It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Urban coyotes quietly thrive in Chicago but experts say don't panic
WHY DHS TARGETS CHIGAGO
27.04.2026, DPA
Photo: Amy Katz/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
Coyotes have been spotted across Chicago, from downtown streets to nearby suburbs. Experts say the sightings are a normal seasonal pattern. But you may want to keep your dog on leash or cat indoors during peak times, just to be safe.
By Madeline King, Chicago Tribune
Coyotes have been spotted out and about in central Chicago neighbourhoods and its suburbs, and wildlife experts say there's no cause for alarm.
According to Chris Anchor, a wildlife biologist for the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, people see more of the species when mating season peaks, normally around mid-February.
Experts also say that activities may also increase into the spring and summer months when male coyotes are foraging for pups.
Coyotes, who are instinctually territorial, are therefore patrolling their land more often.
“Everybody in the Chicagoland area lives within the territory of a family group of coyotes,” Anchor said.
Another reason for these omnivores’ more obvious visibility is that prey can becomes scarce in the winter, causing them to travel farther for food, said Seth Magle, senior director of Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute.
He added that coyotes help the environment by eating rabbits, geese and other animals that would otherwise overpopulate the area.
Preschool teacher Kelsey Davies said she has seen one or two coyotes on her street. “What I tell them is, ‘Please eat all the bunnies in my yard. Help yourself,’” she said.
Davies, 50, said the high number of coyote sightings is rare for her neighbourhood. Before the past winter, she hadn’t seen a coyote on her street in years.
She said she now sees them most often at night, when the species is most active, and occasionally hears them howl along to ambulance sirens.
“They don’t bother us. I’m not going to bother them,” Davies said. “I feel like we can live together.”
They look at her and her goldendoodle on their nightly walks, but Davies said the coyotes aren’t aggressive and usually walk away. But Davies said she understands why her neighbours who have small dogs worry.
Despite the fears of some people, experts say the coyote diet does not include humans or pets.
“If coyotes were truly an issue, you would already know about it,” Anchor said. “It would be a huge public service social issue.”
Anchor and Magle stressed that coyotes are almost always peaceful toward and even afraid of humans. Anchor said that it’s far more likely to be bitten by a dog than a coyote — only one person gets bitten by a coyote in North America in an average year.
The two also noted that coyotes are all around people, even those living in densely populated areas. Coyotes look for places to hide where they won’t be disturbed by people.
In cities during the winter, they’ll sleep in cemeteries, on golf courses and in patches of shrubs, Magle said.
Anchor added that there are families living at Navy Pier and the Museum Campus.
“They’re thriving in our cities … but they’re doing it by avoiding us,” Magle said.
Between 2,000 and 4,000 coyotes live in Cook County, according to Stanley Gehrt, a professor of wildlife ecology at Ohio State University and researcher with the Urban Coyote Research Program.
Coyotes returned to the area in the late ’70s and early ’80s after being driven out by human development and population growth for nearly 100 years, according to Anchor. White-tailed deer, beavers and Canada geese also came back to the area, Anchor said.
Gehrt said experts aren’t sure why coyotes returned to urban areas. “What makes it even more of a mystery is that that same pattern occurred in cities across the Midwest and the Eastern US,” he said.
Gehrt said coyote numbers have remained relatively stable for the last decade or so because the species self-regulates its population.
Coyotes can have litters of four pups or as many as 13. Since both parents — who mate for life — remain involved in raising the pups, the litter sizes can increase as long as there’s enough available food.
It’s a common misconception that city coyotes have become dependent on human food, Gehrt said. The species still hunts its natural prey.
Coyotes have the potential to become dangerous to people when they associate humans with food and stop being afraid of them, making it important to keep trash secured and refrain from feeding coyotes, Magle said. In the very rare case that a coyote approaches a person, it’s best to make loud noises to scare it away, he added.
Anchor said while coyote attacks on pets are rare, they are more common than attacks on humans. He recommended keeping dogs on leashes and cats indoors.
