Politics
Analyzing Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson at the Midpoint: Lurching from Crisis to Crisis While Working to ‘Disrupt Status Quo’
Video: Mayor Brandon Johnson appears on the May 13, 2025, episode of “Chicago Tonight.” (Produced by Shelby Hawkins)
When Mayor Brandon Johnson took office two years ago, Chicago was in crisis.
As Johnson celebrates his second anniversary and marks what he hopes is the midpoint of his first term in office, Chicago remains in crisis.
A different crisis.
Johnson spent much of his first two years in office lurching from emergency to emergency, battered by outside events and suffering from self-inflicted wounds. That has left the bulk of his promises to remake the city into a “Chicago for all” — not just the wealthy or the powerful — unfulfilled.
Johnson has repeatedly said he was elected to “disrupt the status quo.” On Wednesday, he told WTTW News that he had done just that, even as federal officials during the Biden administration “left cities in peril.”
“We responded to that crisis. as we have in the past, with the full force of government,” Johnson said, ticking off a list of accomplishments, including a significant drop in homicides.
“Now, is it moving at the pace in which I want?” Johnson said. “Of course not, I would like to see things with more expediency, but we are certainly headed in right direction.”
Despite the mayor’s trademark optimism, the unrelenting turmoil of the past two years, and his missteps in handling problems both new and old, has weakened Johnson’s political standing, ensuring that if he runs for and wins a second term in office in 2027, he will have to do it the same way he won the first time: as an underdog.
Confronted With a Humanitarian Crisis
Even as the confetti drifted to the floor of the Credit Union 1 Arena on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago after Johnson’s inaugural address on May 15, 2023, the city’s police stations were filling up with migrants who had nowhere else to go.
In all, approximately 50,000 people, many fleeing violence and economic collapse in Venezuela, made their way to Chicago hoping to build a new life. Instead, they found a city with an already tattered social safety net and deep fissures between Black and Latino communities their arrival helped expose.
At the peak of the humanitarian crisis, in October 2023, nearly 3,900 men, women and children lived in Chicago’s police stations. with thousands more in emergency shelters. After requesting asylum, many came to Chicago on buses paid for by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in a successful attempt to split the Democratic Party before the 2024 presidential election.
The crisis also soured relations between Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who slammed Johnson’s response to the crisis — including the city’s eventually scuttled plan to build winterized base camps to house hundreds of migrants on a polluted empty lot in Brighton Park — and publicly warned that he would not allow migrants to “freeze to death on our doorstep.”
The city and state’s concerted effort to care for the people they called “new arrivals” by providing temporary shelter and rental assistance infuriated a wide swath of Black Chicagoans, who found it deeply painful to see the city spend hundreds of millions of dollars to care for the newest Chicagoans, many of them Latino, while they have lived in neighborhoods that have suffered from disinvestment for decades — with no end in sight.
Johnson said the first step to repairing that breach is to acknowledge it stems from decades of racist decisions by his predecessors.
“For Black Chicago in particular, on the West and South sides of our beloved city, disinvestment has been the prevailing form of governance,” Johnson said. “Previous administrations have ignored the West and South sides of the city. We didn’t do that.”
Johnson told The Triibe, a news organization that covers Black Chicagoans, that the city has “spent 20 times that amount, with new investments, on Black Chicago” than to care for the migrants. That spending, as detailed by the mayor, includes plans to build a quantum computing campus on the Southeast Side of the city as well as federal relief for West Side residents whose homes flooded in 2023 and 2024.
Chicago taxpayers have spent a total of $269.1 million, with an additional $370.5 million coming from state and federal grants, to care for the migrants between August 2022 and December 2024. That included $95 million in federal COVID-19 relief aid originally designed to mend the city’s social safety net and tackle the deeply entrenched problems worsened by the pandemic.
Despite the objections of several alderpeople, Johnson used $95 million in federal COVID-19 relief to care for migrants, records show. Another $87 million in COVID-19 relief was used to balance the city’s 2025 budget.
While fiercely defending Chicago’s protections for undocumented immigrants in front of the U.S. House Oversight Committee in March, Johnson repeatedly said that Chicago has spent approximately 1% of the city’s budget from August 2022 to December 2024 to care for the migrants.
