Dear Chicago, Welcome to the Chi-GUI Conspiracy

“We shall overcome because Carly(is)le is right: ‘no lie can live forever.’”

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968

Hello, my name is Brian Carlisle, and I am running for mayor. No man is an island, and I believe in the people of Chicago, which is why I think the job is easier than it looks (this used to be a harder sell, but Mamdani is proving you can just take the easy wins sitting right there). Three of my top concerns are public safety, the cost of living (housing above all), and the budget (mostly the pension debt), but I am not limited to those. There is a list below. I want to find the people here who can get things done and hand them the keys.

Chicago Platform

Please send me any feedback here.

I can't do this alone. If you like the policies below, send this link to someone. If you want to directly help, sign up here. If we get 100 volunteers, I will send out the petition and instructions.

Policies

Health & Home

• No more Lead Pipes: Chicago has ~412,000 lead service lines, more than any other city in America. Shame. We got here because our plumbing code required lead pipes until the federal ban in 1986, decades after we knew lead was poison, courtesy of plumbers union lobbying. There is no safe level of lead for a child's brain, and a 2024 JAMA Pediatrics study estimates two-thirds of Chicago kids under 6 have detectable lead in their home tap water. The city's plan finishes the job in 2076, roughly three decades past the federal deadline. Of the five US cities with the most lead pipes, we are the only one that hasn't committed to the federal timeline. The cost story is madness: Chicago pays about $31,000 per line; Detroit pays $8,000-$10,000, Milwaukee $4,800. Newark replaced all 23,000+ of its lead lines in under 3 years at ~$8,300 each, block by block. Meanwhile we've replaced less than 4% in five years and let ~$320 million in already-secured federal loans sit unspent. Pay competitive rates to whoever gets it done, build an in-house crew to compete on cost, and match Newark's pace. This is a solved problem that we are choosing not to solve.
• Housing: Let's be honest about the score: in 2023 Chicago permitted 1.36 new homes per 1,000 residents; the other nine biggest US cities averaged 4.71. Now Chicago rents are rising faster than any other top-10 metro. That's not a mystery, it's supply and demand: we are choosing scarcity, and other cities have run the experiment in reverse: Austin built so much housing that rents fell ~7% in a single year, and Minneapolis ended single-family-only zoning and held rent growth near 1%. The city's own "Cut the Tape" report found approvals that should take 3-6 months routinely taking 9 or more. Fix zoning and permitting first. Update the building code where we actually lag, like legalizing single-stair apartment buildings, which Seattle has allowed since 1977 (a redundant second staircase costs $200k-$400k per building and eats the floor space that could be family-sized apartments; Washington, Colorado, and Tennessee have already moved, and an ordinance is sitting in our own City Council). Protect the two-flat, Chicago's native affordable housing: two-to-four-flats are about 27% of our housing stock, and we lost nearly 4,800 of those buildings from 2013 to 2019 alone, mostly deconverted into bigger single-family homes. We finally legalized granny flats citywide in 2025 (46 to 0, a real win), but in single-family zones an ADU still needs your alderman's personal blessing, which tells you who actually runs zoning here (see Process Reforms). And bring back SROs: Chicago demolished 81% of its single-room-occupancy housing between 1960 and 1980, over 31,000 of the cheapest homes we ever had, and then acted surprised about the people in the parks. The end goal: define the ideal city block and write a code that delivers it. Wards get flexibility, but universal standards are how we stop NIMBY bimbly bullshit at every turn.
• Homelessness: Ask people who avoid shelters why: they aren't safe or private, and what few belongings you have get stolen. Private rooms beat warehouse shelters on every measured outcome, and Chicago demolished over 31,000 of them (see Housing). So the plan is boring on purpose: bring back SROs with a per-ward minimum based on population, and copy what's working: Houston moved 25,000+ people from the streets into homes and cut homelessness by more than half since 2011 with permanent housing and one coordinated intake system. No miracle, just management. Chicago already merged its migrant and homeless shelters into one system in 2024 (good). Now point that system at private rooms instead of cots. Safety inside cheap housing is an engineering problem, not a reason to do nothing: the Ewing Annex Hotel ran on the Harold's Chicken principle: a threat of violence is something we can work around with a rotating door and bullet-proof glass. A great city doesn't leave people sleeping in the parks and then act surprised.
• Child care: Every Chicago 4-year-old is already eligible for free full-day pre-K, genuinely good. The hole is ages 0-3: infant care in Illinois runs about $16,400 a year, basically a second college tuition, and Chicago-area costs rose ~30% from 2020 to 2024. Subsidize care starting with the families who need it most, and scale up. This isn't charity, it's the best investment on the public books: Nobel laureate James Heckman, a UChicago guy, measured a 13% annual return on birth-to-five programs. When Quebec made child care universal and cheap, maternal employment climbed to ~87%, among the highest rates in the world.
• Guaranteed Income: Not speculation anymore. The receipts: Chicago ran one of the largest guaranteed income pilots in the country (5,000 households at $500/month, launched 2022). Cook County ran its own two-year pilot, and in November 2025 became the first government in America to make guaranteed income permanent, with the first permanent payments rolling out in 2026. Stockton's famous pilot saw recipients land full-time jobs at over twice the control group's rate. And Chicago? We announced a second round (the Chicago Empowerment Fund, another 5,000 households), opened applications in November 2024, and then cut the funding to patch the budget hole while people were still applying. We proved it works, and then we quit mid-application. I want to finish the job, and I want the bigger version too. That's BUBI, full section below.

