The Latest Breaking News from Maria Pappas

The early results coming in Tuesday night had Toni Preckwinkle leading in the race for Cook County Board president and Karen Yarbrough ahead in the Cook County clerk contest.

The history of government redlining haunts many struggling neighborhoods to this day. A little more than half of the 27,000 properties now at risk of being sold for back taxes are within areas the federal government had redlined.

CHICAGO — Vacant and abandoned properties clustered on the Chicago’s South and West sides and southern suburbs have been a stubborn problem for decades. Every two years, the Cook County treasurer tries to return those properties to productive use during its biennial scavenger sale of delinquent taxes, often with little…

A study says that a nearly 80-year-old law intended to put distressed and tax-delinquent Chicago-area properties back to productive use has done little to improve or solve racial inequities in the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas would like the report to spark discussions about reforms to the county’s scavenger sales that occur every two years.

They lease public property to businesses. Many don’t pay their taxes. And the government landlords do little to monitor this, even when the law requires it, a Sun-Times investigation finds.

‘It’s like a story of survival for generations to come, and we intend to keep passing it down.’