The hits keep coming for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. On Thursday the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the city’s pension reform, which required city workers to chip in more to their retirement plans, raised the retirement age and cut back on cost-of-living adjustments. But there may be a silver lining for the fiscal basket case known as Illinois.

The Illinois court said Chicago’s 2014 reforms violate a provision of the state constitution that bans diminishing existing pension benefits. This is legally debatable, but the court’s ruling wasn’t surprising since it had already knocked down state pension reforms signed by previous Governor Pat Quinn.

The ruling further limits Mr. Emanuel’s fiscal options as pension payments take an ever-growing share of city revenues. On Thursday the gracious souls at the Chicago Teachers Union announced a one-day walkout on April 1. The CTU isn’t allowed to strike until this summer, but CTU president Karen Lewis told her members not to worry: “What are they going to do, arrest us all? Put us all in jail? There’s not 27,000 spaces in the Cook County Jail right now.” Ah, she cares so deeply for the children.

Housing prices are climbing and home purchases are increasing, but almost 10 years since the housing crash began it’s not getting easier to get a mortgage. In Chicago, it’s especially difficult.

“We are now almost at historical lows of credit availability” nationally, said Laurie Goodman, director of the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. “Access to credit has been very, very tight.”

It’s difficult to get loans because “lenders worry about anything less than pristine” borrowers, she said. That continues to put home purchases out of reach for many Americans and has crimped the recovery of the housing market. With the value of the nation’s housing market now pegged at $23.18 trillion, the market has improved but not recovered fully. Prices would need to recover another 8 percent to return to 2006 levels.

The notoriously polluted Chicago River is about to get cleaner with disinfection technology at a Skokie water treatment facility.

Ultraviolet radiation will kill harmful bacteria and pathogens in water released from the O’Brien Water Reclamation Plant into the North Shore Channel and North Branch of the Chicago River. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) announced the new disinfection facility at a ribbon-cutting ceremony this morning. Sen. Dick Durbin acknowledged the Chicago River’s murky history while praising the new disinfection effort.

“The city’s record when it comes to the Chicago River, the river that runs through the heart of downtown, has not been great,” Durbin said. “Today, we make a major step forward to reverse that trend and protect the valuable resource of the Chicago River.”

Mitchell and Loria Versher say they were looking for one thing when they bought their first home in South suburban Markham: “Stability.”

They might have been better off buying swampland in Florida.

In retrospect, July 31, 2007, was a bad day to go shopping for property anywhere.

You’ve probably seen this week’s alarming headlines, such as “CHICAGO TOPS NATION IN POPULATION LOSS,” the Page 1 screamer from today’s print edition of the Tribune.

We don’t yet have Census Bureau numbers for Chicago itself, but the raw population decline in the metropolitan statistical area (which stretches from Wisconsin to Indiana) and Cook County are dramatic: “Cook, Ill., had the largest numeric decline among counties at 10,488 people,” the Census Bureau reported. “The next largest decline belonged to Wayne, Mich., at 6,673.”

Wayne County is where Detroit is. It’s not great news. But it’s more complex than simply people moving out of Cook County, though that is happening. To begin with, Cook County is really big; it’s about three times bigger than Wayne County (5.2 million versus 1.8 million), and the second-biggest county in America. (Only Los Angeles County has more, with 10.1 million people.) So the raw numbers, while important, aren’t the whole story.