Safety

• Public Safety - Solve the Shootings: Start with the good news nobody believes: 416 homicides in 2025, the fewest since 1965. Now the bad news nobody talks about: Chicago has among the most police per capita of any big US city, roughly double the national average, and yet only about 6% of nonfatal shootings end in an arrest. Since 2018, more than 19,000 people have been shot in this city and roughly 1,200 shooters arrested. You can shoot someone here and expect to get away with it. That is the real deterrence crisis, and no amount of tough talk touches it. CPD touts a 71% homicide clearance rate for 2025, a 13-year high, but most of the recent gains are "exceptional" clearances, cases closed with nobody ever charged. We are not under-policed; we are mis-allocated. The plan: detectives, detectives, detectives. PERF found our homicide detectives carrying roughly double the recommended caseload and left CPD 89 specific recommendations. Implement them, and move the spending needle from stops to solves. Scale what's proven: UChicago's READI trial (jobs plus therapy for the highest-risk men) cut shooting-and-homicide arrests 79% among the men reached through street outreach, with benefits worth 4 to 18 times the cost. And take mental-health calls off cops' plates entirely (next planks). Chicago just proved violence can fall fast. The job now is making it stick by actually solving the crimes that remain.
• Cameras with Real Oversight: Surprise: Chicago is already the most-surveilled big city in America (CPD can tap into 32,000+ cameras), but unlike San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and New York, we have no surveillance transparency ordinance. The cameras exist; the rules don't. I want them working FOR us, with the oversight in writing: open-source access rules, every viewing logged and auditable, ward-level buy-in, and automatic cancellation for tech that fails its own evaluation. ShotSpotter is the proof that rule works: the Inspector General found only 9.1% of alerts ever led to evidence of a gun crime, and the contract died in 2024. Let me be precise about the lesson: the science is sound: microphones can absolutely detect and triangulate gunfire. What failed was a black-box vendor product that never showed its data and never turned into evidence or arrests (New York's audit found the same thing). So build the next one our way: developed in-house or by a contractor who works for US, open about its numbers, judged on evidence recovered. And the city keeps the data, period. We already know what unaccountable data does here: CPD's old gang database held 134,000+ people, 91% of them Black or Latino, some with "occupation: scum bag" typed into the file. No notice, no appeal, shared with 500+ outside agencies, until the oversight board scrapped it. Never again. Support officers with live help instead of after-the-fact blame, and let the auditors watch the watchers.
• Mental Health Clinics: The city ran 12 public mental health clinics; in 2012 Rahm closed half of them to patch a budget gap. The shuttered six served ~5,300 people, mostly Black and Latino patients. It took a decade of organizing (Treatment Not Trauma) to start undoing it: a new Pilsen hub in 2024, Roseland reopened in January 2025, so we're back up to 7. Keep going, and pair the clinics with the thing that actually changes the street: non-police crisis response. Chicago's CARE teams answered 1,500+ mental-health calls from 2021-2024 with zero arrests, and finally expanded citywide in 2026, but they still catch a sliver of the calls, on limited hours. Denver's version handled its first 1,400+ calls with zero arrests and police backup never once needed, and a Stanford study found reported low-level crime fell 34% in served neighborhoods at about a quarter of the cost of a police response. My improvement: make CARE 24/7 with enough teams that dispatchers treat "person in crisis" as a health call by default, route follow-ups through the clinics so nobody bounces from crisis to crisis, and publish the response data monthly. Cops shouldn't be the city's therapists of last resort, and most cops would agree.
• Street Safety: Chicago adopted Vision Zero in 2017 and promised zero traffic deaths by 2026; we ended 2025 at 100, the lowest since 2016 and down 46% from the 2021 peak, but 100 is not zero, and the playbook that got deaths falling is sitting right here. A 13-year study of 12 cities found that protected bike lanes cut road deaths by ~44% for EVERYONE, drivers included, because they calm the whole street. Chicago is up to ~70 miles of protected lanes; keep building the north-south and east-west spines and let crash data drive the map. Daylighting is even easier: Illinois law already bans parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk, but Chicago's municipal code exempts ordinary cars from it. Adopt the state rule: Hoboken daylighted its intersections and hasn't buried a traffic victim in 8 years. And since everyone in this city carries a camera, let residents report vehicles blocking bike lanes and crosswalks and take a cut of the fine. Delivery drivers aren't the enemy. We bolted a whole new industry onto our streets and gave it zero infrastructure. Give them protected lanes and a bike-delivery option in the apps, and they'll use both.
• No more late night revving and screeching: Chronic traffic noise is a health hazard, not an annoyance. The WHO ties it to heart disease (risk rises ~8% per 10 decibels), and Europe attributes 12,000 premature deaths a year to environmental noise. Chicago's muffler fines run up to $750 and basically never get issued, because the law requires an officer standing there holding a decibel meter. New York solved this with noise cameras: trigger at 85dB, fines up to $2,625, over 2,000 tickets issued. A noise-camera pilot ordinance has been sitting in our City Council since 2023. Pass it. Sleep is public infrastructure.

