Mayor Brandon Johnson’s decision to earmark five hundred thousand dollars to launch what he is calling the Repair Chicago process, framed as a forum to collect lived experiences of harm as the foundation for a reparations program, drew sharp criticism from Paul Vallas, senior policy adviser at the Illinois Policy Institute, weekly contributor to the Chicago Contrarian, former chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, and former mayoral candidate, who joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to call it a political scam disconnected from any genuine investment in the communities it claims to benefit.
Vallas said the reparations framework is transparently a political gambit designed to shore up support in the Black community at a moment when the mayor’s approval there is visibly fading, by staging hearings that generate stories of victimhood which can then be used to justify future redistribution while the underlying conditions of those communities continue to deteriorate. The city, he noted, has spent over six hundred million dollars on services for undocumented migrants, and Chicago Public Schools have absorbed somewhere between two hundred and four hundred million dollars in related costs depending on the study consulted. Against that backdrop, Johnson’s administration has produced no meaningful affordable housing program, has left the city severely short of police officers particularly in its most violent neighborhoods, and has through its school board actively worked to block poor Black families from accessing the federal tax credit scholarship program that could deliver nearly nine hundred million dollars in private scholarship money to Illinois families at no cost to the state. The money would benefit not only families choosing private schools but public school families seeking tutors, mentors, early childhood education, and special education supports. The school board voted to recommend Illinois reject participation in the program entirely.
Vallas noted the particular irony that House Speaker Chris Welch recently announced his own son is attending Nazareth Academy, a private school, while simultaneously refusing to extend that same choice to the families his caucus claims to represent. He contrasted Illinois’s posture with Iowa, where the state house passed a bill to opt into Trump’s school choice program by an 88-3 vote, a margin he said represents the kind of overwhelmingly bipartisan common sense that recognizes free federal money for families has no obvious downside regardless of political affiliation. Pritzker, he said, continues to claim he is studying the scholarship issue while doing nothing, the transparent purpose being to protect the teachers union whose political support sustains the entire Democratic coalition in Springfield.
On affordable housing, Vallas said Johnson’s much-announced program to convert empty downtown office buildings into housing has amounted to a one-hundred-fifty-million-dollar subsidy to a single politically connected developer to produce roughly three hundred affordable units in a city that needs tens of thousands. He said the cost per affordable unit across the administration’s housing initiatives runs to approximately eight hundred thousand dollars per unit in subsidies, a figure that reflects money flowing to political allies rather than to families in need.
Proft raised the decision by City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin to modify the management of Chicago’s eleven-billion-dollar investment portfolio to exclude United States Treasury bills as a form of protest against the Trump administration, a decision the city council authorized. Vallas said this is a microcosm of the investment philosophy that has produced Chicago’s pension crisis. Over the last decade, investment returns on Chicago pension funds have been roughly half the national average, not primarily because benefits were expanded beyond what contributions could support, though that is also true, but because politically constituted investment boards have been making decisions based on ideology rather than maximizing returns for the beneficiaries of those funds. Every state pensioner worried about the solvency of their pension, he said, should understand that their retirement security has been consistently sacrificed to the political preferences of the boards managing their money.
The conversation closed on a story from Minneapolis where the city’s Planning Commission voted unanimously to recommend zoning changes allowing what officials are calling safe outdoor parking, designated lots of at least ten thousand square feet where people living in their cars can legally do so with on-site staff and security provided by approved nonprofit or religious organizations. Vallas said the calm, bureaucratic seriousness with which Minneapolis officials discussed the proposal as substantive policy is itself the most alarming thing about it. He invoked the ancient formulation that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad, and noted that the program’s trajectory is entirely predictable: establish the lots, then expand the support services, then create a bureaucracy to manage them, then contract the management out to a preferred NGO whose staffers need a sinecure, all while the underlying housing unaffordability that produced the problem in the first place goes unaddressed because addressing it would require confronting the tax and regulatory policies that caused it.