Chicago homeowners are being walloped with a record property tax hike, with some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods absorbing the steepest increases even as downtown office owners see their bills fall, according to new data from the Cook County treasurer’s office.
An analysis from Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas’ office found the median property tax bill for a Chicago homeowner jumped 16.7% since last year, the largest percentage increase in at least 30 years. The surge follows similar spikes in Cook County’s north and south suburbs over the last two years and complicates the job of the Chicago City Council as it considers tax hikes to help close a historic budget gap.
The long-awaited second installment of Cook County property tax bills was mailed to property owners on Friday and is due Dec. 15. Across the county, residential and commercial property owners are being billed a total of $19.2 billion, a nearly 5% increase from last year. But the burden is falling unequally.
Audrey Pierce, 71, last year paid about $3,300 in property taxes for the greystone three-flat she has owned on Christiana Avenue in North Lawndale since 2000. On Thursday night, she logged onto the treasurer’s website to discover her new annual bill now is nearly $7,000.
“To put it mildly, I’m very pissed off,” Pierce said. “I mean, what are we paying for?”
The West Side native bought her first two-flat in the neighborhood in 1995 and now owns four other buildings nearby. She and her neighbors have worked over the decades to clean up the area and drive out gang activity, she said.
Following an uptick in nearby real estate interest, Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s office last year doubled its valuation of the Christiana Avenue building, from $190,000 to $380,000, according to the assessor’s website.
“I’m getting punished because I cleaned up the block,” Pierce said.
As the Illinois Answers Project and Chicago Tribune reported in September, homeowners on the South and West sides were bracing for property tax hikes after sharp assessment increases in many of those neighborhoods. The treasurer’s report confirms those fears — and highlights another powerful force behind the shift: a steep drop in the value of Loop office towers, retail properties, hotels and restaurants. The collective tax bills for those commercial properties dropped by $129 million, driven by plunging property values, effectively shifting more of the tax burden onto Chicago’s homeowners.
“When you have a vacancy rate in commercial properties the way we do in the city right now, commercial (valuations are) going to go down,” Pappas said in an interview Friday. “So, who has to pick it up? It’s like a scale. If … one side goes down, the other goes up.”
Median residential bills in nine predominantly Black Chicago community areas jumped by more than 50% compared to last year, according to the treasurer’s analysis. In West Garfield Park, the median homeowner’s bill more than doubled, rising from $1,482 to $3,448. North Lawndale saw a similar hike, with the median bill increasing from $1,905 to $3,791.
The median residential bill in the Chicago community areas of Englewood, West Pullman, West Englewood, Fuller Park, New City, East Garfield Park and Riverdale each increased between 54% and 82%. Even outside those neighborhoods, South and West side homeowners faced steeper increases than the rest of the city.
Property owners in those neighborhoods rarely appeal their valuations, a previous study found, depriving them of the opportunity to win a reduction and potentially a significant cut in their tax bill. Meanwhile, downtown commercial property owners are more likely to hire lawyers to help them get breaks.
“When people with means appeal, which they always do, it crushes the people who don’t have the means to hire … attorneys,” said Richard Townsell, executive director of the nonprofit Lawndale Christian Development Corp.
Townsell said volatile and inconsistent property taxes have chilled momentum in the West Side’s burgeoning real estate market.
“It makes it difficult, because it makes it not predictable,” Townsell said. “I go to a closing, and when I put up my escrow, what am I going to put in there?”
Officials in Kaegi’s office defended the assessment spikes earlier this year, telling the Tribune and Illinois Answers that they reflected increasingly hot real estate demand in those neighborhoods.
Pappas said she’s personally noticed an increase in homebuyers walking into the treasurer’s office to express interest in Englewood.
“If you go to Englewood, you will be surprised, because these various residences and bungalows are being rehabbed, and they look stunning,” Pappas said.
The timing of the property tax bills adds a new political challenge for the Chicago City Council and Mayor Brandon Johnson as the council tackles Johnson’s 2026 budget proposal.
The mayor’s plan avoids a property tax increase but imposes new charges on businesses, such as a per-employee tax on large companies and a steep hike in the city’s tax on leases, including cloud software.