The Money

• Parking Lease Reform: In 2008 the city sold 75 years of our parking meters for $1.15 billion. The council approved the 500-page deal about 72 hours after seeing it, and the city's own Inspector General found we were underpaid by roughly $974 million. The investors recouped their entire purchase price in under 10 years; through 2025 they've collected about $2.2 billion, they set a revenue record in 2024, and there are 58 years left on the lease. On top of that, we've paid THEM $160+ million in "true-up" penalties, plus $25 million for COVID street closures. Right now the owners are trying to flip the lease for $2.5 billion, and the council fight is live. This is the moment to get our streets back. Long term, meter pricing should be demand-based: if your street never fills past 70%, your parking should be cheap or free. Full rant with receipts at the bottom of this page.
• The Budget & Pensions: Here is the hole with no makeup on it: Chicago's four pension funds are $36.4 billion short and about 28% funded, the worst-funded pension system of any major American city, with the police and fire funds sitting near 25 cents on the dollar. The city paid $2.9 billion into pensions in 2025; add debt service and about 40 cents of every operating dollar goes to the past instead of the present (New York's number is about 17). The 2026 budget closed a record $1.19 billion gap, 2027's projected gap is another $1.16 billion, the rating agencies downgraded us twice in two days this February, and Springfield made it worse: a 2025 police-and-fire benefit sweetener quietly added roughly $7 billion in required contributions over 30 years. I won't pretend a mayor waves this away, so here are my rules instead. One: make the full advance pension payment every single year, no games. Skipping it is borrowing from your own future at loan-shark rates (the city paid only half of it this January; that is how you get downgraded). Two: no one-time revenue patching recurring holes; that's the parking meter move again, just smaller. Three: every program on this page is tiered honestly (see How It Adds Up): cheap stuff ships first, expensive stuff waits for real revenue, and the revenue conversation happens in the open with published models anyone can check. Four: growth is the only painless fix: every vacant lot filled and every new neighbor housed improves the pension math without raising anyone's taxes. Five: pension reform gets paired with an income tax; the two gotta come together. You don't ask workers to give ground without new honest revenue on the table, and you don't ask for a new tax while the hole keeps growing. This debt took four decades of bipartisan lying to build, and anyone promising a four-year fix is just the newest liar. The honest promise: stop digging, publish everything, leave the trajectory pointed up.
• Cost Reforms: Build in-house capacity instead of defaulting to vendors and consultants. Chicago's outsourcing record speaks: the parking meters (see above), the Skyway (leased for $1.83 billion, and investors later resold the lease for $2.8 billion), and four downtown garages that ended with the city paying a $62 million arbitration award. Cities that insourced, like Atlanta's water and Fort Wayne's fleet, got better service for less. Every service we can competently run ourselves is leverage against every future bad deal.
