Inside a balmy church in Lawndale, Bring Chicago Home volunteer Michael Burns dutifully adjusted his mother’s sweater hood while she loaded a mobile canvassing app on her phone.
The pair was heading out to try to drum up support for the now-imperiled ballot referendum.
Burns has had to sleep on the Red Line during the winter, and he worried his 67-year-old mother, Carla Johnson, would catch the bitter February cold.
“I’m homeless myself,” Burns, 35, said. “When it was too cold … I just ride the train, but that gets boring because you’ll fall asleep. And it’s like right when you fall asleep, it’s time to get off the train.”
On that Saturday, Burns quietly trailed behind his mother, the pair tip-toeing across parking lots and creaky porch stairs to door-knock for the referendum.
“I want him to see that there’s other young people that are out here helping too,” Johnson said, adding that she has also experienced housing insecurity.
Stories like those are at the heart of a longtime drive by a coalition of Chicago homeless advocates who believe raising the real estate transfer tax on higher-end sales is the best way to secure steady funding for housing and social services.
After years of false starts and stops, the movement found new momentum when the election of Mayor Brandon Johnson sealed the placement of the question on the March primary ballot — only for a Cook County judge to disqualify the referendum more than a week ago.
The court order, now being appealed less than a month before Election Day, stems from a lawsuit by real estate interests and means no votes will be counted.
Judge Kathleen Burke’s ruling is a potentially devastating, unilateral wrinkle for the grassroots campaign that has been pinning its hopes on an impressive ground game, with the help of volunteers like Burns stumping for support as the very Chicagoans who would benefit most from the referendum.
Despite the fresh need to cut through voter skepticism over the ballot question’s relevance, Bring Chicago Home leaders maintain they are more animated than ever to win and are making the moral case to voters about the necessity of the measure.
Standing in their way is the city’s powerful real estate and construction lobby, which has sought to attack the campaign’s credibility by arguing the tax increases would stifle the city’s growth with no guarantee homelessness would improve.
“We aren’t the rich fat cats,” said Mike Glasser, president of the Neighborhood Building Owners Alliance, a plaintiff in the suit. “The statement that I find offensive is that we need to pay our fair share. Tell that to anybody: the owner of a two-flat, the owner of a 40-unit building. Black, brown, white, Asian. Tell that to any of us that are struggling mightily.”
Fighting against the campaign’s ‘unicorns and rainbows’
A couple weeks before the favorable court ruling, Bring Chicago Home opponent and longtime political operative Greg Goldner struck a somber tone in a video conference with business interests and politicians. He knew he was up against formidable adversaries.
“If Bring Chicago Home is able to craft this as a giveback — you know, unicorns and rainbows — then we’re going to lose,” Goldner said. “They’re going to be effective. They have a great operation. We are starting so late. We’re not trying to replicate it. We can’t. We don’t have the time. … But we do have the resources.”
Indeed, Goldner’s firm Resolute Public Affairs waited until January to launch a 501c4 dubbed “Chicago Forward,” utilizing a nonprofit classification commonly likened to “dark money” because it can keep donors anonymous. Resolute also helped Tribune Publishing facilitate the sale of the Freedom Center location, according to the agency’s website.
Last Thursday, Chicago Forward contributed $300,000 to Keep Chicago Affordable, a ballot initiative committee opposed to the referendum that can accept unlimited contributions from any source — and also formed by executives from Resolute Public Affairs. That money was used for a TV ad.
It is one of three campaign groups created to oppose the referendum. Leaders from the conservative Illinois Policy Institute started the “Vote No on Chicago Real Estate Tax” committee in February, its sole funder being recorded as another 501c4 that shares the same office.
And the earliest and most active opponents were realtors groups, who poured $1.3 million into the REALTORS® in Opposition to Real Estate Transfer Tax committee since the start of last month.
End Homelessness, the sole ballot initiative committee supporting Bring Chicago Home, has raised $1.5 million since the start of November, when City Council approved putting the referendum on the ballot.
In total, more than $3.1 million has been infused into the race since then, with contributions split fairly evenly between the two sides.
The top contributions to the End Homelessness fund included about $500,000 from the Michael Reese Health Trust; just under $350,000 from State Power Fund, an Ohio-based national nonprofit focused on racial justice and equity issues; more than $260,000 from the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless; and $200,000 each from SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana and the Chicago Teachers Union.
The trust’s CEO and President, Gayla Brockman said the $500,000 — the charity’s first political donation since becoming a public charity — is a solid investment in an idea that works: other cities that have successfully addressed homelessness are the ones that “created a stream of revenue. That’s why we thought, ‘Well this is an opportunity for Michael Reese to flex our lobbying muscles.’”
Bring Chicago Home aims to hike a one-time tax tied to the sale of all properties that sell above $1 million, levied on the buyer’s side. The city currently charges a flat 0.75% rate on all property sales.
After negotiations during the summer, the Johnson administration secured City Council approval of a different version that slightly reduced the tax charged on the first $1 million in value — to 0.6% — while increasing the marginal rate on properties valued between $1 million and $1.5 million to 2%, and boosting the marginal rate even more on properties valued above $1.5 million, to 3%.
