The city of Chicago’s move toward mandatory pre-rental inspections raises an obvious and unanswered question: Who will be expected to bear the cost?
If history is any guide, the answer will likely be small, independent landlords — the very people already navigating rising property taxes, insurance premiums, maintenance costs and increasingly complex regulatory burdens. This would be yet another in a long series of incremental pressures — the “thousand paper cuts”— that collectively make it harder to provide affordable housing at the neighborhood level.
At the Chicago Housing Authority, inspections are funded by the agency itself. In those cases, the public entity requiring compliance also assumes the financial responsibility. Here, the city appears poised to mandate compliance while shifting the cost entirely onto property owners.
Let’s be candid: Policies like this don’t exist in a vacuum. When you increase the cost of operating small rental properties, those costs are inevitably passed along, whether through higher rents, reduced investment in maintenance or landlords exiting the market altogether. None of those outcomes benefits tenants or neighborhoods.
If the city insists on implementing a pre-rental inspection regime, it should at a minimum:
- Clearly disclose all associated costs and fees
- Provide subsidies or waivers for small landlords
- Ensure the program is about safety and habitability — not revenue generation.
Absent those safeguards, this initiative could look less like sound housing policy and more like a thinly veiled revenue grab — one that risks doing more harm than good in the very communities it claims to protect.
Edward G. Irvin, landlord, Auburn Gresham
Pungent phrases
Yeah, they said it.
“It’s hypocritical to say that these attacks harmed (Iranian) women and children when those women and children — the young girls that you reference — would live a life in a barbaric, unequal society behind a burqa, with no ability to make career choices” — Matt Schlapp, chairman, American Conservative Union.
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” — Charlie Kirk.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” — Donald Trump.
Remember President Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” quote? Such an innocent time.
Jim Newton, Itasca
Privatize TSA tasks
Amid all the teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing and political preening about Department of Homeland Security funding and Transportation Security Administration issues, one very important observation goes virtually without notice. The 20 U.S. airports that employ private security (e.g. San Francisco, Kansas City and Orlando) have continued to function rather nicely during the partial government shutdown. Indeed, they were more effectively and efficiently run before the current TSA kerfuffle. That should come as no surprise, as private industry almost always outperforms the government.
If there is any good to come out of the current attention to airport security, the best thing would be to privatize that function.
William P. Gottschalk, Lake Forest
No will to fix lapses
Joe Biden may have let Jose G. Medina, Sheridan Gorman’s alleged murderer, into the country, which was wrong. But what is currently being done to correct the problem? The Trump administration has had more than a year and millions of taxpayers’ dollars to stop Medina and maybe could have.
Instead, there have been too many missteps along the way, and now Department of Homeland Security agents are in airports trying to learn Transportation Security Administration jobs. All of us want these criminals to be stopped, but is anything productive really being done?
Tom DeDore, Garfield Ridge
Selective outrage
President Donald Trump loves to throw shade at Democrats when people who shouldn’t be in the country cause damage, like the undocumented migrant who allegedly gunned down Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman.
But where is the outrage when someone pardoned by Trump causes great harm?
One example: Andrew Paul Johnson was convicted in August 2024 and sentenced to a year in prison for his role in the Jan. 6 “disturbance” at the U.S. Capitol. On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump pardoned Johnson as well as everyone else involved in that riot, no matter how violently they behaved.
On March 5, Johnson was convicted of two counts of child molestation, at least some of which occurred after he was released from prison, and sentenced to life if prison.
Does Trump feel any guilt or responsibility for the subsequent behavior of people he released back into society, or does his kind of outrage only apply to the other side?
Kevin Coughlin, Evanston
Midterms will tell us a lot
If there is voter’s remorse for electing Donald Trump, we’re not going to hear it from those voters. With all the political divisiveness in our country right now, who would admit to being on the losing end of his or her candidate selection?
We will find out in November’s midterm elections.
John Petersen, Belmont Heights
Limit mail-in ballot use
Debating the constitutionality of accepting late mail-in ballots is a diversion from the real issue: whether mail-in voting should be accepted at all.
Why do we have polling places in the first place?
When people vote in person, we know who is voting and we know they are voting in secret, free from outside influences.
When people vote at home, we have no idea who is filling out the ballot or whether they were alone when they did.
Voting in person is a minimum safeguard for our elections. Mail-in voting may be allowed, perhaps only in the rarest of circumstances.
Larry Craig, Wilmette