Illinois Answers Project

1 month ago | illinoisanswers.org | Peter Nickeas

The state agency responsible for keeping Illinois’ most vulnerable children safe has failed to produce legally required public reports after examining what went wrong in hundreds of cases of child deaths and thousands of serious injuries, the Illinois Answers Project has learned. More than 1,200 deaths and more than 3,000 other cases of serious injury have met the criteria for incident-specific reports since July 2018, according to data DCFS provided under an open records request.

2 months ago | illinoisanswers.org | Casey Toner

The city of Chicago has reached a tentative, $11.5 million agreement to settle its legal battle against the companies of a north suburban woman that city attorney’s have dubbed Chicago’s “worst landowner,” who has accrued millions of dollars in unpaid fines for hundreds of weed-strewn and garbage-filled lots across the South and West Sides.

Feb 12, 2025 | illinoisanswers.org | David Greising

President Donald Trump has leaped into office relishing his role as disruptor-in-chief, and much of that disruption is aimed at Chicago and Illinois. Chicago is a sanctuary city. Northern Illinois’ deep-blue politics are red meat for the partisan-minded president and his devoted supporters in and out of government. Gov. JB Pritzker is becoming a leading voice of the Trump resistance.

Jan 23, 2025 | illinoisanswers.org | Meredith Newman |Grace Hauck

Meredith Newman is an embedded investigative reporter with the Illinois Answers Project. Before joining the newsroom, she worked at The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware and The Capital in Annapolis, Maryland. She is a graduate of Syracuse University and is originally from Evanston, Illinois. More by Meredith Newman

Jan 22, 2025 | illinoisanswers.org | Mina Bloom

By the time the city sued her, absentee owner Suzie B. Wilson had let hundreds of properties on Chicago’s South and West sides become so infested with rats and filled with trash and weeds that she owed more than $15 million in fines. Now, as a result of that case, a Chicago real estate company is selling off more than 800 properties in the South and West side neighborhoods, the largest mass land sale in the city in years.