While the vast majority of sales would be charged the lower 0.6% rate, larger commercial properties such as offices, large apartment buildings, stores and industrial sites would shoulder more of the burden.
The referendum lays out the following use for the additional revenue: “The purpose of addressing homelessness, including providing permanent affordable housing and the services necessary to obtain and maintain permanent housing in the City of Chicago.”
Both the Chicago Board of Elections and Johnson’s administration announced they would appeal Burke’s ruling. Should the ballot question be restored by the appellate court and then pass by a simple majority, the City Council must then hash out a more-detailed ordinance.
In 2023, the Department of Family and Support Services tallied more than 6,100 homeless Chicagoans at one point in time, with most residing in shelters and just under 1,000 on the street. The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, the nonprofit torchbearer of the Bring Chicago Home drive, has argued that number is actually more than 68,400 because it also counts as homeless those temporarily “doubled up” with relatives or friends.
Much of the counter-narrative on Bring Chicago Home acknowledges homelessness is an issue while attempting to cast those who own properties worth slightly above $1 million as coming from humble means. The real estate groups have warned hiking the transfer tax will compel mom-and-pop landlords to raise rents and disincentivize property owners from rehabbing buildings after purchase.
Amy Masters, the governmental affairs director for the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago, one of the lawsuit plaintiffs, wants voters to know the city’s central business district is still hurting, as well. Almost four years after the pandemic began, office vacancy rates hover around 22%.
“If you can imagine 16 Willis Towers worth of empty space, that’s what we have right now downtown,” Masters said. “Our downtown is the heart of our city, and if we want all of our city to thrive, it’s really imperative that we have a flourishing downtown.”
A legal bomb on the campaign trail
Leo has a keen eye for Chicago architecture.
The 18-year-old who has been door-knocking for Bring Chicago Home often pauses to marvel at the finer quirks of the neighborhood’s tony buildings, despite some residents’ chilly response to the tax referendum.
That’s because the teen, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym for privacy reasons, sees something magnificent in every nook of the city. They recall how bleak life was when they turned 17 in a homeless shelter.
“I remember looking around at this dingy s—hole and thinking that I was like the discarded trash of the world,” said Leo, now a DePaul University student with their own apartment. “That I could die here and be carried out the next morning, and no one would think twice.”
While working through a block on West Aldine, the teen pointed out regal carvings on aged stone pillars, outdoor courtyards bursting with plants — and any splashes of color.
“Why do we only paint houses white?” Leo said. “We used to do oranges, and greens, and blues and reds. … I would love to see a purple building —”
Then the door swung open, prompting Leo to pipe up, “Hi, I’m your neighbor!”
Leo’s hope is that the referendum can help more young people struggling with homelessness.
Johnson’s 2024 budget allocates more than $250 million on homelessness services, including permanent and temporary housing support, and his administration estimates $100 million in additional revenue can be generated from raising the transfer tax.
Critics are skeptical and have said the city’s spending plans are vague. Over the last couple decades, revenues have been fickle and subject to the whims of the real estate market. The Johnson administration itself last year projected the city’s 2023 transfer tax haul to come in around $139 million, or $82 million short of expectations. Though final numbers won’t be available until the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report in June, a budget office spokeswoman said they expect the $139 million figure to be accurate.
Theresa Kern, president of a Chicago steel reinforcement company called MA Rebar, said she employs many unionized iron workers who either build roads and bridges or high-rises. The slowdown of available work in the latter category has left her wanting, she said.
“As you can see, there’s very few tower cranes downtown,” Kern, also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said. “That’s a very bad omen for the construction industry in Chicago. I mean, we were known as the multistory capital of the world, and we’re not putting up too many tall buildings anymore.”
The anti-referendum coalition’s lawsuit focuses on “logrolling,” a banned practice of bundling together dissimilar legislations in order to sneak through the unpopular measure. Lawyers for the business groups argued in court that combining a real estate tax cut and tax increase in the same ballot question amounted to such a maneuver. When announcing her ruling, Burke did not specify why she invalidated it.
Time will tell if the Bring Chicago Home movement will come to regret adopting the more complex levy structure. Long poised to be Johnson’s first crack at his “tax-the-rich” agenda, the fate of the referendum now rests in the hands of the judicial system.
“It’s an unhealthy precedent when judges make a decision to not allow the people of Chicago to cast their votes,” the mayor told reporters last week.
Bring Chicago Home organizers have urged their volunteers to tune out the courtroom drama and stay on message.
Leo, the teen volunteer, still feels their heart catch when they enter their new apartment. The sound of the keys jingling reminds them of how their parents so suddenly changed the locks after kicking them out at 16.
Inside, a modest piano keyboard hugs the wall. Fellow canvassers due to trickle in later wouldn’t know, but the instrument was a quiet reminder of how far they’ve come from bunkering down in their school’s music room, stirring every few hours with angry carpet imprints.
“I taught myself when I was homeless actually, in the room,” Leo said. “I’m sure there’s something beautiful in there about unexpected passions that emerge from strife.”
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