While Johnson’s progressive allies demanded that the mayor do more to care for the vulnerable migrants and live up to the city’s self-proclaimed status as a sanctuary city, he focused on convincing Black Chicagoans that assistance has not come at their expense.
Johnson’s political future will be determined by whether he repairs the breach between the two most critical parts of his base, while withstanding attacks from his political opponents.
The migrant crisis has faded from the spotlight since the start of the year, when Johnson’s administration helped launch a unified shelter system that will care for migrants as well as longtime residents who are unhoused.
“So, we did not lose our way because of this crisis,” Johnson said. “In fact, we strengthened our way, because we proved that you could respond to an international, global crisis without the help of the federal government, being attacked by a right-wing Republican governor in Texas while still making critical investments on the South and the West sides.”
Johnson repeatedly proclaimed that effort a success, noting that the 7,375-bed system is no longer at capacity, with beds available for those in need on most nights.
However, more than 18,800 people in Chicago lack a permanent place to sleep, according to the annual assessment conducted on Jan. 25 that is used by federal officials to determine funding levels.
That disparity has ensured that fierce debates continue to swirl over the presence of an encampment in Gompers Park on the Northwest Side and whether a shelter in Kenwood should continue to operate past July.
The most stinging defeat of Johnson’s first two years in office was Chicago voters’ rejection of a ballot measure known as Bring Chicago Home that would have given the Chicago City Council the power to hike taxes on the sales of properties worth $1 million or more to generate $100 million annually fight homelessness.
Johnson has consistently blamed wealthy business leaders in Chicago for the measure’s defeat and said they prioritized the desires of the “ultra rich” over the needs of working people.
In February, Johnson told a WTTW News town hall he would try again to pass Bring Chicago Home but has so far made no move to resurrect the proposal.
But the mayor’s pledge to try again widened the breach between his administration and Chicago’s business community, who are preparing to spend millions of dollars in the 2027 campaign to defeat Johnson.
And Then a Financial Crisis
Just as Johnson declared an end to the migrant crisis, former President Donald Trump won a second term in the White House.
Trump’s victory ensures that Chicago will spend the next four years in the crosshairs of a president determined to punish his enemies, including Johnson and Pritzker, who has yet to announce whether he will run for a third term as Illinois governor and is widely considered to be weighing a run for president in 2028.
Just 17 days after taking office, the Trump administration sued Illinois, Chicago and Cook County officials to overturn laws designed to protect undocumented immigrants by prohibiting state local law enforcement officials from helping federal agents. That suit remains pending.
Johnson and Pritzker have repeatedly said Chicago and Illinois will continue to prohibit local and state law enforcement agents from helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deport undocumented residents unless they have been convicted of a crime.
Hanging in the balance is approximately $3.5 billion in new and existing federal grant dollars that Chicago officials expect to receive in 2025. The city’s 2025 budget is $17.1 billion.
In addition, the Chicago Transit Authority expects to receive $1.9 billion from the federal government to extend the Red Line south to 130th Street and the Chicago Public Schools received $1.3 billion from the federal government during the 2024-25 academic year.
If Trump succeeds in yanking federal funds from Chicago, the city would be hard pressed to withstand that blow, Johnson acknowledges.
Chicago’s finances have long been out of whack, pinched by soaring pension costs, spiraling personnel costs and a massive amount of debt.
The low point of Johnson’s first two years in office came as weeks of intense negotiations over the city’s 2025 budget spiraled out of the mayor’s control.
Facing a $982.4 million gap, Johnson and his budget team delayed his budget address until the end of October, only to surprise everyone with a proposal to hike property taxes by $300 million while ruling out cuts to jobs or city services.
The City Council unanimously rejected that proposal, sending everyone back to the drawing board. The final package hiked a host of other taxes and fees to generate an additional $165.5 million, records show.
That opened up a new breach between Johnson and some of his closest progressive allies on the City Council, who publicly accused him of incompetence.
“One of the things that I did learn, not just during this budget process, but as mayor of one of the largest economies in the world, that I have to do a much better job communicating to the people of this city what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Johnson said. “And I have to engage people earlier, right? We’ve had engagements, but we need to do it earlier and we have to do it more frequent.”
