Totaling the unsustainable tax increases and windfall revenue during Pritzker Administration – Wirepoints
May 25, 2026
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With $162 billion more from taxpayers, couldn’t you deliver a few bond upgrades, too
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A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.
It has been proven that people can work from home. The commercial real estate has taken a down turn. Why would companies want to continue to pay for empty buildings?
Last summer’s two looting events were the death-knell for Chicago downtown and Mag Mile/Oak Street as destination retail, as tourist hub, and yes, as corporate address. Chicago Contrarian provided a very negative prognosis of Chicago’s downtown/near north real estate market prospects, noting that many businesses, whether holders of office or retail leases, were re-evaluating their commitment to area.
There goes the Chicago’s most reliable real estate tax base. BLM, sure, but who’s sticking around to pay the tax bill?
Agreed
Downtown and The Loop are NOT safe – the place is crime infested. I don’t care how cheap rental rates may be, it’s not worth all the trouble.
Stop blaming the virus, it’s blm and the enabling of the black criminals by the Chicago Administration of Lightfoot, the black caucus, Sophia King and Kim Foxx. These groups have done more damage to downtown than the China virus ever did.
How can companies tell workers to start commuting again when they’ve just proven to said employers the work got done for a year? What are they gonna say its compulsory to commute again? Why even upper management likes not having to commute.
The law firm Nixon Peabody got a better deal on a smaller space on a higher floor in the same building. That doesn’t sound like a solution to save the market. It’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. At the end of the day, having an office in downtown Chicago must still retain that cachet, that prestige that is conferred by being a high powered professional in a large office tower downtown with expensive leases. Some firms and companies – the biggest ones with the most F U money – will still want to keep their offices downtown. But… Read more »
Very useful perspective. Thank you.
Hubcap and used tire shops, nail salons and store front churches with a tattoo parlor here and there. Madison and Cicero on the Westside, Michigan Ave. in Roseland and 63rd and Halsted in Englewood point the way to the future for downtown Chicago. So sad!!
The west and south sides used to be nice, safe busting areas. Englewood had 90,000+ people from the 1930’s through the 1960′ and was one of, if not the most, vibrant neighborhood in the city. Over the course of time, the old people fled, and new residents moved in, and now it’s a bad neighborhood, with high crime, few opportunities and terrible housing stock. The same will happen to downtown Chicago, I imagine, over time. There is nothing guaranteed about any neighborhood, ever. Even the Roman Forum today is a museum, it’s sunken ruins dug up, and surrounded by fencing,… Read more »
It doesn’t take long. As a child, I played in my grandmother’s neighborhood in Detroit, even after dusk. It was safe; all the neighbors knew each other and had lived there for years. By the time I was in high school, the neighborhood had completely changed. My grandmother’s neighbor was murdered. Few houses are left now, most that are left are boarded up.
Chicago is following Detroit’s path, and will end up in the same place.
To follow up on this, I read an article a while back about CRE in downtown Chicago and said that the Loop itself no longer held the same cachet or prestige that it once held. The loop vibrancy was all centered around the Board of Trade at the end of the LaSalle St. canyon of office towers, and from that were the banks (B of A, Northern Trust, Harris) and the law firms just blocks of off that (Sidley’s building a few blocks north), with State St. a block over from that. There were plenty of two or three martini… Read more »
I suspect with the unneeded largess from the fraudulent Covid ‘Relief’ spending bill of $1.9T, states like TX will offer to relocate AND provide shiny new office space campuses to companies interested in moving. Plano may become a Mecca for Chicago relocations.
It will be fascinating to see how this plays out. In education, I think the clear, widely-accepted lesson has been that online is inferior to in-person. I don’t know whether employers are drawing the same conclusion re work-from-home. In any event, those other factors you cite are indeed at work.