Magle said more people are learning to appreciate urban wildlife. When he started working at the Urban Wildlife Institute 16 years ago, he would get calls asking him who would “do something” about the coyote. Now, the calls he gets about coyotes are mostly from people who are enthusiastic and want to share their sightings.
“Maybe your knee-jerk reaction is like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t belong here,’ but then when you think about it, you’re kind of like, ‘Why not? Who decides that?’” Magle said. “‘Maybe a city can be a place for wildlife.’”
Severe drought has dominated the West, leading to larger wildfires. Photo by George Wuerthner.
If you want to understand why we are seeing larger wildfires, severe drought, and higher temperatures, I suggest the mantra should be “it’s the climate, stupid.”
Yet, it appears that most agencies, many scientists (who are paid by the Forest Service and timber industry), and far too many conservation groups, blame recent large blazes on “over dense” forests that are “unhealthy” and in need of thinning (read logging).
Natural sources of mortality, like bark beetles, are indicators of “healthy forests” where ecological processes still function. Photo by George Wuerthner.
To these folks, tree mortality from natural processes like drought, insects, or wildfire is an indication of “unhealthy” forests. This paradigm drives all federal and state forest policy.
The driving force in all large fires is climate and weather, not fuel. I am always astounded that advocates of logging can seemingly ignore the fact that most of the West (and other parts of the country) are in severe drought. The historic conditions that created the forests we have today no longer exist. Our forest ecosystems are operating under a new climatic regime. And yet it does not seem to occur to people that this might have something to do with the large blazes we are experiencing.
Drought, high temperatures, low humidity, and wind are the key factors in all large blazes. The ongoing climate conditions that began in the 1980s have exacerbated all of these factors.
It doesn’t matter how much fuel you have; if you don’t have the right climate/weather conditions, you will not have a significant blaze. That is why wildfires are almost non-existent in wet, cool places like the Tongass National Forest in rainy Southeast Alaska. You could use a blowtorch to ignite the forest, and you would not get a large conflagration.
We have many climate/fire studies that demonstrate that, under severe drought conditions, wildfires are larger and more frequent—regardless of fuel type. By contrast, if you have decades of wet, cool conditions, the acreage burned and the size of wildfires decrease.
We have recent evidence of this trend from the last century. In the early 1900s, we experienced a significant drought. Remember the Dust Bowl? Indeed, in 1929, more than 50 million acres were charred across the West.
There is a shifting baseline. If you start in the 1970s, wildfire size has increased, but if you were to look at the early part of the last century, wildfires were just as large due to dry conditions that prevailed at that time.
To put that into perspective, today, if 10 million acres burn, it is considered a “record” year.
Then, in the late 1930s, the climate shifted due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which controls climate conditions along the West Coast. Throughout the 1940s through the early 1980s, the climate was considerably cooler and moister. The number of ignitions declined; even those that managed to burn did not impact large areas.
In the 1970s, glaciers were expanding around the West, and some predicted a new Ice Age had begun. Photo by George Wuerthner.
During this period, glaciers grew in the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Rockies. Some scientists were predicting a new Ice Age.
In addition to fewer large fires, the cool, moist conditions favored tree establishment and survival, leading to denser forest stands.
While most logging and prescribed burn advocates attribute denser forests to “fire suppression,” it ignores how many natural conditions influence fire suppression efforts. It is easy to suppress fires when it’s cool and moist, but the supposed success of fire suppression was more a consequence of natural conditions that hindered ignition and spread.
Nature did a fine job of suppressing fires and increasing forest density.
The other reason given for larger blazes is the presumed cessation of “Indian burning.” According to this idea, before the spread of Euro-American control over wildfires, native people kept forest fuels low, forests healthy, and everyone happy by regularly burning the woods. Here is a recent paper promoting the idea that Indian burning kept fuel loading low and prevented large fires.
There are many problems with this concept.
