Chicago’s latest stadium fantasy highlights a far more serious problem: Crime, political dysfunction and failed leadership have squandered one of America’s most valuable urban lakefronts
One peculiarity of Chicago is the seemingly endless game of musical chairs among our professional sports franchises. Nobody seems particularly happy with where they’re playing, and everybody seems to have a better idea about where they ought to go.
At the moment, two of our major franchises, the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Bears, are engaged in this exercise simultaneously. The White Sox, who have called 35th and Shields home for more than a century, are entertaining proposals to move closer to downtown, while the Bears have been conducting an increasingly tiresome soap opera involving Arlington Heights, the Chicago lakefront and, most recently, Hammond, Indiana. Apparently, finding a suitable place to play football in a metropolitan area of nearly 10 million people is more complicated than putting a man on the moon.
So it was with considerable amusement that I learned of yet another proposal to build a Bears stadium, this time on or near the former U.S. Steel South Works property along Chicago’s southeastern lakefront. State Representative Curtis Tarver has promoted the idea of using more than 300 acres near 85th Street and DuSable Lake Shore Drive for a stadium. The proposal is one of several speculative alternatives being floated while the Bears pursue their own plans elsewhere. And although the location is technically in South Chicago, it borders the South Shore community, a part of the city whose troubled reputation has earned portions of the area the nickname “Terror Town.”
Imagine the spectacle of tens of thousands of football fans, including suburbanites and North Siders who rarely venture south of Roosevelt Road, descending on this corner of Chicago on a Sunday afternoon. Imagine the traffic crawling down DuSable Lake Shore Drive and then attempting to negotiate the relatively narrow streets leading toward the former steel mill. Imagine the parking requirements, security arrangements, infrastructure improvements and the logistical nightmare of getting everyone in and out. One suspects the architects have produced some lovely renderings. Architects are very good at that. Unfortunately, people cannot drive to a football game on an architectural rendering.
But what makes the whole proposition more sad than funny is that this part of Chicago represents one of the city’s great lost opportunities. Indeed, it is a paradise lost, a potentially magnificent stretch of urban lakefront that ought to be among the most desirable residential and recreational locations in the Midwest. Just north of the old steel mill is beautiful Rainbow Beach and Rainbow Beach Park, named, incidentally, not for contemporary LGBTQ symbolism but for the U.S. Army’s celebrated 42nd Rainbow Division, which fought in World War I. The area offers something that very few American cities can boast: miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, beautiful beaches, parkland and proximity to one of the world’s great metropolitan centers.
There was a time when the southeastern lakefront was a thriving part of Chicago’s industrial and residential landscape. The steel mills provided thousands of well-paying jobs, supported businesses and sustained neighborhoods where working families could build comfortable lives. South Works itself operated for more than a century before finally closing in 1992. Its disappearance was an economic catastrophe for the surrounding communities, and the enormous vacant property became a monument to Chicago’s industrial decline. Yet the land remained, as did the lake, the beaches and the extraordinary geographic advantages that had made the area attractive in the first place.
The obstacles to redevelopment have been substantial. One is environmental. More than a century of industrial activity left contamination requiring investigation and remediation. The former South Works property is now the subject of an Illinois Environmental Protection Agency cleanup program, and part of the site is being developed for a major quantum technology campus. So it would be inaccurate to suggest that nothing is happening there. But environmental contamination, however expensive and complicated, is ultimately an engineering and financial problem. We know how to clean up contaminated industrial land. Chicago has done it before, and other cities have done it successfully. Given sufficient resources and a plausible economic return, the problem can be solved.
The other obstacle, however, is much more difficult to address. It is public safety, and public safety is not simply an engineering problem. It is a political problem, a cultural problem and, ultimately, a problem of governance. Chicago has spent years cultivating an atmosphere in which law enforcement is too often treated as the enemy, criminals are too frequently portrayed primarily as victims of society, and the legitimate expectations of ordinary citizens are subordinated to ideological theories about criminal justice. Mayor Brandon Johnson and his political allies have hardly invented this attitude, but they have done little to inspire confidence that restoring public order is their overriding priority.
Consider what would be required to transform the southeastern lakefront into a genuinely attractive destination for investment, recreation and residential development. Investors would need confidence that their properties and customers would be safe. Families would need confidence that their children could play in the parks, ride public transportation and walk neighborhood streets without undue fear. Businesses would need confidence that employees and customers would actually want to come there. And taxpayers would need confidence that the enormous public investment in infrastructure would produce a lasting return rather than another expensive monument to political wishful thinking.
These are not unreasonable demands. They are the minimum requirements of a functioning city. Yet in Chicago, even these elementary expectations have become politically controversial.
