Budget Talks are Missing One Key Option
December 4, 2025
By Steffany Bahamon
Link to full article at A City That Works
Chicago is at a financial tipping point. Our decades-long inability to fund municipal employee and teacher pensions or craft sensible yearly school and city budgets has culminated in consistent bond rating reductions, conversations about bankruptcy, and fears of increasing economic irrelevancy.
Our city leaders know this. Two recent reports from the Ernst & Young Consulting Group and the Chicago Financial Future Task Force outline various recommendations addressing these issues. The 180+ pages in these reports are exhaustive on fees, fines, and service efficiencies, but they neglect a powerful revenue option completely in City Council’s control: changing land use rules to grow the tax base - particularly by upzoning residential neighborhoods.
To be clear, I don’t mean increasing the property tax on individual units. We already have some of the highest residential property taxes in the nation. Recent tax reassessments have resulted in skyrocketing property tax increases for many of our neighborhoods. The reasons behind these changes are numerous and beyond the scope of our conversation today. But it’s no coincidence that the neighborhoods that have the most units per acre are also the ones who contribute more tax per acre. Growing the number of units per acre enables us to spread the tax levy over more units - bringing in more revenue without raising taxes on individual units.