First, while tribal people did burn the landscape, the influence was primarily local. In other words, Indian burning was localized and did not have a landscape-scale effect. We have numerous studies documenting the negligible influence of tribal fire, including evolutionary evidence.
For instance, Vachula et al. (2019) did a study of what is now Yosemite National Park where, historically, large Indigenous communities resided. Their research found a direct correlation between climate and the amount of burning on the landscape.
“We analyzed charcoal preserved in lake sediments of Yosemite National Park and spanning the last 1400 years to reconstruct local and regional area burned. Warm and dry climates promoted burning at both local and regional scales…
For instance, sagebrush ecosystems are among the most widespread vegetative communities in the West, yet are not adapted to fire. If tribal burning were as widespread and influential as claimed, we would not have sagebrush-adapted species like sage grouse, sage thrashers, pygmy rabbits, and a host of other species specifically adapted to sagebrush landscapes.
Sagebrush, a common plant species at low elevations where native people lived, lacks adaptations to frequent fire. If Indian burning were as widespread as asserted, we would not have sagebrush and sagebrush-adapted species like sage grouse. Photo by George Wuerthner.
A further problem with the idea that fire suppression and Indian burning reduced large blazes is that most plant communities in the West burned at long fire intervals, during which fuel naturally built up.
Finally, you have to ask yourself, how did forests survive and remain healthy for millions of years before there were any humans in North America? For example, ponderosa pine forests, a tree species that many suggest only remain healthy if they experience frequent fires set by humans, have existed as a separate species for 55–60 million years. Yet, tribal people only colonized North America in the last 15,000 years or so.
Fire suppression is not the issue. Climate change is what is driving large blazes. And solutions like increased logging or even prescribed fires are not going to significantly reverse the ongoing effects of severe drought and climate change.
The burning of fossil fuels, which contributes to climate warming, is the driving force behind larger wildfires. Photo by George Wuerthner.
The change in wildfire spread and size began in the late 1980s, as the cumulative influence of greenhouse gases began to create warmer, drier conditions, which in turn led to more wildfires.
The ultimate cause of larger blazes is warming climate. Until we, as a society, seriously address climate change and work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, no amount of logging or prescribed burning will result in fewer large blazes.
In the meantime, the only viable way to protect homes and communities is to ramp up home hardening to reduce the vulnerability of structures to ignition.
Image from the 'Dear Alice' Decommodified Edition by Waffle to the Left
Imagine you have a year’s stash of food, a huge garden and chickens for eggs, a rainwater collection system, a solar system … and on and on and on. Welcome to my suburban yard.
Yesterday a group of volunteer earthquake preparedness neighbors met to test out our walkie talkies. I slipped a question into the conversation: “Do you have enough food and water stored for a week? There are only two roads in to our subdivision and if both are blocked, we’ll be home alone.” I tried to sound nonchalant. I don’t want to scare people with talk of crossing 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) – such party stoppers. So I sidled in questions about water storage (a gallon a person a day for a week) and survival food (tuna, peanut butter, dried milk, instant oatmeal, almonds.. nothing fancy.) It did start a conversation about rainwater collection, so that’s a plus.
Prepared for what?
I first heard the data about “overshoot and collapse” 37 years ago and it changed my life. “Holy shit,” I said, when I saw the graph of how much planet we have and how much we’re overspending. The line of have and the line of spend crossed in the 1980s! The Footprint Network developed the idea of Earth Overshoot Day to express our dilemma. It’s the day of the year we exceed the planet’s capacity to support us. We were flush in 1970. Now, Overshoot day is August 2. As I said, this is not a polite conversation among friends. Reality sucks when you’re having fun.
Quartermaster
My response to data has always been to do something. I don’t demand 100% right. Over 50% is enough to get me started ambling towards solutions.
I must have been a quartermaster in the army in a prior life. I think in terms of provisioning (ergo my survival compound). How many mouths, how much food, what tools, supplies, etc? Here’s just half the stash in three deep kitchen drawers. Double it to include cupboards for a better estimate.