• Chicago Bears Deal: Taxpayers still owe roughly $356 million on the 2003 Soldier Field renovation (payments run through 2032), and the Bears asked for ~$2.4 billion more in public money for a lakefront dome while being worth about $8.8 billion. When top economists were polled, including 7 Nobel winners, 83% agreed stadium subsidies cost taxpayers more than they return. Almost nothing gets economists to agree like that. My deal: the Bears get land and cooperation, they pay for their own stadium, and whatever value the public contributes comes back as a contractual share of the money. The NFL bans cities from owning equity (Green Bay and its 538,967 citizen-shareholders got grandfathered in), but teams share stadium revenue with public authorities all the time through their leases: rent, naming rights, ticket surcharges. So structure the public's return as a contract, not a share certificate; Chicago accounting firms can make independent estimates of fair value. As a bonus, I want to see a player alumni ownership group; the team could really use some check on shitty ownership decisions. And if the league objects to the public simply getting paid back, make them say that out loud.

Getting Around

• Transit Frequency: At the worst of the operator shortage, the Blue Line ran as little as 44% of its scheduled trains. Service is mostly restored, and Springfield finally passed $1.5 billion a year in transit funding (December 2025), so the excuses are gone. Rush-hour trains every 5-10 minutes, and buses you don't need a prayer to catch. (The other day I arrived at Merchandise Mart to a packed platform a little after 5 on a weekday, and the next train didn't come for 20 minutes. God forbid we over-serve the people.) Frequency is the highest-leverage move in transit: the research consistently finds a 10% increase in frequency drives roughly a 9% increase in ridership. The CTA's new Frequent Network, 20 bus routes at 10-minute headways, is the right idea; extend it until "just missed it" stops mattering.
• Smarter Traffic Lights: INRIX ranks Chicago the most congested city in America: 112 hours a year lost per driver, roughly $7.5 billion citywide. Here's the part that should make you scream: a 2020 Inspector General audit found CDOT has NO traffic signal management plan; signals get retimed only when somebody complains through 311 or their alderman. My hometown suburb had left-turn signals that knew whether a car was waiting three decades ago; the third-biggest city in America is still guessing. Pittsburgh deployed adaptive signals and cut travel times 25% and idling 40%. This is the cheapest infrastructure win on the menu.
• Ads → Content: The CTA sells your attention for about $33 million a year, roughly 2% of its budget. That's the going rate for every El sign blasting ads instead of just telling you when the train comes. Public ads are nonconsensual brain AIDS (literally, your mental immunse system is used against you), and cities have called the bluff: São Paulo banned outdoor advertising, removed 15,000 billboards, and 70% of residents approved; Grenoble replaced its street ads with trees. Every digital sign shows arrivals, always: a color and a number of minutes. Then give the space to the people: sign up to decorate a train car.

