square in October 2006; as a result, the October 2007 charts indicated a dramatic (and false) decline...

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