Progress Illinois

More bad news emerged on the Illinois foreclosure front today. The number of homeowners slapped with bank repossessions, foreclosure, default or auction sale notices came to 12,681 in October -- a 24 percent increase from September and a 31 percent increase over the same month last year.

Homeowners in Cook County fared the worst. They made up more than half of the total foreclosure filings in the Prairie State. From the Sun-Times:

Some 6,885 homes received foreclosure notices in Cook County, representing one in every 313 homes. In Will County, the number was 990 homes, or 1 in every 226 homes. In DuPage County, the number was 807 homes, or one in every 441, and in Lake County it was 815 homes, or one in every 307 homes.

For more on what certain banks are doing to stem the tide of foreclosures -- here in Illinois and nationwide -- check out this post from yesterday.

Back in May, Adam profiled several young progressive candidates running for public office around Illinois.  Among them was Tony Michelassi, a 23-year-old Democratic candidate for the GOP-dominated Dupage County Board:

After receiving his Associates Degree in Political Science from the College of DuPage in December, Michelassi decided that government service was the career that best suited him. “Politics gets a bad rap in our society as being something that people go into if they can’t make it in the private sector, and that’s not true,” he says. “Politics can and should be treated as a profession.”

If elected to the DuPage board, Michelassi hopes to ease the county’s growing pains. He says that the board is struggling to balance its budget and the steps members have proposed to alleviate excessive outlays -- cutting funding for the public safety department or charging fees for storm water drainage service – aren’t appropriate responses.

Well, last week Michelassi -- who works at a Jewel-Osco photo desk in Naperville -- won election to the board.  And no seemed more amazed than himself:

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As Josh noted yesterday, the most dramatic change in the Illinois presidential map between 2004 and 2008 is the blue-ing of the collar counties. Solid Bush terrain four years ago, every single county swung for Barack Obama on Tuesday.

Here's a data comparison (click "Sheet 2" to see the popular vote margins):

A few things seem fairly obvious from the returns Tuesday night. The first is that the "Emerging Democratic Majority" -- which started to develop in the 1990s but was stunted by Sept. 11 -- appears to have arrived. The New Republic's John Judis explains in his sharp election analysis published Wednesday:

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Under a barrage of legal appeals and lawsuits, Planned Parenthood of Illinois keeps standing strong. Just days after a judge threw out significant portions of a defamation lawsuit against the women's health care provider, the Aurora Building Code Board of Appeals dismissed appeals filed against Planned Parenthood's state-of-the-art clinic there. The Beacon News has the details:

Earlier this week, the Building Code Board of Appeals rejected the lion's share of a complaint filed in July by anti-abortion activists, including Fox Valley Families Against Planned Parenthood. In the complaint, those opponents argued several zoning and building codes were violated during the construction of the facility, and challenged the July 1 issuance of a final certificate of occupancy.

City Attorney Alayne Weingartz filed a motion to dismiss the complaint, and after nearly two hours of deliberation, the board upheld that motion. The board, Weingartz said, has a 20-day limit on decisions it can consider, and most of the decisions referenced in the appeal happened more than 20 days before it was filed.

But Illinois' pro-life community isn't backing down.

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A great story from the Lisle Sun today. Recent college graduate Tony Michelassi was so frustrated by the lack of a Democratic candidate in the race for the 5th District seat on the Dupage County Board that he decided to run himself:

The 22-year-old had graduated with an associate's degree in political science from College of DuPage two months before the February primary. Although he started his college career as a rhetoric major at the University of Illinois, he had become increasingly interested in government administration.

So when he saw blank space after blank space on the ballot, he decided his name should go in the Democratic slot for the 5th District of the DuPage County Board, which includes Naperville and Lisle.

"I thought this would be a great way to get experience in the field, whether I win or not," said Michelassi, of Aurora.

After consulting with his local precinct committeewoman, Michelassi began attending meetings of the DuPage County Democratic Party and was nominated to run for the seat in March, just before the filing deadline.

In November, he'll compete with two Republicans - incumbent Jim Healy and attorney Gerry Cassioppi - for two of the District 5 seats on the 18-member board.

Go, Tony, go!

As our own Adam Doster explained in a recent feature article, Democrats have gradually been coming out of the woodwork in Dupage County this year to support Democratic congressional challengers like Bill Foster, Jill Morganthaler, and Scott Harper.

In accordance with this resurgence, the Democratic Party of Dupage County just unveiled their stylin' new website. Check it out.

In my recent article on changing political dynamics in the collar counties, I highlighted a number of factors that are aiding Democrats at the ballot box, including demographic shifts, Republican missteps, and the transformation of the regional economy. But one factor I only touched on tangentially was what DePaul University professor Larry Bennett called "the rush of urbanization."

This phrase refers to a rise in civic problems that are traditionally found in urban areas, such as struggling schools, traffic congestion, and slow development. Suburban residents distanced themselves from these issues when they left Chicago's bungalow belts, but they have since crept back into their communities. Meanwhile, as Bennett told me, GOP legislators have failed to address these concerns adequately, instead continuing to advance an anachronistic view of suburban governance.

Michael Gecan, a national staff member for the Industrial Areas Foundation and the author of the must-read memoir Going Public, picks up where I left off, beautifully profiling DuPage County's new bouts with urbanization in this month's issue of the Boston Review:

By the date of the meeting, however, the developers who had helped double DuPage’s population in just 30 years had run out of land. The income generated by their construction efforts had dwindled to a trickle. Education and public safety costs continued to climb. Scores of specialized local districts and commissions — water, sanitary, and others — absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars that never made it into the general operating budget of the county and were subject to little, if any, scrutiny or oversight. And residential real estate taxes — the backbone of the county’s budget due to the long-standing agreement to attract and retain business by keeping commercial taxes low — soared.

(More after the jump ...)

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