How many mouths to feed?
Ever since seeing that “Holy Shit” graph, I’ve watched population like some people weigh themselves. When I was born, there were 2.5 billion people on the planet. When I learned about overshoot, there were 5 billion of us, and that seemed a good place to plateau. To me. I’d hoped Your Money or Your Life would be a lever long enough to reduce human impact on Mother Earth. Nope. Not with passing 6 billion in 2000 and adding another 2 billion since then.
Well, if I can’t hit the big solution to overshoot jackpot, maybe I can go regional. The island I live on, and about 100 in all directions, is the US part of the Salish Sea – and my local home. I wrote a book about local food, asking a farmer if the 60,000 people on my island could survive from what we grow on the island. Yes, she said, for two weeks in August. Called Blessing the Hands that Feed Us, the book documents my effort to eat for a month within 10 miles of my home. Here’s the TEDx version. Maybe the book will have a resurgence now that more people are trying to be quartermasters of their own lives – but I’m not counting on it.
Enoughness is the through line of my work. First book: enoughness at the level of stuff. Second book: enoughness at the level of food.
Now – and we’ve finally arrived at the essence of this post – what is enoughness at the level of housing, more specifically, affordable rentals? At the moment, we have nowhere near enough affordable rentals in my 100-mile region, and it’s squeezing the life out of our communities and economy.
I always start with a personal experiment
Before writing Your Money or Your Life, I’d lived on next to nothing for 2 decades. Before writing Blessing the Hands that Feed Us, I’d lived for a month only on what grows within a ten-mile circle of my home.
A rental-enoughness idea – that’s now called In-Home Suites – started for me when I bought my first house, at 65. Until then, I’d lived with others in vans, a school bus, a communal household and a tiny first apartment.
My communitarian habit
I was part of a tight community in my 20s and 30s, and a looser one in my 40s. Some of our group’s economy came from sharing bedrooms, rice and beans meals and the dining table we ate at, a living room, cars, closets, chores, and a general philosophy of life. We were high-minded, dedicated to the common good. Sharing seemed like manna, not deprivation.
This communitarian habit pairs well with my survivalist tendencies that come from when our group lived on 14 acres in Northern Wisconsin, where locals joked that there are two seasons: winter and the 4th of July. Growing a half-acre garden took skill and intention. We lived in said school bus for part of that time, then built a general-purpose building and a dome, raised a pig and rabbits and ate them, hunted and butchered deer, and pounded in a well point for water. Our supplies came from town or…the town dump. We called it the source of all goodness because we’d find doors, windows, building materials, some supplies, washed-and-folded clothes left over from the Saturday church bazaar, and even a tool shed (OK, it was an old outhouse, but it worked).
Sharing the wealth
Fast forward 50 years, and here I was, padding around the bargain-priced big house I’d bought with more rooms and room than I needed. Of course, I asked, “How can I share this”? A friend moved into the family room on the ground floor and converted it into what we now call an In-Home Suite. It has a bathroom, exterior door and an efficiency kitchen. She also built in a sweet desk and closet, and lots of pantry space. After she left, I paid her for her investment and rented it out. I’m now on my 10th renter of that space.
Then I eyed the garage. I’d converted it into a bonus room and used it as a rehearsal and performance space for my improv troupe as well as for neighborhood gatherings, trainings and whatever interested me at the time. Of course, it graduated to a second In-Home Suite. Between the two, I’ve made back 80% what I paid for the house!
This is an idea whose time has come!
It’s not a roommate situation where someone has a room, shares a bathroom and has kitchen privileges. It’s not a housemate where all corners of the house are shared (except bedrooms). Both of those would now cramp my style.
Neither are these studios attached ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units). The difference from an In-Home Suite is in the meter. Not rhythm, but whether electric, water and sewer hookups are shared or separate. Nor are they co-ownership; I am the landlord, and they are tenants, and we navigate the power gradient with as much grace as possible.
