On Wednesday, Mayor Brandon Johnson unveiled his proposed $17.3 billion 2025 budget, which includes a $300 million property tax increase to close the projected $1 billion shortfall.
He called the decision to raise property taxes “tough.” In the months since the city released its budget forecast, Johnson said he directed the city’s budget team to consider all options to close the budget gap.
“It is something I grappled with for weeks and weeks,” Johnson said, referring to closing the budget gap.
While addressing the property tax hike, Johnson said his proposal avoids mass layoffs in departments like the police and fire and cuts to city services. Later, in a post-address press conference, Johnson also said he’s not willing to compromise investing in people.
“It came down to either mass layoffs or curbing vital city services or an increase to property taxes,” Johnson continued. “I would certainly much rather tax the rich, but I did have to make the choice to increase our property taxes. I understand that today I am asking families to lean in and do a little bit more to make sure that their neighbors are not laid off, to make sure that we don’t have to cut vital city services.”
Johnson’s move to raise property taxes is a departure from his promise on the campaign trail. His proposed property tax increase is the city’s largest since 2016 under then-mayor Rahm Emanuel, who raised the city’s property taxes to $543 million.
Under previous mayoral administrations, including Richard M. Daley and Emanuel, the city didn’t fulfill its obligations to working people, Johnson said, adding that those administrations did not pay pensions and shuttered mental health clinics to cut costs.
“As a City, we are constrained by our legacy pension and debt costs,” Johnson said. “These past debts challenge our budget and ability to invest in this great City; debts that were created by repeated decisions to kick the can down the road when tough choices presented themselves. Fifty schools were closed, and 14 mental health clinics were shuttered in order to cut costs.”
He added that those decisions were short-sighted and have had long-term consequences.
Johnson’s request to raise property taxes will be challenging for alderpersons who are tasked with balancing their constituent’s needs. City Council must vote on and approve a balanced budget by Dec. 31.
Though the proposed property tax increase is one of the larger focal points for Johnson’s budget address, there are a number of proposed investments that speak to Johnson’s commitment to investing in people.
“It’s gonna always be a tough sell for residents, especially when you have people from a marginalized, disinvested community,” Ald. Monique Scott (24th Ward) said following Johnson’s budget address.
Scott’s ward includes North Lawndale, South Lawndale and Homan Square. She added that property owners in her ward are looking for ways to fund home improvement projects, and adding property tax increases could make that challenging.
She doesn’t support a property tax increase.
“People are trying to fix their homes, especially my seniors,” Scott said. “So, to add another price on top of expensive groceries and high gas, everything we do in the city is inflated over three-to-four percent and people on fixed incomes don’t have the salaries to recoup everything that we’re always spending.”
Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd Ward) said they have to figure out places to make additional cuts to avoid a $300 million property tax hike. She chairs the City Council’s finance committee.
“This is not the year to have cake and icing,” Dowell told The TRiiBE about the budget. “This is the year just to have cake, and we need to figure out places where we can make some additional cuts so that perhaps we don’t have to have a $300 million property tax increase. But the reason we need to look at that [property tax increase] and not ignore it is because it is the most sustainable funding source that we have for a city of this size.”
Ald. Maria Hadden (49th Ward) said she was happy that no job cuts were happening, although she was not thrilled about the tax property increase. She worries about how it will impact residents in her ward, which includes Rogers Park.
“We are not very wealthy people overall economically. I’m 75% renter (occupied). So there’s 25% of my population that will be directly impacted, and I need to check in with them,” Hadden said. “A lot of them are seniors, so that comes into play. I’ve got a lot of people on a fixed income, and 75% of those who aren’t directly impacted will be indirectly impacted if their building owners are raising their rent, which is already happening.”
Hadden added that she is already dealing with displacement in her ward as rent becomes more unaffordable, causing people to leave the ward.
In addition to the property tax increase, Johnson’s proposed 2025 budget includes $200 million in community safety investments, including community violence intervention programs and victim support funding; $2 million toward mental health network expansion; and $30 million in economic relief for small businesses and nonprofits.