Schools & Kids

• Teachers: About 1 in 7 CPS teachers leaves their school every year, and nationally ~44% of new teachers quit the profession within five years. That is a burnout pipeline, and it's fixable: decades of research show real mentoring and induction keep teachers in the classroom and raise student achievement, and CPS's own data agrees: its Teacher Leaders program retains teachers above the district average, and its Opportunity Schools initiative cut vacancies roughly in half at hard-to-staff schools. Make Chicago the best city in America to be a new teacher: eased-in workloads, materials ready on day one, and our best teachers paid to coach the next ones, while still teaching a class themselves.
• CPS - The Board and the Books: The elected school board this city fought decades for arrives exactly on schedule with the next mayor: the final seats are on the November 2026 ballot, and the first fully elected 21-member board is seated January 2027. So the next mayor's job is not to puppeteer the board; it's to hand it a district that isn't on fire. The fire: CPS closed a $734 million deficit last year, is closing another $732 million gap right now, currently via roughly 760 teacher layoffs, and carries nearly $10 billion in debt, over $28,000 per student and among the most of any district in America, at junk ratings, with debt service near $1 billion a year. Enrollment is down about 22% since 2011 (316,000 students and falling), which is the brutal math behind every half-empty building. On closings, hear me clearly: 2013's closure of 50 schools was the largest in US history, and UChicago's Consortium found the results for displaced kids were "neutral at best, and negative in some instances". That is what closure-by-politics looks like. Some consolidation is coming either way (you can't run every half-empty building forever), so here is my rule for it: before any school closes, the city publishes exactly what happens to every affected kid: where they'd go, how they'd get there, what programs they'd gain or lose, plus the steps we'll take to soften the damage, and the numbers we'll track afterward to prove we didn't cause it. The burden of proof sits on the closers, in public, before the vote. Equality through math means showing the math. And keep perspective: the graduation rate is at a record ~84%, roughly double the late-1990s rate, so don't let anyone tell you nothing works. Teachers (above) are the investment; the board belongs to the voters; the books are the job.
• School Start Times: The American Academy of Pediatrics says teens shouldn't start school before 8:30am; their body clocks literally shift at puberty. CPS high schools start as early as 7:30, and bell times get set by bus logistics, not sleep science: in 2015 CPS changed start times at 77 schools to save $9.2 million on buses. When Seattle moved high school to 8:45, students slept a measured 34 minutes more and grades rose ~4.5%. California made 8:30+ state law. Sleep is free academic improvement: you can always add after-school programs, you can't undo chronic sleep deprivation.