Each suite (whether in my house or elsewhere) has:
a separate entrance
a bathroom
a kitchenette
ideally an off-street parking space
Each suite shares the envelope of the house, including washer/dryer and all utilities, including high-speed internet. We share the benefits of the house (beauty, safety, utilities, yard) while having completely separate lives.
Sharing space can be enoughness at the level of housing
Sharing is mainstream. Go Shareable to learn more about how the sharing economy operates now. Here’s how they say it:
“A better world isn’t a dream, it’s a movement.
Shareable collaborates with organizers and allies to imagine, resource, network, and scale cooperative projects. We envision a just, connected, and joyful world where sharing is a daily practice and communities flourish.”
What if our society was rooted in a sharing culture?
Imagine neighborhoods where food, tools, housing, care, and power are shared (not extracted, exploited, and hoarded!). Where co-ops replace corporations, mutual aid replaces individualism, and collective resilience outlasts crisis. This is the solidarity economy in action.”
The essential spirit and toolkit of a sharing economy is called “Mutual Aid,” where, whenever the dominant economy becomes too expensive, too heartless, too insecure, too insufficient, or too boring, you start to realize that there’s a wide, wide world beyond solving problems privately. There are Libraries of Things. I use platforms like Buy Nothing and Next Door for meeting some of my needs – and often you can do an ISO (in search of) request, and someone has the very thing gathering dust in their garage.
Shareable Housing
In this hyper-individualistic, competitive society, sharing sounds dangerous and/or ditzy. Maybe not.
Castle consciousness is a rigid mindset that deserves to be disrupted. Sharing is safe, economical, socially acceptable, generationally fair, and did I say economical? Safe sharing, like safe everything else, involves boundaries, agreements, and exit doors. Many times, out of fear, habit or pride, we’ll pay extra to have everything we might ever need and never share it. Our social standing seems to stand on the number of square feet of house we call our own. Is sharing a low-life strategy? “I worked for it, own it and let others work for what they want just like I did.” Is sharing un-American? Let’s look at whether these fears, habits, entitlements or pride hold water.
Sharing isn’t as un-American as it may sound
We already have a myriad of collective solutions to personal needs, though we take them for granted.
Infrastructure: sidewalks, bridges, ports, airports, telephone lines, cell towers, electric lines and on and on. We have roads and ways to share them: speed limits, traffic lights, and lanes. Self-made men are delusional – without the common resources, their supplies would never arrive, their trucks would go nowhere.
We have shared services like post office, libraries, local law enforcement, and public schools.
Then we have laws, government, social programs… still.
What am I missing in these lists? How else is the sharing economy right in front of our noses?
Sharing our Castles Rn’t US – yet
Sharing ends at property lines, though. Who has the right to cut “their own” trees? Graze animals right by “their own’ stream. Burn old tires? Or brush? Burn wood in their fireplace in fire season? Have someone living in a motorhome or tiny home on their property? Build a septic system? Drill a well? Build a barn, a second or third home on their land?
Do you know that “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” was borrowed from Englishman John Locke’s “life, liberty and property”? Property rights are king. No, I’m not heading for your fence with community shears. I’m talking about contractual sharing for the benefit of the property owner and those they choose to let on their land, or in their home.
Putting our houses where our mouths are?
Seniors stay put for many social and financial reasons, unintentionally limiting opportunities for younger people. To us seniors, this makes perfect sense. Where would we go? How would we afford a higher mortgage rate? What about the webs of community?
Perfectly healthy octogenarians like me don’t want to move from our homes with our treasured collections of art and such, and good neighbors and meaningful clubs and belonging – into a room in “a facility.” Some don’t want to relocate to a room in their children’s homes either. Nor do we want to spend down our savings to a nub and let Medicaid house us
Good, wise, loving people with large houses may not realize that our reasoned choices may make life harder for younger people. We don’t mean to. Those with a social justice bent might consider an In-Home Suite as a way to provide for themselves – and for a nurse, teacher, librarian, or barista. In this country, we are encouraged to consider our own interests first and foremost, not asking questions about how our boon might be someone else’s bust. In-Home Suites that offer privacy and safety can be a personal as well as a social good.
