Joe Zekas ran the real estate news website YoChicago. If you have been following that site and their social media channels i.e. YouTube or X/Twitter you might find that he hadn't updated since June 2023 which was the month that he was said to have passed away unexpectedly.
Zekas in the early days would link to us frequently and you might find a few comments here from him in the past. And he caught my eye thanks to his coverage of some of the south side neighborhoods such as Pill Hill, Pullman, Englewood, Chatham, West Chesterfield, etc.
Even did a video I featured here called "treating your skin disease" he railed against the bias toward buying and living in "certain" communities based upon the predominant ethnicities in those communities. For example I do believe he was speaking of Chatham he might say why isn't Chatham a destination for everyone to consider buying and living there? [VIDEO]
As of late I see YoChicago appears to be a one man shop with Zekas running everything. He's the only one listed on staff there. He's had people like Joe Askins, Eric Stonikas, Whet Moser, and others work with him over the years. In addition some of the people who worked with him at YoChicago had also joined Curbed Chicago back when the Curbed publication had more local editions. So I'm sure there's quite a learning tree out there for people who want to follow what's going on in Chicago real estate.
My condolences to Zekas' family.
As we head into 2024, I couldn't allow this to go unnoticed on this blog!
Just found this article. Joe was my dad and loved Chicago and its real estate deeply. Thank you for such a nice post about him. He loved following others covering Chicago neighborhoods especially the south side.
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ReplyDeleteI only recently learned of Joe's passing. I left Chicago and changed professions entirely in 2011 and only checked in with him (and YoChicago) infrequently after that, but I still look fondly on those Yo years, even if it all seems like a bit of a fever dream anymore. Zekas was a true character--he wasn't always easy to get along with or easy to please (and the cigarettes...oh, the cigarettes), but the man loved that city, he had a story about just about every developer and every neighborhood and seemingly every building, and he knew how to hustle. I joined the staff in late 2007, right as things were starting to go south in the real estate market, and we had a front-row seat for all the highs and lows that followed. Remember that the parent company's main gig was placing real-estate listings in the Chicago Tribune. Between the collapse of construction and lending and the Trib's bankruptcy, we were truly between a rock and a hard place. There were months-long stretches of time during which I'd arrive at the office not expecting to have a job by the end of the day, but somehow we kept going, cruising around town in Zipcars with our digital cameras, posting whatever we could, as often as we could, to Flickr and YouTube. His documentation of Chicago is a worthwhile legacy. Glad I got to be a part of it for a few years.
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