This page explains why Chicago is in managed decline and how we fix it. It makes the full case for The New Burnham Plan.
THE PLAN
THE NEW BURNHAM PLAN
How we renovate Chicago, step by step.
This is the whole plan: what's broken, the order we fix it in, what it costs, and where it's already been done. Every policy is one click away.
THE INSPECTION
WHY FIXES DIE
THE RENOVATION
ONE TRENCH
HOW IT FITS
HOW LONG
THE MONEY
THE PROOF
BEFORE ANY RENOVATION: THE INSPECTION
Open the walls and here's what you find.
Most of what's broken in Chicago wasn't bad luck. It came from decisions people made. Here's the report: what I found, and for each finding, the decision that made it worse.
INSPECTION REPORT · CITY OF CHICAGO
9 FINDINGS
01 · FOUNDATION
Pensions
$36.4B
in pension debt at the end of 2025. The police pension fund has about 25 cents for every dollar it owes, and the fire fund is about the same. The city's 2027 pension payment, about $2.94 billion, is the largest it has ever made.
HOW WE MADE IT WORSE
For years City Hall paid in less than its own experts said it owed. In 2009 it paid $423.9 million when $990.4 million was needed. In August 2025 Springfield raised benefits for newer police officers and firefighters, a change the city estimates at more than $11 billion, and sent no money to cover it. None of that is on the people who earned the pensions.
THE FIX
Keeping Our Promises: Paying Off the Pension Debt →
02 · FOUNDATION
The budget
$882.4M
short in the city's 2027 budget, before a single new thing is paid for. The city's own forecast shows a $943 million hole in 2028 and more than $1 billion in 2029.
HOW WE MADE IT WORSE
The city has run a deficit every year since 2023 and kept covering it with one-time patches instead of permanent fixes. In February 2026, Fitch and KBRA, two of the agencies that grade the city's credit, downgraded Chicago and pointed to those deficits. S&P had already downgraded it in January 2025. A worse grade means every dollar the city borrows costs more to pay back.
THE FIX
Chicago Efficiency Initiative →
Housing Abundance →
03 · WIRING
Corruption
38
members of the City Council convicted of crimes since 1968. By 2012, a University of Illinois Chicago count put it at about one in three of the aldermen who had served.
HOW WE MADE IT WORSE
The latest, Ed Burke, sat on the Council for 55 years and chaired the Finance Committee. In December 2023 a federal jury convicted him on racketeering, bribery and extortion charges for demanding legal work for his private law firm from companies that needed something from the city. The kind of power he abused is still built into how the city runs: one alderman's private yes or no over what gets built or opened in their ward.
THE FIX
Honest Government →
04 · LIABILITIES
Police misconduct payouts
$246M
paid this year to settle police misconduct lawsuits, as of September 21. The budget for all of 2026 was $82.5 million. In 2025 it was $259 million. The mayor's forecast for 2027 sets aside $401 million for lawsuit settlements and judgments.
HOW WE MADE IT WORSE
This year the city borrowed $267.3 million to cover lawsuit costs, so these payouts now come with interest. The same officers keep costing us: from 2019 to 2024, 272 officers named in two or more settled cases accounted for $295 million. Since 2019 the police department has been under a federal court order to reform. So far it has fully met 25% of the requirements.
THE FIX
CPD Fiscal Protection Act →
05 · SOLD OFF
Public assets
$1.15B
is what Chicago got in 2008 for handing over its parking meters for 75 years. By 2024 the operator had collected $1.97 billion, and the lease runs to 2083.
HOW WE MADE IT WORSE
The City Council approved it 40–5 within days. The city's Inspector General put the meters' value at more than $2.13 billion. Now whenever a bike lane or plaza takes away a metered space, the city pays the operator for the lost revenue: more than $150 million so far. The city handed over the Chicago Skyway toll road for 99 years for $1.83 billion. In 2016 investors resold it for $2.8 billion, and the car toll went from $2 in 2004 to $5.90 by 2022. It handed over four downtown garages for 99 years for $563 million. The city got one payment up front, and the costs will keep coming for generations.
