Yesterday Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas laid out something Chicago residents on the south and west sides are now feeling in real time. Property tax bills are landing with increases that range from eighty percent to one hundred percent. Families who have lived in their homes for decades are staring at numbers that make absolutely no sense. And the explanation she gave was simple but devastating. Downtown Chicago is empty. Commercial spaces are vacant. The businesses and workers who once carried a major share of the city’s tax base are gone.

This fact cannot be separated from the policy decisions being pushed at City Hall. While we were already watching downtown hollow out, the mayor doubled down on a proposal to create a head tax on corporations. The idea is based on the belief that big companies can and should pay more. But the reality is that there is a point where you stop targeting corporations and start punishing the ecosystem that the entire city depends on.

Corporations do not exist in isolation. They create the demand for small businesses. They employ the residents who buy homes, support neighborhoods, and pay taxes. They fill buildings that many small businesses occupy or rely on for customer traffic. Once those companies reduce their presence or relocate, the ripple effect hits everyone else. You cannot destabilize the center of the economy and not expect it to create chaos on the edges.

This is not about defending corporations. It is about understanding how an urban economy works. It is a symbiotic relationship. Big companies, small businesses, workers, and residents are tied together. When corporations leave, small businesses struggle. When small businesses struggle, jobs disappear. When jobs disappear, residents fall behind. And when residents fall behind, they lose the ability to absorb massive increases in property taxes. That is the exact crisis unfolding right now.

I am not blaming the mayor for the national and global economic trends affecting downtown. But I am saying that adding new taxes on the remaining companies accelerates the very problem we need to solve. Corporations have choices. They can move to other cities or other states. They can move anywhere in the world. If you give them another reason to leave Chicago, many will take it.

The mayor recently said that aldermen who oppose this tax need to offer another solution. But the solution is not to squeeze the last dollars out of companies that are still trying to operate here. The solution is to make Chicago a place where corporations want to stay and grow. A place where they hire residents across the city. A place where small businesses can plug into supply chains that stretch from downtown to the neighborhood corridors. A place where the tax base expands instead of shrinking.

Speaking from personal experience as a small business owner with multiple locations across the city, the cost of operating is already climbing fast. One of our locations in the South Loop is facing a thirty five percent rent increase as we negotiate our renewal. We understand very clearly what it means when the financial pressure moves from downtown to the neighborhoods. We see it every day.

This is why the city has to get serious about structural solutions. It might mean cutting costs in government. It might mean rethinking salaries, staffing, or unnecessary programs. It might mean freezing penalties for homeowners during these extraordinary circumstances. But it cannot mean forcing people out of their homes because their taxes doubled in one year. It cannot mean ignoring the collapse in the commercial core while increasing the burden on the very residents who can least afford it.

We need a stop gap to prevent people from losing their homes due to unrealistic tax hikes. We need a freeze on the process that penalizes homeowners when they cannot pay these new bills. And above all, we need a real economic strategy that brings corporations, jobs, and activity back to Chicago. You cannot build a thriving city by driving away the entities that hold it together.

Chicago cannot tax its way to stability. We have to build our way toward it.