A new analysis from Zillow has concluded that Chicago has more “underwater” mortgages than any other real estate market in the country, meaning there are more homeowners in Chicago than anywhere else whose houses are worth less than they still owe on their mortgage.

The total figure for the Chicago metro area, according to Zillow, is 413,690. That’s far and away the highest number of total underwater loans; New York comes in a distant second with 307,573.

According to the first-quarter data, Chicago also has the second-highest overall rate of homeowners with underwater mortgages, a concept referred to as negative equity. Nearly 24% of Chicago mortgages were underwater as of the first quarter. That’s actually a significant year-over-year improvement, down from 28.1% in the first quarter of 2014, but the market still trails only Las Vegas, which has a 25% negative equity rate.

Zillow calculated that rate by comparing the estimated values of each home to “all outstanding mortgage debt and lines of credit associated with the home,” meaning the analysis took into account home equity lines of credit and home equity loans, as well as traditional mortgages. Home values can, of course, be difficult to pinpoint (since something as simple as landscaping can increase home value by between 7% and 15%), but estimates can still act as valuable indicators of the overall condition of a market.

The national negative equity rate now sits at 15.4%, more than a three-point drop from this time last year. At the lowest point of the real estate crisis, more than 15 million American homeowners held underwater mortgages; that figure has now decreased to around 7.9 million.

But those homeowners are quite deeply underwater. “It’s great news that the level of negative equity is falling, but what really worries me is the depth of negative equity,” Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries commented in a news release, explaining that it could take up to a decade for many of those homeowners to build enough equity to get their mortgages right-side-up again.

He also explained that these underwater mortgages affect the entire market, especially with lower-end houses, because they prevent would-be first-time homebuyers from finding affordable entry-level properties.

“The logjam at the bottom is having ripple effects throughout the market, and as home value growth slows, it will be years before it gets cleared up,” Humphries predicted. “In the meantime, we’ll be left with volatile prices, limited inventory, tepid demand, elevated foreclosures and a whole lot of frustration.”

Northwest Community Healthcare, which serves suburbs to the northwest of Chicago, is embracing technological advances to offer more convenience and better care to its patients.

The group just finished the implementation of a new electronic health record system, a project that has been in the works since late 2013.

The system “helps improve communication between clinicians, allows patient data to be readily available across all units and saves time for clinicians who no longer chase down patient charts,” CEO Steve Scogna said in a statement.

It also allows patients to access their own information through a 24-hour online portal so they can request or schedule appointments, view their test results, request refills on prescriptions, keep track of immunization and medications, and even securely communicate with healthcare providers directly.

Electronic Health Records in the U.S.
Despite their undeniable promise, electronic health records have become a fraught issue in the United States, largely because of government programs that first incentivized and have now essentially mandated their use for providers accepting Medicare or Medicaid payments.

There’s no doubt that the market for EHR systems is growing; the industry is projected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2022, according to the latest projections. Data for last year is still being collected, but adoption of basic EHR systems by office-based physicians went up by 21% in just one year between 2012 and 2013 (bringing the total figure to about 78%). Critics say, however, that doctors have had very little choice in whether to implement those systems and in how they are implemented.

Federal regulators are now having to back off on some requirements in order to give doctors, hospitals and medical software systems more time to comply with government requirements.

The next big challenge, those in the industry say, will be to bridge the gaps among various EHR software systems so that both providers and patients can reap all the benefits that EHRs can — at least in theory — offer.

Increasingly overwhelmed by the city’s population, aging infrastructure systems throughout Chicago could begin to threaten the environment in the coming years if nothing is done to fix them.

According to The DePaulia, evidence of sewer system overload is already apparent throughout much of the city. When last summer brought heavy rains and flash flooding, Chicago’s century-old sewer lines — buried 12 to 24 inches below the city streets — weren’t equipped to cope with the extra storm water.

When Chicago’s sewer systems and water treatment plants can’t handle these intense storms, this water overflow goes into the Chicago River. But to keep the river from rising onto city streets, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District officials are often forced to release extra sewage and rain water into Lake Michigan. Last summer, the city released 525 million gallons of sewage and storm water into Lake Michigan.

And with climate experts and city officials predicting that these storms will only get more intense and unpredictable as time goes on, current sewer line repair projects might be another case of too little, too late.

“There is a new kind of storm hitting Chicago in recent years — heavy rains that can be very local, very intense and hard to predict,” a city website that pushes for preventative flood programs said. “They dump two inches or more per hour on a given neighborhood. This volume quickly overwhelms local sewers, which were not designed for such intense rainfall. Sewer mains fill up, and additional water pushes into basements through our private drains.”

Chicago’s sewer system overflow isn’t all that threatens the local ecosystem. According to a June 4 report from The Chicagoist, methane leaks from natural gas pipelines around the city pose a risk to the climate. In the city’s older neighborhoods, especially, these leaks are most prominent, indicating a clear need to upgrade and fix these leaks.

In fact, 40% of Chicago’s gas pipelines are more than half a century old, the Environmental Defense Fund found. And while these methane leaks don’t necessarily create an immediate threat to the environment, it’s clear Chicago’s leadership will need to prioritize pipeline upgrades in the near future.