A brilliant solution for Seniors
The village where I live is a NORC, a naturally occurring retirement community. The median age is over 70. This deserves some exclamation points!!!
The term NORC was first coined in the 1980s by Michael Hunt, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He defined NORCs as neighborhoods and housing developments, originally built for young families, in which 50 percent of the residents are 50 years or older and are “aging in place,” reflecting the desire for older adults to stay in their comfortable, familiar homes and in their communities.
In-Home Suites are ideal for NORCs where people are house-rich and Millennials and X-ers are shut out.
How do we age in place, though, given the rigors of aging? How do we make retirement income stretch far enough to stay independent? Might we use our biggest asset, our homes, to solve this equation? I don’t mean a second mortgage or HELOC, though those can help.
I mean convert underutilized space into an In-Home Suite.
In addition to welcoming rent to supplement my retirement income, many of my tenants have done chores in exchange for reduced rent, mostly maintaining my yard and garden, carrying heavy bags for me and cat-sitting when I travel. As my needs increase, I will find tenants willing to trade rent for some basic care – grocery shopping, batch cooking, vacuuming, etc.
Eventually, I intend to exchange rent for both apartments when I need extensive care. A nursing home would be at least $80-100K a year, or more. I just did the math, and it would save me (yikes) $70,000 a year.
This is all back-of-the-envelope calculations. I’m not a bean counter. I’m a community member who wants to provide affordable rentals to good people in my community, many of whom become dear to me. I’m doing it because I’ve got that communitarian habit, so it made sense to me, and a frugality habit that sees opportunities where others see nada.
Who pays for such conversions?
How does a senior on a fixed income afford the conversion? This site offers a range of options.
Some spaces are easier and cheaper to update. The family room required only interior changes. The garage needed to be hooked up to the sewer to add a bathroom and kitchen. A contractor can help you understand costs and feasibility.
… the kids will foot the bill?
One way or another, your family may eventually bear the costs of care. Families with means can finance the remodel so that the rent supports the parent while they are active, and a caregiver can live there when needs are greater.
Loneliness and isolation can make our final years our worst years. Families know that, but they can only do so much with responsibilities for work and children. Underwriting the conversion may provide for their elders’ social needs as well, while bringing the offspring some peace of mind.
In-Home Suites across the generations
How do In-Home Suites benefit younger people other than as potential rentals? One way a young couple could afford a home would be to put a suite in it – or duplex it – right away and use the rent to cover enough of the mortgage that they can afford to own. This is the kind of house hack that people in the F.I.R.E. (financial independence retire early) subculture often do.
Have I made my case?
Bringing the sharing economy home, into our homes, is a frontier of affordable housing. It is often overlooked and even rejected. Building new rentals is the assumed solution, but it’s not the only way, nor even the best.
Home-sharing is the homeowner’s privilege. Why would they do it?
Income
Security
Help with chores
Conviviality
Contributing to the common good
There are many sharing solutions: roommate, IHS, JADU, ADU, duplexing, and shared ownership. In-Home Suites slip between a roommate (low privacy + low conversion cost + income) and an ADU (high privacy, high conversion cost + income). Government and financial institutions have a role to play. Incentives, expedited permitting, changing zoning, and creating new lending criteria.
Culture and society benefit from more working and professional people able to enrich our communities, increase services available, and let shops and restaurants open their doors every day of the week. Tradespeople, medical professionals, teachers – they would all live here if they could afford it. My dream is that In-Home Suites become a common and honored choice and that we all flourish with all generations having homes to come home to.
This article was originally published by Coming of Aging; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.