THE FIX
Public Assets Protection Act →
Dibs On Our Streets →
06 · HIDDEN LEAK
TIF
$1.59B
went into Chicago's 108 TIF (tax increment financing) districts in 2024, up 51% since 2020. Picture every raise you get for 23 years going into a side account someone else controls, while your bills keep coming. That's TIF. The growth in property taxes inside a district goes to a special fund for development deals, whether TIF caused the growth or not. Schools, parks and the city still have bills to pay, so everyone's tax rate goes up to cover them.
HOW WE MADE IT WORSE
TIF was sold as a cure for blight. A University of Illinois Chicago study released this August estimated that more than 98% of the growth in property values inside TIF districts would have happened without TIF, and that TIF raised property tax bills 13.7% from 2014 to 2023. Over 40 years, more than half the spending went downtown and to neighborhoods near the Loop. Now the city leans on TIF leftovers to plug its budget: $232.6 million of the 2026 budget came from a record $1 billion TIF surplus that isn't expected to repeat at that size.
THE FIX
TIF Abolition →
07 · PLUMBING
Lead pipes
412,000
pipes that are lead or need replacing. They carry water from the water main under the street into people's homes.
HOW WE MADE IT WORSE
The city said it was on pace to replace about 8,000 in 2025. At that pace the last lead pipe comes out in 2076, decades after Chicago's federal deadline. That isn't a plan to meet the deadline. City finance officials said last year that Chicago can't afford to. As of September 2025, the city had drawn only $70 to $90 million of a $325 million federal loan for the work.
THE FIX
Lead-Free Chicago →
08 · STREETS
Repaving
~170 miles
of streets and alleys repaved in 2025, out of roughly 5,900 miles. At that pace, your street comes up about once every 35 years. The city's own Inspector General puts a street's life at about 15 years.
HOW WE MADE IT WORSE
In 2015 the city set a minimum of 300 miles a year. In 2024 it repaved 188. In 2025, it repaved a little over 170. The Inspector General also found the city did no preventive maintenance on its main streets from 2000 to 2014, even though each dollar of it can save $4 to $10 in rebuilding later. In 2017 the city refused the Inspector General's advice to stop letting each alderman pick which residential blocks get repaved. By late April 2026, crews had already filled more than 151,000 potholes this year.
THE FIX
Paved Paradise →
09 · CARE
Mental health crises
<1%
of about 96,000 calls flagged as possibly mental-health-related were handled by the city's specialized crisis response teams. Today those teams run eight vans, and only on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
HOW WE MADE IT WORSE
In 2012 the city closed 6 of its 12 public mental health clinics to save about $2 million. The cost didn't go away. It moved to emergency rooms, the county jail and police officers on calls they weren't trained for.
THE FIX
Chicago Guardians →
Mental Health & Addiction Recovery →
INSPECTOR'S NOTE
Most of these problems trace back to debt.
Almost every finding in this report comes from a city deep in debt, making the kinds of deals people in debt make. Again and again, someone took the easy money or skipped a hard payment and left the bill for later. We're the ones paying it now.
A city in debt acts like a person in debt.
When you fall behind, you start making choices you'd never make with money in the bank. You sell things for less than they're worth. You put off the doctor and the car repair until they cost three times as much. You borrow to pay last month's bills, and because you're desperate, the lender charges you more.
Chicago has done every one of those, and you can see each one in the findings above. Each bought a little time and made the hole deeper, and the credit agencies noticed: borrowing now costs the city more.
Debt doesn't explain everything in this report. Corruption is a separate problem of its own. But debt is why the city keeps taking bad deals, and why every year the options get worse. The same goes for the people in charge. A politician who owes donors and endorsers makes the same kind of choices a city in debt does: whatever keeps the people they owe happy.
And there are fewer of us to pay it. Think of ten roommates splitting rent, utilities and internet. One moves out and everyone pays a little more. Then another moves out, and another. Eventually the people who stayed have to decide: cut what the house shares, or move somewhere cheaper. Chicago has lost nearly 900,000 people since 1950. Still, the city's fixed costs stayed the same size.
THERE ARE THREE WAYS OUT
Cut
The city cuts what it spends, services get worse, more people leave, and the whole cycle starts over.
