Our Cities:
In Service to the Banks

Mar 31, 2025

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson narrowly won approval from his City Council to issue a new municipal bond—a loan of 830 million dollars for which his administration expects Chicagoans to pay two billion dollars in interest.

The administration presents the loan as uncontroversial and necessary to pay for routine maintenance of the city’s streets, equipment and other infrastructure. Yet editorials in both of the city’s major newspapers, the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, argued against the expensive plan.

The City Council nearly didn’t supply the votes. Opposition to the plan counted among it conservative alderpersons at odds with the liberal mayor. And the president of the Fraternal Order of Police threatened to fight the reelection of any alderperson who voted for it.

Mayor Johnson was himself a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, and then an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union. He was elected as part of a broad, multi-million-dollar push by the union to elect its endorsed candidates in the 2023 elections. He was also only the third black man or woman to be elected mayor of Chicago.

In support of the mayor, an alderman likened the council’s opposition to that of the 1980s’ “Council Wars,” in which a bloc of mostly white alderpersons obstructed the term of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington.

And, in their defense, Mayor Johnson’s office pointed out that there’s nothing unusual about their plan—for decades, every one of the city’s mayors has taken out the same loans, with the same repayment plans, and without this level of opposition.

That’s because—whatever they have to say and whatever they might have to fight about—today’s left and right really have only one solution for our cities’ problems: to make the working class pay.