[[link removed]]

CHICAGO’S MAYOR BRANDON JOHNSON IS CAUGHT IN A TRAP  
[[link removed]]


 

Preston H. Smith II
December 28, 2025
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The challenges Chicago’s progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson, has
faced demonstrate that Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York will have to
out-organize what’s soon to be a mighty opposition to his every move
from finance, insurance, and real estate intere _

To make New York safe and affordable, Mamdani will have to confront
and accommodate the power of finance, insurance, and real estate
(FIRE). In a city dominated by FIRE like no other, the experience of
Chicago Mayor Johnson hints at the fight ahead, Brian Cassella /
Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

 

When labor activist Brandon Johnson upset Paul Vallas in Chicago’s
2023 runoff mayoral election, the Left had good cause for optimism.
One of their own, a former Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) activist, had
just won the highest elected office in the third largest city in the
United States. And, even better, he did so with an explicit commitment
to pursuing a racial and economic justice platform. After the Sanders
2020 campaign, it was a much-needed glimmer of hope for the American
left.

And for a time it seemed that the hard work of local activists had
finally paid off. Johnson’s victory was made possible by support
from the United Working Families Party, founded as a coalition between
the CTU and Service Employees International Union Health Care Indiana
Illinois and now including a range of other progressive unions, along
with the impressive get-out-the-vote efforts of community-based
organizations. While Johnson’s assembly of a traditional electoral
coalition of blacks, Latinos, and lakefront white liberals was
certainly formidable, it would be the _governing coalition_ that would
determine whether or not he could fulfill his social democratic
agenda. Inevitably, this would mean working with real estate
developers and the corporate class writ large to feed the growth
machine with financial incentives and corporate subsidies.

This conundrum was hardly unique to Chicago. Brandon Johnson, like all
progressive mayors, is caught in this contradiction of urban
governance in America; he cannot govern without accommodating the
financial, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sectors. But he cannot
accommodate the FIRE sectors _and_ build “the safest, most
affordable big city in America.” Examining the challenges
confronting Brandon Johnson can help to anticipate the kind of
governing constraints that Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who lacks the benefit
of an activated institutional base such as the CTU, will soon face
from the much more powerful FIRE sectors in New York. If Chicago was a
battle, then New York will be nothing less than a full-scale war.

For Johnson, affordable housing wasn’t just one of many campaign
promises — it was central to his run. And for good reason. Chicago
faces a shortage of 119,000 affordable housing units, with the
majority of renters spending more than 50 percent of their income on
rent alone. So far, the Johnson administration has reached for many of
the standard tools in the affordable housing tool box, including
streamlining the permitting process for affordable housing
development, supporting moderate-income homebuying, and leveraging
taxes, fees, and municipal land to incentivize developers into
building affordable rental housing units. At the same time, the
Johnson administration has put into place the infrastructure for
increasing affordable housing production in the long term through
social housing, as reflected in his Green Social Housing (GSH)
program.

If Chicago was a battle for Mayor Johnson, then New York will be
nothing less than a full-scale war for Mayor Mamdani.

Green Social Housing, which passed the city council in May 2025, is
the signature program in Johnson’s affordable housing agenda. The
goal is not simply a larger supply of affordable housing in general,
but its availability in affluent neighborhoods like Lincoln Park.
First, the ordinance creates the Residential Investment Corporation
(RIC), an independent nonprofit housing developer, to work in
partnership with private developers to produce affordable housing. The
GSH ordinance requires publicly assisted developments to include a
minimum of 30 percent of their rental units that are permanently
affordable for households making no more than 80 percent of the area
median income (AMI), or $89,700 for a family of four. Many alderpeople
representing West and South Side wards contested this requirement,
explaining that many of their working-class constituents would not be
able to afford this supposedly “affordable” housing. Instead, they
proposed development set aside for those making 30 percent of AMI, or
roughly $36,000 for a family of four.

Second, RIC will administer a revolving loan fund which makes
low-interest three- to five-year loans to nonprofit and for-profit
developers to build mixed-income, environmentally sustainable,
permanent affordable housing across the city. Once these loans are
paid back, they will add to the fund, which will in turn be used to
finance future affordable housing. The revolving loan fund will start
out with $135 million distributed from the mayor’s $1.25 billion
Housing and Economic Development Bond, passed by the city council a
year earlier. This kind of public financing will allow the city to be
less dependent on federal subsidies like Low-Income Housing Tax
Credits or on private equity to fund affordable housing. Most
crucially, the RIC — which aims to produce no less than four hundred
affordable units annually — will have a majority stake in any
development that draws on the loan fund.

