Each year for nearly 20 years now, the National Association of Home Builders and the Wells Fargo Bank have boiled down national real estate data into an easy-to-digest housing affordability index. Local housing markets are judged “affordable” according to how many families earning the national median income of $64,400 can buy an average-priced house. By […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Discount-price cultural life
Back in March of 2009, Barnes & Noble signed a new five-year lease on its store in the strip mall at Wabash and Veterans where it has been doing business since it opened in 1993. The decision was a modest surprise, since word was out that the store might move to the long-vacant and larger […]
Posted inOpinion
End greed, invest in healthy economy
As a business owner who has created hundreds of jobs over the past two decades, I understand economic policies that build sustainable growth. Yet the billions in tax cuts for the wealthy recently signed into law compromise our shared future. The promise of “trickle down” economics has failed. When recent studies suggest that one in […]
Posted inOpinion
Death and dishonor
The motives people have for entering the public sphere often are murky. Their motives for leaving it prematurely are usually even more so. Tim Davlin is only the latest of several Illinois public men to have killed themselves recently. Four such deaths have occurred in Chicago since 2007, the latest being Phil Pagano, for 20 […]
Posted inOpinion
Stay with me
After 40 years, area tourism promoters still don’t have a compelling answer to the central question of their trade, which is, How ya gonnna bed ’em down in Springfield, after they’ve seen the Tomb? As I noted back in April (“The Presidential museum turns five,” April 29), attendance at the Presidential museum even in the […]
Posted inOpinion
Toward a farm-fresh food system
Readers of the brand new Illinois Times might not have learned learn much about who controlled the Illinois House, but we reported so diligently where they could buy farm-fresh eggs that it became a standing joke around the office. It was 1975. Anti-corporatism, pesticide paranoia and food faddism had come back into vogue. We joined […]
Posted inOpinion
Warrior days
It’s that time of year again, when youth gangs dressed improbably in bloomers and armed with basketballs rumble at the gym to defend the honor of the Red and Black or the Green and White – or, as in my case, the Blue and the Gold. In the mid-1960s I proudly, if ineptly, represented Washington […]
Posted inOpinion
Monument to a dead building
What, I wonder, is the overdue fine on a library lintel that was lost for 36 years? The carved stone lintel that stood atop the main entrance to the old library building had been salvaged when the building was demolished in 1974 and trucked to a storage yard at the state fairgrounds. There it sat […]
Posted inOpinion
What good are public libraries?
A library used to be one of the first things to be established by any town that wished to call itself advanced. Of late, spending on the library is one of the first things a town cuts back. Many a mayor faces fiscal dilemmas such as those that once prompted Springfield’s Mr. Davlin to muse […]
Posted inOpinion
Still alternative after all these years
I don’t often look at calendars – so often they remind me that there is an editor somewhere, impatiently drumming his fingers on his desk because the article draft I’d promised him is late. But look at a calendar one must do occasionally, and last week it reminded me that it has been 35 years […]
Posted inOpinion
Putting your name above the door
On Sept. 11 a grateful Springfield learned that Tony Kerasotes, head of that family’s movie house chain, had made a gift of $2 million to the YMCA building fund. It is a generous gift, graciously given as a “thank you” to the city that had helped his family’s rise. Every town of any size […]
Posted inOpinion
Greener than thou
The world continues to surprise me, and never more than the day in 2008 I read that Springfield had been named one of the top 50 greenest cities in America by Popular Science magazine. Surprise gave way to dumbfoundedness in August, when the National Resources Defense Council recognized Springfield as one of its 22 “Smarter […]