Tax more, get less
The city raises taxes just to cover old bills, nothing you can see gets better, and more people leave.
Grow
More people move here and share the fixed costs, so services get better.
So the whole plan is built to do one thing: make Chicago the place people choose, in every neighborhood. Nobody is coming to do it for us. Washington can freeze its money mid-project, and Springfield's money comes with strings.
WHY IT KEEPS COMING BACK
Good ideas die in Chicago in four ways.
The fix causes a new problem somewhere else.
If the city allows more building without protecting the people who already live there, they get priced out. So people learn to fear change.
It's too small to work.
The city tries a pilot program on a handful of blocks. It barely moves anything, and the idea gets blamed when the real problem was that the program was too small.
Whoever shows up decides.
A public meeting hears from whoever can get there that night. The working parent at home with the kids usually can't, and the family who might have moved in hardly ever gets a say.
The plan gets cut to fit the money.
It survives on paper and dies in practice, because it only gets enough money to do a fraction of the job.
This plan is built against all four. It's designed as a whole, so one policy catches the side effects of another. It's sized to finish the job. Its biggest asks go to a citywide vote instead of whoever shows up to the meeting: a permanent fund to rebuild neighborhoods, the money to pay off the pension debt and a new subway. And the money is built to match the plan, instead of the plan getting cut to match the money.
WHY IT'S CALLED THE NEW BURNHAM PLAN
Make no little plans.
In 1909, Daniel Burnham and a group of Chicago civic leaders published a plan for the whole city: the lakefront, the parks, the boulevards. It shaped Chicago for a century.
It also left things out. Burnham planned the physical city. He never touched the governing city, the political machine that decided who the streets and parks were for. And he never touched the social city: the wages, childcare, health care and housing that decide whether the people who build a city get to stay in it.
The physical city
Burnham planned it.
The governing city
Burnham never touched it.
The social city
Burnham never touched it.
The New Burnham Plan takes on all three, in the right order and at the right scale.
THE RENOVATION
A gut rehab has an order.
You don't tile the bathroom before you fix the subfloor. Every one of the 46 policies fits into one of four steps, and each step makes the next one possible.
1. ABATE
2. DESIGN
3C
3B
3A
3. CONSTRUCT
4. WARRANTY
STEP 1
ABATE
Get the hazards out before you build anything.
In a house, abatement means getting out the mold, rot and asbestos first. You can't see them from the curb, but they cost you for years and ruin anything you build on top. Chicago has its own version: tax districts that quietly hold back billions in property taxes, one alderman's power to block a building or a business, permits that take months, a parking meter deal that bills the city for using its own curbs, and corruption. Corruption is the asbestos in the walls. If you leave it in, whatever you build on top becomes the next thing someone sells off.
WHAT YOU'LL NOTICE
More homes get built, because a building that fits your block no longer needs a political favor.
You get a decision on your business license within 30 days, based on published rules instead of who you know.
Property tax money that's been locked in special districts gets freed up for the whole city, and city money gets handed out by a public formula instead of by favor.
City spending and contracts are posted where you can see them.
The city challenges the parking meter deal to take back its own streets.
Contextual Zoning →
Regulatory Streamlining →
CPD Fiscal Protection Act →
TIF Abolition →
Productive Land Incentive →
Chicago Efficiency Initiative →
Honest Government →
The Public Work Act →
Dibs On Our Streets →
Public Assets Protection Act →
STEP 2
DESIGN
Hire the architect and know the budget.
Before the first shovel goes in, you need someone accountable for getting it done and the money to pay for it. So the plan starts with a small team in the mayor's office whose only job is making sure every promise gets kept, in public. Then comes the money. The plan includes the Chicago Remodel Fund, a permanent neighborhood fund that pays for programs that help families stay in their neighborhoods and rebuilds neighborhoods block by block. It is a line on the property tax that voters approve or reject. The plan also includes the River Crossing Fee, a toll that drivers from outside Chicago pay to cross the city's bridges over the Chicago River. Chicago residents are not charged. Part of that money restores the bridges they drive over. A plan with no way to pay for it never gets built, so the money is part of the design from the start.