With Chicago businesses vacating 370,000 sq. ft. of office space and vacancy rates soaring, why is Mayor Johnson continuing to vilify the business sector?
Office space vacancies have soared to 28.2 percent in Chicago, which is higher than the vacancy rate from before the pandemic. The latest contraction marks the 14th straight quarter of rising vacancies, according to The Center Square.
Wirepoints Executive Editor Mark Glennon says that the "anti-business attitude" in Brandon Johnson's City Hall is strangling the business sector and costing the city thousands of jobs.
"You never see any effort to make life easier for employers here. The state of Illinois is like one big oppressive intermeddling HR department with countless rules and regulations that strangle people," Glennon told Center Square.
Glennon added the continued cratering of Chicago's businesses means trouble for the city itself. Fewer businesses mean fewer jobs and subsequently fewer taxes returned to the city, too. Worse, it is the city's homeowners that will hurt the most in the long run.
"The valuations of those big buildings go down because they're not getting as much rent and those lower valuations mean lower property taxes that they pay that has to get passed off someplace, and that goes largely to homeowners," he noted.
The whole cycle rolling in circles will also send Chicago into steep decline unless City Hall stops punishing businesses and driving them away.
"All those things, of course, snowball,” Glennon explained. "They drive more people away, other things will continue to deteriorate, and businesses will get more fed up, more people will leave. It's more of the same and a spiral downward."
In November, Chicago Contrarian's J.D. Busch chronicled the huge number of major companies that have moved their headquarters out of Chicago, and Illinois in general, because of the Democrats and their loathing for business.
Among the companies that have fled Chicago and Illinois, Busch listed Beam Suntory, Boeing, Caterpillar, Citadel, Guggenheim Partners, PEAK6 Investments, Schumacher Electric Corp., SC Johnson, TTX Company, Tyson Foods, United Airlines, Walgreens Boots Alliance, and many others.
The Chicago business death toll is daunting. Between 2015 and 2024 Chicago lost 17 percent of its businesses, according to the Illinois Policy Institute, going from 54,135 in 2015 to 44,840 by 2024.
Chicago's famed Magnificent Mile was hardest hit, too, going from 1,600 registered businesses to only 784 in 2024 -- that's a 51 percent drop.
Businesses face a lot of pressures. They pay the second-highest state corporate income tax rates in the nation and the highest commercial property taxes in the country.
It's so bad that even Democrat Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza says Chicago is needlessly chasing away companies with its anti-business attitude.
Yet, along with his Rousseauian call to "eat the rich," Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to punish businesses with even more taxes than ever before.
Indeed, Johnson is desperately pushing the City Council to pass a confiscatory head tax, one that would charge businesses a $21 tax for each employee they have. Thus far the City Council has resisted approving the mayor's demand on this issue, but he re-floats this lead balloon every time someone asks him about his revenue plan.
He also wants to tax social media companies for every user they have in Chicago and a cloud computing tax, all of which would tend to hamper the tech sector just when cities should be hoping for tech growth.
All these ills could be ended if Johnson stopped treating Chicago’s business sector like an enemy, and, if instead, would begin offering tax incentives to encourage it to start growing again. Chicago is an amazing locale for businesses. Its central location in the country and its proximity to one of the world’s busiest airports has traditionally made Chicago an ideal place for business. And business is what made Chicago the envy of the world for decades.
But Brandon Johnson isn’t just killing that golden goose, he is mincing it up, boiling it away to nothing, and salting the earth to prevent it from coming back.
Worse, he is not proposing to tighten his spending, nor is he suggesting that city employees be cut. Apparently, the city's budget hole is everyone's fault but his own. In fact, he feels it incumbent upon himself to shovel hundreds of millions at illegal migrants to the detriment of his own constituents. Typical Democrat, there.
Johnson is destroying his city one office building at a time. But instead of looking inward, cutting needless workers, lowering spending, and tightening the city's belt, he is lashing out at businesses, which he appears to view as a bottomless pit of money for him to spend.
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