The budget agreement prompted a Wall Street ratings agency to downgrade Chicago’s credit rating, blasting Johnson and the City Council for crafting a spending plan that left intact “a sizable structural budgetary imbalance,” worsening the city’s financial condition.
While the mayor touted his first budget as a “down payment” on the promises he made during the campaign to invest in working-class Chicagoans by strengthening the city’s social safety net, his second budget did little to fund those priorities.
After reopening three of the six mental health clinics closed in 2011 by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, there are no plans to open additional mental health clinics in 2025, or advance the other goals of the plan known as “Treatment Not Trauma.”
Johnson’s first budget expanded the city’s youth jobs program by 4,000 positions to 28,000 jobs, but his second added only added another 1,000 jobs, even as more than 46,000 teens and young adults apply for the city’s summer jobs program every year.
Additionally, Johnson has not made any progress to fulfill his campaign promise to levy $800 million in new taxes on the wealthiest Chicagoans to fund new investments designed to boost working class Chicagoans, particularly on the West and South sides.
Chicago faces a likely budget deficit in 2026 of nearly $1.2 billion, according to the city’s most recent budget forecast, released in August. If the economy worsens significantly, that gap could swell to $1.6 billion, according to the forecast.
Assuming a robust economy, that shortfall could shrink to $634 million in 2026, according to the forecast that no one at City Hall believes is likely.
As he navigates those rough financial seas, Johnson will have to contend with the lack of trust many alderpeople have in his ability to steer the city through such a perilous time.
Just days before he shocked alderpeople by proposing a $300 million property tax hike, breaking one of his central campaign promises, Johnson fired Ronnie Reese, a longtime friend and his communications director. Reese was fired after being accused of sexual harassment and making racist and sexist statements, according to documents obtained by WTTW News. He has denied those allegations.
Johnson has declined to discuss Reese’s firing or any of the other personnel issues he has confronted in his first 24 months in office.
But it was Johnson’s decision not to ask Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez to step down after he took office that defined much of the mayor’s second year in office, which saw the end of full mayoral control of the school district.
CPS had been engulfed in turmoil since the CPS board approved a budget for 2025 that did not make a $175 million payment to one of its employee pension funds as Johnson had requested.
Johnson proposed borrowing money to cover those costs, but Martinez called the proposal backed by the mayor “exorbitant” and fiscally irresponsible. Ultimately, Martinez was fired by the last CPS Board to be appointed by a mayor, and will leave the district next month.
But while the Chicago Teachers Union reached an agreement for a new four-year labor agreement in April, CPS remains drenched in red ink, facing a $529 million deficit that could result in thousands of layoffs.
Hard-Fought Wins, Unfulfilled Promises
Amidst the turmoil, Johnson has notched significant wins, including presiding over a Democratic National Convention that went off without a hitch, even as the ghosts of the 1968 convention threatened to overshadow the nomination of former Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president.
Johnson also held his own in front of the Republican-controlled U.S. House Oversight Committee, fiercely defending Chicago’s protections for undocumented immigrants in the glare of the white-hot national spotlight.
But those achievements failed to counteract some Chicagoans’ sense that the former Chicago Teachers Union organizer who had never before served as an executive is in over his head and is incapable of governing Chicago. That narrative has been reinforced by the routine chaos involving the City Council, which is continuing to evolve into an independent legislative body no longer willing to serve as a rubber stamp for any mayor, much less one who is struggling.
Most significant is Johnson’s plan to borrow $1.25 billion to fund during the next five years a wide-ranging slate of projects designed to expand the supply of affordable homes and good-paying jobs.
That debt will be paid off by increased property tax revenues generated by the end of the city’s decades-long reliance on tax increment financing districts, known as TIFs.
Progressive groups in Chicago have long blasted the city’s use of TIFs, contending it has only fueled gentrification and exacerbated inequality in Chicago.
The City Council also approved a plan to use $135 million of those borrowed funds to create a city-owned nonprofit housing developer charged with building what the city calls “green social housing,” permanently affordable, mixed-income and environmentally sustainable housing.
Johnson also muscled through a plan to borrow $830 million to repair Chicago’s crumbling streets, sidewalks and bridges.
Johnson also spearheaded the push to phase out the tipped minimum wage and ensure that Chicago workers get at least 10 days of paid time off, major priorities for Chicago’s progressive political community.