For a particularly disturbing illustration, consider what happened in Tuesday’s judicial retention election. Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez, who had previously ordered the release of Lawrence Reed on electronic monitoring over prosecutors’ objections in a separate violent-crime case, was retained by approximately 71 percent of voters. Reed subsequently became the defendant in the horrific November 2025 attack on Bethany MaGee, a 26-year-old woman who was allegedly doused with gasoline and set on fire while riding a CTA Blue Line train. MaGee suffered catastrophic burns over more than half her body. She survived and was eventually released from the hospital, but the ordeal inflicted injuries no human being should ever have to endure.
Reed, who has an extensive criminal record, had been arrested dozens of times before the attack. The electronic monitoring condition was subsequently removed by another judge. Molina-Gonzalez was not responsible for every decision in Reed’s criminal history, and a judicial career cannot fairly be evaluated on a single ruling alone. Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding his release raised serious questions about the criminal justice system’s ability to protect the public from repeat violent offenders. Yet more than seven out of 10 voters who cast ballots on her retention chose to keep her on the bench for another six years.
How many of those voters knew anything about the case? How many knew the name Bethany MaGee? How many had investigated the record of the judge whose continued employment they were approving? Probably very few. Judicial retention elections are notoriously low-information affairs, and the sheer number of judges on the ballot makes meaningful voter scrutiny difficult. But that is precisely the problem. We have created a system in which judges exercise enormous authority over public safety while remaining largely invisible to the electorate. When the consequences of judicial decisions become horrifyingly visible, electoral accountability still proves elusive.
Criminal justice, in Chicago, increasingly threatens to become an oxymoron.
And this brings us back to the Bears. Would a magnificent new domed stadium on the southeastern lakefront be a wonderful thing? Of course it would. Would the redevelopment of the surrounding property into an attractive community of homes, restaurants, hotels, shops and recreational facilities be a tremendous achievement? Absolutely. There is no reason, geographically speaking, that Chicago’s southern lakefront could not become as desirable as its northern counterpart. The lake is just as beautiful on the South Side as it is on the North Side. The beaches are just as inviting. The views are just as spectacular.
But geography alone does not create prosperity. Institutions matter. Government matters. Public safety matters. And when those institutions fail, even the most valuable real estate can become economically stranded.
Consider Wrigley Field, which has survived for more than a century in the middle of what has become one of Chicago’s most desirable residential neighborhoods. Its presence generates traffic, congestion, noise and all sorts of inconveniences for nearby residents. Yet it also anchors an enormously successful entertainment district and contributes to the neighborhood’s economic vitality. The surrounding community is sufficiently attractive that people are willing to pay extraordinary prices to live there, inconveniences and all. That is what a successful urban environment looks like.
Now imagine proposing a comparable stadium development in the South Shore area. Even if the neighborhood enjoyed the prosperity and stability it experienced in the middle of the 20th century, residents might reasonably object to the traffic and disruption. Perhaps they would prefer a football stadium to a steel mill. Perhaps not. But at least they would be debating the merits of a major development rather than wondering whether the neighborhood could attract the necessary investment in the first place.
The tragedy is not that the Bears probably will not build a stadium at South Works. The tragedy is that such an extraordinary piece of real estate remains so difficult to develop to its full potential. Chicago has already demonstrated that industrial land can be transformed into valuable residential and commercial property. What it has not demonstrated is the political will to restore the conditions that allow prosperity to spread throughout the city rather than remain concentrated in a handful of favored neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, the familiar cycle continues. Taxes rise. Public services deteriorate. Politically powerful public-sector unions demand more. Businesses contemplate leaving. Families who can afford to move consider doing so. And the people who remain are asked to pay more for a government that too often delivers less.
The Bears are merely the most conspicuous example of institutions looking for a better deal elsewhere. Ordinary Chicagoans do not have the resources to commission stadium renderings or negotiate with the governors of neighboring states. They simply pack up and leave when the costs of remaining become too high.
The real question, therefore, is not where the Bears will play football. It is whether Chicago can once again become a city in which people want to live, work, invest and raise families throughout its neighborhoods, rather than merely in the relatively prosperous enclaves that have managed to resist the broader decline.
We will have an opportunity to address that question on February 23rd, when Chicago elects its next mayor and City Council. We have just watched a national midterm election in which voters delivered a sweeping rebuke to Republicans, but the results of various ballot initiatives suggest the electorate’s preferences are more complicated than the partisan outcome alone would indicate. The lesson for Chicago is that elections ought to be about the practical consequences of government, not merely partisan loyalties, ideological fashions or campaign slogans.
The southeastern lakefront could be a paradise again. Whether or not the Bears ever play there is almost beside the point.
But that will require a city government more interested in protecting citizens and encouraging prosperity than appeasing political constituencies and defending failed policies.
Chicago voters will soon have another chance to demand exactly that.
Let’s not blow it.
George Shay is a conservative activist and writer. His Common Sense Substack can be found here.