Quality of Life

• Public Bathrooms: Chicago has fewer than 500 publicly accessible restrooms for 2.7 million people. The city's FIRST public toilet (first pushed in council in 2021, finally contracted in 2024) is scheduled to open at the end of 2026. Five years, one toilet. The unit costs under $500k and the vendor maintains it for free. A great city lets you exist in public without buying a coffee. This is the cheapest dignity money can buy.
• Night Sky Initiative: Chicago is the 4th-brightest metropolitan area on Earth, 4.5 times brighter than the average city. Under a dark sky you'd see ~2,500 stars; from a Chicago sidewalk, maybe a dozen. Our new LED streetlights already point downward (good), but the city chose a blue-heavy color temperature; one physicist estimated warmer amber LEDs would have cut our light pollution by at least half. Fixtures and phasing: that's the whole project. Give the kids of Chicago the Milky Way, and highlight a Chicago star (the human kind) every night alongside the count of celestial ones we've won back, a daily open mic of sorts. Pair that with the safety-net planks above and we can transform the starving artist.
• Trees That Actually Arrive: Trees are infrastructure: shade, flood absorption, cleaner air, calmer streets. Chicago's canopy is around 16%, and the tree map is the same map as every other inequality: Forest Glen sits near 46% cover while parts of the South and Southwest sides sit under 12%. The city's Our Roots program (75,000 trees, ~90% planted) is real progress with a designed-in flaw: planting chases 311 requests, and the city's own foresters admit wealthier residents file more requests, so even the equity program drifts north. Anyone can order trees; delivering them where they're needed is the actual job. Flip the default: plant block-by-block in the lowest-canopy wards unless a resident opts out, publish the canopy map live, and measure success in shade over Brighton Park, not totals in a press release.
• Environmental Justice - the Toxic Doughnut: A history lesson I got for free, so you get it too: Hazel Johnson, an Altgeld Gardens mother, spent the 1980s mapping the landfills and polluters ringing her neighborhood. She called it "the toxic doughnut", and more or less founded the environmental justice movement from the South Side. The pattern she named is still city policy: when General Iron's metal shredder got pushed out of wealthy Lincoln Park, the city helped move it to the Latino Southeast Side, and it took a month-long hunger strike to force the permit denial in 2022. A federal investigation then concluded that Chicago's own planning practices steer polluters into Black and Latino neighborhoods; HUD made the city sign a binding reform agreement. The receipts are in our kids' lungs: pediatric asthma ER visits on the South Side run about triple the state rate. The fix is already written and named after her: the Hazel M. Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance, which would finally make permits weigh the pollution a neighborhood already carries, was introduced in April 2025 and has been stalled in council ever since. Pass it, and enforce the HUD agreement like a contract instead of a press release.
• Grocery Deserts: Roughly 600,000 Chicagoans live without easy access to fresh food, and it's getting worse: seven more South and West Side groceries closed in July 2026. Chicago actually studied a city-owned grocery store; the 2024 feasibility study came back "necessary, feasible and implementable", and then the city skipped the state grant deadline and quietly downgraded the plan to a "public market". Classic. Meanwhile New York is running the experiment for us: Mamdani's five city-owned stores are funded, with the first opening in the Bronx next year promising ~30% cheaper staples. My position is the engineering position: watch the data. If New York's stores hit their price and access targets, our feasibility study is already on the shelf: dust it off and go. If they faceplant, we learned for free, and we push the cheaper levers meanwhile: fast-track permits and incentives for grocers in low-access areas, back co-op models, and stop letting one chain's exit erase a neighborhood's produce aisle.

Our People

• Sanctuary City: This isn't new politics; it's Chicago tradition. Harold Washington signed the first order in 1985, and every mayor since, both Daleys and Rahm included, kept it. More than one in five Chicagoans is an immigrant; they're over a third of our entrepreneurs and nearly half our manufacturing workforce, paying billions in taxes into the very pensions above. The research is boringly one-sided: sanctuary counties have LOWER crime and stronger economies than comparable non-sanctuary counties. Then came 2025: masked federal agents ran "Operation Midway Blitz" through our neighborhoods, and the government's own numbers fell apart in court: most people detained had no criminal record, and at one processing center DHS's own ratings tagged 16 of 614 detainees as high public-safety risks. A federal judge found "widespread misrepresentations" after bodycam footage contradicted agents' sworn accounts; the Supreme Court blocked the National Guard deployment; the DOJ's lawsuit against our sanctuary laws was dismissed. The measurable cost landed on kids: CPS attendance in Latino neighborhoods dropped at double the normal rate, and one Monday ~14,000 students stayed home. My position takes one sentence: the Welcoming City Ordinance stays, city resources never do ICE's job, and a city that defends its people is a city whose people call 911, testify, open businesses, and keep each other safe.
• Historical Justice: A prominent Fred Hampton memorial. The facts are not in dispute: Chicago police fired 90-99 shots into his apartment; the Panthers fired one. The FBI's informant supplied a floor plan marking his bed. The city, county, and federal government settled for $1.85 million in 1982. In 2006 the police union blocked even an honorary street sign, one of over a thousand brown signs in this city, most far less deserving; the city finally unveiled Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. Way in August 2025, 56 years after his assassination. That's a start, not a finish. A city that murdered a 21-year-old visionary owes his memory more than a brown sign; a proper memorial gives the city back a role model.

