Chicago's Pothole Season Is Breaking Records

Chicago's Pothole Season Is Breaking Records

Seventeen thousand, seven hundred and thirty-eight. That's how many pothole complaints Chicago residents have filed with 311 so far this year — a 46% jump over the same stretch in 2025. April alone is already running 84% above last April's pace, with 2,877 complaints logged in the first two weeks of the month versus 1,561 a year ago. The freeze-thaw winter did exactly what freeze-thaw winters do, and the streets are showing it.

The monthly anomaly detection flagged February as a statistical outlier — 4,808 complaints in a single month, more than 2.5 times the prior six-month average of 1,923. That wasn't a blip; it was the start of a sustained surge that's carried straight into spring. The data doesn't tell you whether CDOT is keeping up with repairs, only that residents are not staying quiet about what they're driving over.

The ward-level map below shows where the complaints are clustering — useful if you're trying to figure out whether your specific block is an outlier or just part of the citywide pattern. Spoiler: it's probably not just your block. Trend data

🗺Interactive map

Chicago's Drug Crime Just Hit a Multi-Year Low

Here's the number that deserves more attention than it's getting: drug crime is down 26.5% year-to-date compared to the same period in 2025 — 1,707 incidents versus 2,323. That's not a rounding error. Month-over-month it's also down 10.1%, and compared to March 2025 it's off nearly 20%. The trend has been consistent across multiple comparison windows, which is the kind of signal that's harder to dismiss as noise.

The community-area breakdown shows the decline is broad rather than concentrated in one or two neighborhoods. Whether this reflects enforcement strategy, displacement, or something else entirely is a question the data can't answer — but the direction is real, and it's been holding for months. Full trend

Violent Crime's Downward Drift Keeps Holding

The first two weeks of April logged 220 violent crime incidents (FBI Type I: homicide, robbery, assault, criminal sexual assault) versus 251 in the same window last year — a 12.4% drop. That's consistent with the broader YTD picture, which shows a 9.5% decline compared to the same stretch of 2025. Assaults, robberies, and criminal sexual assaults are all moving in the same direction.

The anomaly detection flagged a sharp single-week dip back in mid-February — 70 incidents in one week versus a 12-week average of 453 — which looks like a data lag rather than a real-world event. Set that aside and the underlying trend is still genuinely encouraging: fewer people coming home to a robbery report, fewer assaults logged across the city's community areas. Trend data

New Business Registrations Are Quietly Slipping

Business registrations are down 6.7% year-to-date (4,304 vs. 4,615 in 2025) and dropped 16.1% month-over-month in March. That's not a crisis number, but it's the wrong direction for three consecutive comparison windows. Whether it's a permitting slowdown, economic caution, or just seasonal noise is worth watching — especially if it persists into May.

Chicago Scorecard

Pothole Complaints	↑ 46.0% YTD
Drug Crime	↓ 26.5% YTD
Violent Crime	↓ 12.4% vs. Apr '25
Graffiti Removal Requests	↓ 15.4% MTD
Rat Complaints	↓ 14.8% vs. Apr '25
Business Registrations	↓ 6.7% YTD
Total 311 Calls	↑ 5.5% MTD

That's the week. See you next Tuesday.