A few well-paced laps can be a great way to start off a day or finish off an evening. Most towers we visit have fitness centers (even if they're just closet-sized rooms with a couple of hand-me-down treadmills or exercise bikes), but not every project has its own swimming pool. For that reason, I've put together a new list on NewHomeNotebook.com compiling all the developments we know of that will have pools on their outdoor terraces (like Michigan Avenue Tower II, seen in the rendering above) or in their indoor amenities levels.

As always, the list is a work-in-progress, so if you take a look at it and notice that something's missing, dive into the comments section below and tell us what we're missing.

- Read our list of projects with pools at NewHomeNotebook.com.

When it comes to designing condo buildings in Chicago this year, red is the new black. Take, for example, that fire-engine red fin peeking out from behind the scaffolding at Mod, the burgundy aluminum siding on Union Row's townhouses, or the scarlet tic-tac-toe board on the face of Museum Park Place. R+D659, Mesirow Financial Real Estate's 15-story high-rise in the West Loop, is hopping on the little red bandwagon with a crimson stripe of its own, on the inside walls of its north-facing balconies.

I had seen that splash of red in old R+D659 renderings and wondered if the stripe would find its way onto the actual building, and indeed it has. It's more subtle than the other developments I listed - in fact, it's difficult to even see unless you enlarge the dark photo above - but having one bright red wall on your balcony must look pretty strange from inside your home.

Red is often an indicator of danger, sin, or socialism - not the sort of stuff developers want pinned to their new projects. My concern with the proliferation of red in these developments has less to do with its cultural connotations and more to do with how it'll look once it fades into pink and terra cotta hues.

As for construction, Katie Allen from Mesirow Financial says work is three weeks ahead of schedule, and first move-ins are expected to begin in mid-December.

- Rate and review R+D659 at NewHomeNotebook.com.

Favorite Music: radiohead, death cab for cutie, Kanye West, OAR, the shins, lupe fiasco, Beck, Bloc Party, the clash, the cure, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Keys, Vampire Weekend, Spoon, My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Girl Talk, Broken Social Scene, Raveonettes, Mates of state, Cat Power, Band of Horses, rogue wave, the white stripes, white stripes

- From EcoLogic Lofts' Facebook profile.

More and more developers and marketers are turning to Facebook to promote their projects, but I haven't seen any developments as ready to reveal as much personal information and interests as EcoLogic Lofts, the eco-friendly mid-rise planned for 2359 N Seeley Ave in Bucktown.

Along with that slate of indie-rock faves, EcoLogic also digs Diablo Cody and Wes Anderson flicks, thrift stores, dive bars and bowling. (Sounds like someone needs to give 565 Quincy a poke.) Senco Properties' project is a single female interested in men and women, and she graduated from The University of Chicago in 2006 with degrees in environmental studies, architecture, and interior design. Yowza!

If that's not enough, I get the feeling from EcoLogic's profile photo that there's more than one way to conserve water at these condos. Do group showers count toward LEED Silver certification?

- Rate and review EcoLogic Lofts at NewHomeNotebook.com.

With apologies to Raymond Carver…

Anyone who has looked at a PageRank meter recently or uploaded a video onto YouTube knows that Google has plenty of data about traffic on the Web. One toy we've been playing around with this afternoon is Google Insights for Search, which can compare search patterns across regions, categories, and time frames. For example, what is the more popular query among Google users - "new homes Chicago" or "new construction Chicago" - and how has the number of those searches changed over the past four years?

As you can see in the chart above, "New homes Chicago" (in blue) is used just a little more frequently than "new construction Chicago" (in red), but searches for both have tanked by about 80 percent from the halcyon days of early 2005.

And what if you add "real estate Chicago" (the orange line below) to the mix?

The trend line is the same, but "real estate Chicago" definitely blows away the other two.

For what it's worth, Google says the top five searches related to these phrases are:

• "homes in Chicago"
• "new homes Illinois"
• "Chicago new construction"
• "new construction homes"
• "Chicago Tribune homes"

Now that the Chicago River less resembles the toxic cesspool it once was, Chicago residents no longer avoid the river for fear of contracting typhoid fever and other infectious diseases. In fact, some people actually want to live close to the river, or at least that seems to be the assumption of several developers in and around Avondale.

For this region, it's necessary to break the list into two groups: the three developments that we've kept a relatively close watch over, and that seem more likely to be completed, and the three that I have less information about, or that seem to be idling.

These first three are, from what I can tell, either completed or are currently under construction:

• Cornelia Court, 3001 W Cornelia Ave: Two-bedrooms are priced from the the $470s, three-bedrooms are priced from the $510s to $520s, and four-bedrooms are listed from the $580s to the $640s.
• The Homes of Rivers Edge, 2801 N Oakley Ave: 76 1- and 2-bedroom condos priced from $260s to the $520s and 11 3-bedroom townhouses priced from the $670s to the $690s
• Fletcher Row, 2424 W Fletcher St (below, at left): 20 3- and 4-bedroom / 3.5 bath condos priced from the $600s to the $800s

- Rate and review Cornelia Court at NewHomeNotebook.com.
- Rate and review Rivers Edge at NewHomeNotebook.com.
- Rate and review Fletcher Row at NewHomeNotebook.com.

And these are the three that we know less about:

• North River Court, 2700 W Belmont Ave: 46 two- and three-bedroom condos, from the $280s to the $470s
• Bankside Townhouses, 2951 N Oakley Ave: 33 townhouses and four single-family homes priced from the $550s to the $900s
• La Riviere, 2825 N Oakley Ave (below): 15 four-bedroom / 4.5-bath townhouses priced from the $980s

- Rate and review North River Court at NewHomeNotebook.com.
- Rate and review La Riviere at NewHomeNotebook.com.

A recent article in The Atlantic magazine suggests that the emptying out of large public housing projects and the de-concentration of poverty (pdf) have spread crime and destabilized neighborhoods in a number of cities, including Chicago (pdf). Where public housing residents moved is where crime rates surged, according to the article:

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.