The proposal also includes $2.09 billion for the Chicago Police Department, a small increase aligned with salary increases, according to the Johnson administration. According to the document, CPD would experience a 14 percent decrease in grant funding due to the $75 million in security funds the city received for the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
When The TRiiBE asked how Black Chicagoans will see the most impact from the proposed 2025 budget, Johnson said, “We are still committed to investing in building more affordable homes, and now sustainable homes that allow for a revolving loan process that creates a system that will put more affordable rental units [and outlines] the biggest investment for this type of social housing in the history of the country.”
In his budget address, Johnson said he was tired of seeing people being priced out of the city. The 2025 budget proposal allocated $238 million to the Department of Housing for affordable housing initiatives. Other housing-focused lines in the budget include a Green Social Housing ordinance that aims to create 600 affordable housing units every five years and $25 million invested from the administration’s Housing and Economic Bond to go toward home purchases and repair programs.
“No longer will Chicago be a city where folks cannot afford a home. We are going to build, build, build and make sure that there is affordable housing for those who need it. No more disinvestments, no more selling off our public assets, no,” Johnson said.
A proposed $52 million investment in the Youth Opportunities Program will increase the number of youth jobs by 2,000. The 2025 proposed budget will also expand the number of positions for GoodKids MadCity’s (GKMC) peacekeeper program, which was piloted over the summer and employed 101 young people on the South Side. Johnson said the 2025 budget would help the GKMC’s Peacebook Ordinance become a reality.
“Last year, we hired almost 28,000 young people. Ten of the top neighborhoods where young people were hired from were right from Black Chicago,” Johnson said.
Scott said she’s heard about the Peacekeeping program and reopening mental health clinics. But, she said, those investments aren’t taking place in her ward. Although it launched on the South Side, GKMC hopes to double the number of peacekeepers with the 2025 budget. Since inauguration, Johnson has reopened mental health clinics in Roseland, Pilsen and Garfield Park; the latter is a neighborhood adjacent to Scott’s ward on the West Side.
“I’m no expert here on economics and finance, but I just know the only thing I heard in the budget was property tax, Peacebook and mental health. I don’t think that those are ways that’s going to drive our economy,” Scott said.
Some alders, like Scott, see a need for alternative revenue sources so that the city doesn’t have to tax residents. For example, Scott suggested other ways to drive revenue, like film production, and pointed to other states like Georgia, which receive taxes from film production.
In 2022, Scott’s brother, Michael Scott Jr., resigned from his post as 24th Ward alder to join Cinespace Chicago, a mega film and TV studio campus that’s home to major projects like Showtime’s “The Chi,” Netflix’s Umbrella Academy and the Dick Wolf’s Chicago-set shows. Scott was appointed by Lightfoot to finish out her brother’s term in 2022. She kept her seat by defeating Creativ Scott (no relation) in the 2023 runoff election.
“That’s a billion-dollar industry that we can be tapping into more,” Scott said. In 2021, projected film production revenue in Illinois hit a record high of $630 million.
Johnson, during his speech, referenced limitations around other revenue-raising options. The city’s largest revenue sources, he said, are controlled or limited at the state level, such as Personal income taxes, corporate income taxes, and sales tax policy. He also pointed out that Bring Chicago Home, had it been approved by voters in the Illinois Primary election in March, would have been a revenue source that would have provided the necessary funds to address homelessness.
“If that referendum had passed, the city would have collected an average of 100 million more dollars in revenue to fund the critical needs of our unhoused residents,” Johnson said. “Do you know that the number of beds that we need to transform our single shelter system, the amount that prevented us from meeting that number, was the exact amount of money we would have raised with Bring Chicago Home?”
He added that he would ensure taxes are distributed equitably so that the burden doesn’t fall on working people.
“The interest of corporations continues to [be favored] over working people, and this budget proposal reflects the reality of our fiscal constraints,” Johnson said. “We will continue, of course, to work with our partners, all our labor partners, business partners, City Council members and other stakeholders to tackle this challenge and to make sure that we have distributed taxes so that the burden is not on working people.”
The City Council’s Budget and Government Operation committee will conduct a series of budget hearings with city department heads beginning on Nov. 6. The City Council must approve and pass a balanced budget by Dec. 31.