But Johnson has failed to fulfill a promise to put an end to what he called “literal sacrifice zones” — neighborhoods home to Black and Latino Chicagoans where industrial firms are allowed to pollute the air, water and soil with impunity, making residents sick and degrading their quality of life.
While Johnson’s first spending plan reestablished the Department of the Environment, his proposal to allow city officials to weigh the amount of existing air, water and soil pollution in a community — not just what a proposed project is expected to add if it is approved — when considering allowing additional polluting industries is mired in legislative limbo.
New Approach to Public Safety Yields Mixed Results
But no issue has helped bolster Johnson’s political standing more than the significant and sustained drop in violent crime during the past two years, defying repeated warnings from conservative members of the City Council that Johnson’s failure to take a “tough on crime” approach would result in calamity.
Homicides dropped 24% during Johnson’s first two years in office, as compared with the previous two years, according to a WTTW News analysis of police data.
Nineteen people were killed in Chicago in April, the fewest murders during any April since 1962.
“We're moving in the right direction,” Johnson said.
Several other major cities, including Los Angeles and New York, also saw a significant drop in murders during the first months of 2025, also to levels last seen in the 1960s. However, the murder rate in both New York and Los Angeles remains significantly lower than in Chicago.
Shootings are also down 33% during the first four months of 2025, as compared with the same period a year ago, according to police data.
Since Johnson defied the City Council and ended the Chicago Police Department’s use of ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system, in September, shootings are down 21%, according to police data.
While Johnson made good on his campaign promise to end CPD’s use of ShotSpotter, he has yet to unblock live transmission of CPD scanner communications to allow members of the media and the public to track police activity. Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered communications to be encrypted.
Robberies also dropped 36% during the first four months of 2025, as compared with the same period a year ago, according to police data. However, there were 22% more robberies between May 2023 and May 2025 than there were between May 2021 and May 2023, according to police data.
That disparity has no doubt contributed to the fact that Johnson is frequently peppered with questions about why Chicagoans don’t “feel” safe. Those inquires often prompt Johnson to pledge, once again, to keep working to make Chicago “better, stronger and safer,” his 2023 campaign slogan.
In that campaign, Johnson promised to take a “holistic” approach to public safety to roll back the surge of crime and violence that began during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That surge has ended, but Johnson’s effort to transform CPD and focus the city’s resources on the root causes of crime and violence remains a work in progress.
During the campaign, Johnson promised to solve more crimes by adding 200 detectives to the Chicago Police Department. Johnson told reporters on May 6 he had fulfilled that promise, without offering any evidence.
Records published by the Office of the Inspector General show the number of police officers assigned to work as detectives has remained essentially unchanged since May 2023, when there were 1,102 detectives on the force. As of April, there were 1,127 detectives, records show.
But Johnson has made at least some progress on efforts to reform the way the Chicago Police Department trains, supervises and disciplines officers in an effort to restore the public’s trust in the beleaguered department, which has faced decades of scandals, misconduct and brutality.
CPD has fully met 16% of the court order’s requirements, according to the most recent report by the team monitoring the city’s compliance with the consent decree released in April.
The 7-percentage point jump in the level of full compliance with the consent decree reached between July and December 2024 is the largest increase in the nearly six years that the federal court order has been in effect. The last report from the monitors found CPD had fully complied with just 9% of the consent decree.
Despite that progress, there has also been no end to the high-profile police misconduct scandals that have roiled the city, with taxpayers paying more than $82 million through April to resolve lawsuits alleging police misconduct, exhausting the city’s annual budget.
Johnson will also have to grapple with the results of the probe conducted by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability the probe into the March 21, 2024, traffic stop of Dexter Reed or the shooting that killed him, records show. Four officers fired 96 shots in 41 seconds at Reed, hitting him 13 times, shortly after Reed shot and wounded a fifth officer, according to a preliminary investigation.
But Johnson’s third year in office is likely to be defined by threats to the city’s fiscal stability, as well as massive deficits facing the Chicago Transit Authority and the Chicago Public Schools.
The city, CPS and CTA survived the COVID-19 pandemic with federal financial assistance and must now stand alone after the ravages of the pandemic.
It will be up to Johnson, who is no longer a rookie mayor, to maneuver the city through the next two years, which promise no respite from the multiple crises he has already faced.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