Springfield Fights

• Land Tax Reform: Replace property tax with a land value tax. The principle is simple: land is the one thing nobody made: by holding it you exclude everyone else, so you pay everyone else for the privilege. The building on it is your work, and your work shouldn't be taxed. Today we do the opposite: you're punished for improving your building and rewarded for sitting on a vacant lot, and Chicago has 30,000+ vacant lots held by speculators with zero urgency and zero tax pain. Meanwhile broken assessments shifted $2.2 billion in property taxes onto the owners of cheaper homes. That's the Tribune and ProPublica's "Tax Divide" investigation, measured by the University of Chicago. Economists across the spectrum call land tax the "least bad tax" (Milton Friedman's words). When Allentown, PA taxed land more than buildings, building permits jumped 32%; Detroit's recent plan projected tax cuts for 97% of homeowners while doubling taxes on speculators. Honest caveat: done fully, this needs an Illinois constitutional amendment, which is why we start the fight now.
• Process Reforms: Ranked-choice voting, open data models, engineering-driven decisions, and the end of the aldermanic veto. RCV now covers ~14 million voters across 49 US jurisdictions, and New York's 2025 primary ran on it with the highest mayoral-primary turnout since 1989. Evanston voted 82% to adopt it, and a court blocked them, ruling Illinois law doesn't allow it. So this is a Springfield fight, and I'm picking it. Bonus: Chicago's two-round system attracted $34 million in campaign ads in 2023; RCV finishes the election in one round. Closer to home, kill aldermanic prerogative: the unwritten rule that one alderman personally controls zoning, permits, even whether your block gets a granny flat. The Burke conviction showed where fiefdoms lead, and our housing shortage shows what they cost. Citywide rules applied citywide, with wards shaping plans in public instead of one person deciding in private. More in the Process Changes section below.

Experiments

• BUBI - the City That Invests in You: The experimental half of my income agenda (the proven half is Guaranteed Income, above): the city as a patient investor in its own people. Pay for the nursing degree, the trade certification, the small-business start, and get paid back as a small, capped share of the graduate's future income above a threshold. Honest label: income-share agreements have a rotten private-sector record; regulators had to force the industry to admit ISAs are loans, and a coding bootcamp got banned from lending for lying about its terms. Every one of those scandals was a company maximizing extraction, which is exactly the argument for a public version with caps written into ordinance and the profit pointed at funding the floor. Full mechanics, a worked example, and the caveats in the BUBI section below.
• Chi-GUI Civic Platform: A Chicago-focused public interface and LLM for city services. Chicago 311 handles ~1.9 million requests a year. Answering, routing, and publishing a live FAQ is exactly what this technology is for. Do it right, though: New York's rushed chatbot got caught telling businesses to break the law, while Pennsylvania's careful pilot saved workers 95 minutes a day. Ours is open source, cites its sources, and lets registered Chicagoans opt in to shape its vocabulary and accent. It should obviously talk like us.

Education

Childcare is the beginning. We need to support our parents, because they are the most important teachers in their children's lives. Stable households are able to spend more energy on their child each day. I want free daycare for everyone in Chicago. No matter our resources, we can do some form of this, and expand as we can.

Teachers are the other contender for most important resource, and the Teachers plank above is the plan: make Chicago the best city in America to be a new teacher. Young people willing to enter this profession are a sacred resource we should design around: ease them in with incrementally increasing loads and continual guidance from our best, instead of burning out the talent until they quit teaching altogether. Any initial costs are repaid when teachers stay and get better. The best teachers, instead of rising into some admin job, can rise to teaching other teachers, and I'd strongly encourage the hybrid where they still teach at least one regular class. The budget principle underneath it all: maximize the share of every education dollar that reaches a good teacher's classroom, and be willing to name what that implies: removing bad teachers and other obvious wastes of money.