At the passing of the GSH ordinance, the Johnson administration
announced that “Chicago becomes the first major city in the country
to implement this innovative model for developing permanent affordable
housing.” Unlike means-tested public housing, GSH was created under
the premise that housing should be affordable and sustainable for the
vast majority of working people in the city. In addition, these
housing units should not be segregated in low-income neighborhoods but
made available in affluent neighborhoods. In today’s political
climate, the addition of a GSH developer and revolving loan fund, with
the government’s majority stake in publicly financed developments,
is a significant step forward. However, it falls short of municipal
ownership and the direct production of social housing by government,
which is still necessary in order to meet the heavy demand for
affordable rental housing. Such municipally owned social housing
relies on capital grants and loans from the federal government, which
is unlikely to happen under any Republican or Democratic
administration.

Unfortunately, despite the promising start of GSH, the Johnson
Administration’s efforts are still dependent on providing financial
incentives to private developers. For example, the administration
touts its “mixed-income model” that “leverages the efficiency of
private sector development while creating permanent community benefits
of affordable, healthy homes.” This sounds similar to the rhetoric
of the Chicago Housing Authority’s disastrous Plan for
Transformation, which promised to replace “obsolete” public
housing with new, mixed-income communities. Instead, it razed most of
the city’s public housing high rises, eliminating sixteen thousand
affordable homes in twenty-two years, and left vast amounts of vacant
undeveloped land around HOPE VI mixed-income developments on the South
Side. Not surprisingly, mixed-income housing projects prioritize
market-rate renters, eventually driving out low-income residents due
to increased cost of living.

To be fair, the Johnson administration’s housing and economic
development policies are attempting to rebound from the severe
underinvestment and austerity that working-class neighborhoods have
suffered for decades under the Daley, Emmanuel, and Lightfoot
administrations. Also, GSH shares with mixed-income housing the
self-financing model of cross-subsidization of affordable rents by
market rents to avoid reliance on public subsidies to pay construction
and maintenance costs. The key question here is proportion, and,
currently, the Johnson administration relies too much on incentivizing
private actors and not enough on direct public action. Green Social
Housing will alter this calculus somewhat, but not nearly enough.
Inevitably, reliance on private lenders and developers means the
Johnson administration will not be able to deliver on his campaign
promise of building an affordable city for working people.

The Johnson administration’s efforts are still dependent on
providing financial incentives to private developers.

A lot is riding on the success of Mayor Johnson’s efforts. The
affordable housing deficit in the city is so vast that no
administration alone can realistically fill the gap. The challenge for
Johnson is to provide _enough_ affordable housing and economic
development benefits in order for citizens to see real, everyday
improvements in the two remaining years of his first term. But this
plan has its risks — both housing and commercial projects can take
years to develop, let alone become noticed and credited by the public.
Even more challenging, the Johnson administration has to contend with
a hostile national and local political environment. Nationally, they
have had to deal with a manufactured migrant crisis, President Donald
Trump’s threat of sending in the National Guard under the pretense
of runaway crime, and brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement
actions on the city’s streets. And of course the Johnson
administration’s housing, economic development, and financing plans
face local criticism from the city’s propertied class and corporate
media.

In order to overcome this opposition, the Johnson administration has
to be able to educate, organize, mobilize, and expand its base. They
haven’t yet succeeded on this front, with the defeat of Johnson’s
Bring Chicago Home referendum in his first year. This referendum,
which called for an increase in the real estate transfer tax on
properties valued over $1 million, would have provided a dedicated
revenue stream to support the administration’s efforts to fight
homelessness and support affordable housing. This defeat in a
low-turnout referendum came after a legal back-and-forth that saw the
measure kicked off the ballot before being put back on; still, it
meant that Johnson’s forces were unable to sufficiently mobilize
their progressive base, a worrying sign for the future of his
administration.

Clearly, he sees the writing on the wall. An October poll showed
Johnson’s approval at 31 percent — up five points from the summer
before, but still abysmal. Mayor Johnson has recently spoken about the
need to better communicate the achievements of his administration to
his constituents. Unlike other progressive mayors of recent years,
Johnson does have, in the CTU and the coalition of other unions, the
institutional backing of a powerful section of organized labor. But he
has to activate that progressive base at strategic moments, while
expanding it to neighborhoods that could benefit from his housing and
economic development policies. He needs to build and energize a
governing majority in Chicago — and quickly. The success of social
housing and the rest of his social democratic agenda depends on it.

_PRESTON H. SMITH II is a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke
College. Author of __Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis:
Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago__, his research interests include
black politics, urban renewal, and housing policy._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

_Subscribe to Jacobin_ [[link removed]]_ today, get
four beautiful editions a year, and help us build a real, socialist
alternative to billionaire media._

_Donate to Jacobin_ [[link removed]]

 

* Housing
[[link removed]]
* Black History
[[link removed]]
* chicago
[[link removed]]
* Inequality
[[link removed]]
* Brandon Johnson
[[link removed]]
* New York City
[[link removed]]
* Zohran Mamdani
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]