The Obama Presidential Center’s grand opening drew celebrity attendees and friendly media coverage, including commentary from The View’s Sunny Hostin praising the project’s location in what she described as the historically underserved Jackson Park neighborhood.
Paul Vallas, senior policy adviser at the Illinois Policy Institute, weekly columnist for the Chicago Contrarian, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and former Chicago mayoral candidate, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to push back on that characterization and address the city’s mayoral race, crime statistics, and the broader structural problems facing Chicago.
Vallas said the suggestion that Jackson Park or Hyde Park needed redevelopment does not match reality. Hyde Park is anchored by the University of Chicago and functions, in his description, like a city within a city, not a neighborhood that had fallen into disrepair. He said valuable park property was removed from public use to build the center, and that the city will ultimately spend well north of one hundred million dollars on infrastructure improvements to support it. He said if the goal was genuinely community redevelopment from a former community organizer, the old Pullman manufacturing site, hundreds of acres that have sat undeveloped for decades, would have been the obvious choice, anchoring a community that actually needed investment rather than placing a massive structure in the middle of a neighborhood that did not.
On crime, Vallas noted that last weekend’s mass shooting, which injured thirteen people, was the thirtieth mass shooting in Chicago this year. He said the city continues to lead the nation not only in shootings and attempted murders but specifically in mass shootings and in the number of children shot and wounded, citing seventy-four children shot in Chicago so far this year, fifteen of them killed. He noted that while overall crime metrics are reported as declining, murders are actually up six percent this year, with Chicago’s 206 murders again leading the nation. He said the clearance rate on mass shooting cases specifically is alarmingly low, citing a Sun-Times analysis covering roughly six years of mass shooting data that found an arrest rate in the range of one to two percent.
On the criminal justice system, Vallas distinguished between Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke and Chief Judge Charles Beach. He said Burke has done a genuinely strong job, pointing to the county jail population returning to pre-pandemic levels under her tenure as evidence of more aggressive prosecution of dangerous offenders, in contrast to her predecessor Kim Foxx’s record of releasing individuals without requiring affirmative proof of innocence, settlements from which he said have cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars, including a recent thirty million dollar settlement for an individual released after a ride-along resulted in a fatality. He said the trial lawyers and allied political interests are now working to undermine Burke specifically because her approach threatens that lucrative settlement pipeline. On the electronic monitoring program overseen by Chief Judge Beach, Vallas was more skeptical, noting reports of individuals on monitoring committing new crimes, including a robbery of a FedEx driver, and said roughly eight percent of the three thousand people on electronic monitoring have gone missing from tracking at any given time, a rate he called clearly problematic for public safety given the population involved includes individuals charged with violent offenses.
On the mayoral field, Vallas said he has not yet seen any announced or rumored candidate, including Alexi Giannoulias, Susana Mendoza, or others, articulate anything of real substance. He said Rahm Emanuel recently traveled from a bicycle tour in New Hampshire specifically to speak to Vallas’s own donor network and urge them not to support Vallas in any future mayoral or school board run, an episode Vallas found strange given he has no current plans to run for either office, but which he interpreted as confirmation that a faction of Chicago’s political establishment, which he associated with longtime power broker Michael Sachs, intends to handpick the next mayor regardless of who else enters the race.
He identified Gene Munalia, head of the Chicago Teachers Union, as the worst possible choice voters could make, describing him as deeply attached to institutional interests and motivated primarily by personal self-actualization rather than genuine reform. Vallas said regardless of who wins the mayoral race, the city’s financial crisis cannot be meaningfully addressed unless control of the Chicago Public Schools board is wrested away from the Chicago Teachers Union. He noted that during his own tenure as CPS chief executive, the school district received no additional city subsidy and balanced its own budget independently. Today, CPS receives an additional $1.3 billion annually from the city, a subsidy that he said is a direct contributor to the city’s own inability to balance its budget, even as CPS itself remains by most measures a disaster and works actively to undermine public school choice options like charter and magnet schools. He said the union functions essentially as a political organization that treats the school system as its financial bank, and that no mayor, however well-intentioned, can fix Chicago’s structural finances without first addressing that dynamic.