Ald. Jason Ervin (28th), the chairman of the City Council Committee on Budget and Government Operations who represents West Garfield Park, called the sharply higher bills in his community “a concern, definitely.” Ervin credited the mayor for sidestepping a property tax hike that would compound the pain next year and urged county leaders to find ways to “smooth” collections from year to year to avoid dramatic swings. Many West Side homeowners, he added, actually saw their property bills drop after the last city reassessment in 2021.
“I don’t think that having this yo-yo effect on taxes is beneficial to residents … or to the taxing bodies,” Ervin said.
This year’s bills reflect last year’s citywide reassessment by Kaegi’s office, the results of appeals before the county’s Board of Review and higher overall tax levies by local governments. The city of Chicago has not increased its levy since 2022, but Chicago Public Schools — which is the biggest recipient of property tax revenue in Chicago — has consistently raised its levy by the maximum allowed under state law and has sometimes even exceeded that cap through special carve-outs, a recent study found.
At the same time, plunging downtown office values have shifted more of the tax burden onto homeowners. Citywide, residential assessed values climbed sharply, while valuations of downtown properties plunged by more than 7%.
Commercial buildings in the Loop drove the downturn.
The median tax bill for commercial buildings in the Loop such as restaurants, stores and offices, dropped from $14,942 to $10,709. Large Loop apartment buildings saw their bills drop 5%, from about $225,000 to $214,000 on average. Commercial properties elsewhere in the city saw “meager” growth, according to the Pappas report, which was being released Monday.
“It’s probably the most unhappy ‘I told you so’ a person could offer,” said Farzin Parang, executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago, which represents downtown office owners. Parang said he has been warning for years that chronically high vacancies and depressed sales downtown would eventually push more of the tax burden onto city homeowners.
“It’s unfortunately proving the point that we have to invest in downtown and in policies that help revitalize the office industry, because they support everybody,” Parang said.
The numbers bolster the position of downtown and Near West Side Ald. Bill Conway’s opposition to Johnson’s $21-per-employee head tax proposal. Declining commercial values show that businesses already under strain cannot create jobs or housing if they are further burdened by a head tax, Conway said.
“Commercial property sales have fallen significantly,” because of falling rents and rising vacancies, said Conway (34th). “So it’s not like they’re getting some break. They’re seeing their assets deteriorate in value and deteriorate in revenue too as tenants leave.”
Townsell, the West Side developer, said the explanation offers little comfort to homeowners and nonprofit developers who have been straining to bring life back to poor neighborhoods after decades of disinvestment.
“For so many years, our neighborhood has been redlined, there’s been contract sales, and we’re still suffering,” Townsell said. “And now, we’ve started to turn it around and [are] fixing it up. And we are immediately punched in the eye with a tax bill that’s untenable.”
Ald. Monique Scott (24th), who has worked with Townsell’s organization and other development groups, said the new figures were a “catastrophe” that makes it feel like efforts to attract new housing and businesses to the 24th Ward are “in vain.”
Like Conway, it cements her opposition to Johnson’s head tax, she said. Both she and Englewood Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th) said they worried the additional charge on businesses would cause companies to leave the city or lay off lower-wage workers who live in their wards. “It’s not me saving billionaires, it’s me saving my residents,” Scott said.
For Pierce, the more than doubling of her bill won’t be enough to get her to stop investing on the West Side, she said. Pierce plans to organize with her neighbors to call for reforms to the tax system — including by attending a bonfire event hosted by Townsell where neighbors are invited to toss printed copies of their bills into the flames. Townsell called the event their “Boston Tea Party moment.”
“It’s my neighborhood,” Pierce said. “So, you know, I need to fight for it.”
Alex Nitkin is a government finance and accountability reporter conducting investigations on systemic problems and the public policies that are meant to fix them in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois government. Before joining Illinois Answers, he worked as a reporter and editor for The Daily Line covering Cook County and Chicago government. He previously worked at The Real Deal Chicago, where he covered local real estate news, and DNAinfo Chicago, where he worked as a breaking news reporter and then as a neighborhood reporter covering the city's Northwest Side. A New York native who grew up in Connecticut, Alex graduated Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism with a bachelor’s degree.
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