* There are so many legitimate debates to be had about the asylum-seeking migrant issue, but this Anthony Ponce story for Fox 32 is most definitely not one of them. The proprietor of a sketchy-looking poker club using NFT “trading cards” as prizes whines about migrants moving into a building where he also rents is just about the goofiest angle imaginable…

Chicago’s newest migrant shelter has opened up in the West Loop, and it’s creating tension between a landlord and tenants.

The bottom floor tenant at a warehouse-style building at 344 N. Ogden is a retail business. The owner tells FOX 32 that the migrants just moved in starting Friday.

Thomas De Boer, president of the recently-opened Chicago Card Club, said the fact that part of the building he just signed a lease for is now being used to house migrants will kill his business, and cost him in the neighborhood of $100,000. […]

De Boer and his partners just opened the Chicago Card Club two months ago, investing more than $100,000 in converting the bottom floor of the building into a card-playing lounge and retail space for merchandise and digital trading cards. […]

“We just heard about the planned migrant shelter about a month ago, so this all happened incredibly quickly. They started construction maybe two and a half weeks ago and the migrants moved in today,” he said. “We already had a successful business that had only been open for a short period of time, but now none of our customers feel comfortable coming back anymore. It’s unsafe. As you saw on day one already, there’s dozens of people hanging around outside. Our customers don’t want to go through that.”

Huh. Let’s not forget that a real casino recently opened up two miles away. Unlike Chicago Card Club, the actual casino doesn’t look like it may be trying to get around state gaming laws with worthless NFTs (click here for an explanation), so maybe that had something to do with their problems…

A team of researchers have crunched the numbers to explain why you don’t see people hawking ugly cartoon apes on the internet as much anymore: NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, once vaunted as a revolution in crypto and digital art, are largely worthless.

“Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market” is a new report from dappGambl, a community of experts in finance and blockchain technology. Upon analysis of 73,257 NFT collections, the authors found that 69,795 have a market cap of zero Ether (ETH), the second most-popular cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin. In practical terms, that means 95 percent of NFTs wouldn’t fetch a penny today — a spectacular crash for assets that reached a trading volume of $17 billion amid a frenzied bull market in 2021. The study estimates that some 23 million investors own these tokens of no practical use or value. […]

This, however, would not address perhaps the greatest drawback of NFTs, which became a major controversy as they peaked in popularity: their environmental impact. Non-fungible tokens are minted on the blockchain, a process that requires energy, and bought and sold in marketplaces that run on cryptocurrencies “mined” with computer rigs that have a significant carbon footprint. But minting tokens alone carries a cost. The “Dead NFTs” report observes that the nearly 200,000 NFT collections “with no apparent owners or market share” identified by the study caused carbon emissions equivalent to the annual output from 2,048 houses, or 3,531 cars.

Pretty swank interior there, bro…

The company’s website is currently down (gee, I wonder if calling so much attention to this “business” might have been a bit on the stupid side), but click here for an archived copy.

* Also, this is from a Crain’s report on September 7…

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration is in talks to convert a loft office building near the Fulton Market District into a migrant shelter as officials hunt for space to house thousands of asylum seekers who have poured into the city over the past year. […]

The Ogden building would be an example of an office property being put to use as a temporary shelter at a time when many office landlords are struggling with weak demand amid the remote work movement. Yet the building is close to the trendy Fulton Market District, a former meatpacking corridor that has established itself as a hotbed of big corporate offices and upscale restaurants and hotels and has largely defied the sluggish office leasing environment.

Chicago has lots of empty office space, so that’s one way of filling ‘em up. And, as others have pointed out, the city was able to move impressively fast on this property, moving people in within just a couple of weeks or so.

* Also according to Crain’s, the city may have had some leverage with the developer…

Goodman, who is CEO of Chicago-based Farpoint Development, declined to comment. The developer is in a position to help the Johnson administration with its humanitarian crisis as he works on a series of big projects that involve public-private partnerships. The most notable is the former Michael Reese Hospital site just south of McCormick Place, where he leads a team of developers planning a $3.8 billion mixed-use campus.