On closing schools: I understand why the word alone ends conversations here. In 2013 this city closed 50 schools at once, and the research found the promised benefits never arrived for the displaced kids (details in the CPS plank above). That history is precisely why I want the trade-offs worked out in public instead of decided in back rooms. Picture the school system as a map: every school, every kid's commute, every program, every building's condition, all connected. Close one school and the effects ripple across that whole map. We can simulate those ripples before touching anything. So when a school has too few students to serve them well, the process is: show the map, show what changes for each affected family, show the steps that soften the damage, and keep publishing the numbers afterward to prove we didn't cause harm, or to catch it fast if we did. Anyone can check the work and propose better. Equality through math, with the math shown.

I want to invest in our teachers and our students. As I said before, the number one resource for our students are their parents. BUBI, described in its own section below, is for the parents. We can build stability for all, a warm bed and a full stomach at rock bottom. A single parent won't have to work 2 jobs just to get by. More parents could choose to spend their time with their children, to the benefit of all of us.

I don't want to get rid of any school model like charter or magnet schools. The variety helps us learn what is best. Maybe they need regulation changes, I have none to focus on now. I do believe neighborhood schools need more support. I think as we get good with public modeling, we start to focus on things like how far is everyone from parks, grocery stores, and schools. This data will really reveal inequalities in the city investment. I believe in the competition that charter schools bring, but we need to be fitting them within OUR long term plans.

Transportation

The daily fixes (train frequency, smarter signals, protected lanes, El signs that just tell you the time) are all in the planks above. This section is the longer game.

North/South bike-only street. And concrete-protected bike lane highways north-south and east-west (the Street Safety plank has the crash data). The bigger ask: map out the active cycling population of Chicago so we can get accurate simulations going and can optimize the bike lane making. This is where I need my Industrial Engineering brothers and sisters to step up and make us an open-source model of the city that anyone can interact with through various interfaces. I want to let people propose alterations based on the results of their changes to the model. Let local people find local improvements.

Camera system from earlier means fewer crazy people driving on the shoulder. And when you see them on the shoulder, you will KNOW that they are either going to the hospital in a hurry, or are helping fund our dear city.

Carbon Check- it's like a carbon tax but it isn't a tax because the government gets nothing. We check how much harm people are putting in the air and we charge them. That money goes to a fund, and every month that fund is divided evenly between every citizen. Everyone bears the consequences of these actions, so everyone should be paid to compensate. This can immediately correct incentives. The result? The whole city is incentivized to destroy the world less, at ZERO cost. It's just a transfer. This is simply fair, or more accurately, more fair than today. Because we will not be charging the full cost incurred by your gas use. We will be charging a fraction of the cost, and then dividing that fraction evenly. This may seem obvious or too easy, that's because we are shifting incentives without taking money from the people overall. No more political bullshit, no paying the government. Pure equality. Big gains with zero infrastructure changes. Do it. Do it now. The planet can't wait.

Long-term plan for Lakeshore Drive (more wishes as opposed to immediate goals): reroute it away from the lake downtown near Millennium Park. Reduce the car lanes in order to establish bus-only lanes. First LSD can be routed through the Columbus area, eventually down and out of the way like the trains there. The goal is a car-free connection between the city, the parks, and the lake and everything it has to offer. Wouldn't it be cool if someone could arrive at Millennium Station and walk straight through Millennium Park and onto the beach without ever worrying about getting hit by a car? Our architecture is even more beautiful when you can safely look up at it.

(Strategic landfilling for the people. We build more land at strategic places to expand Chicago eastward onto land that cannot be built upon. It's an investment that greedy politicians or developers of the future can't spoil. Homework I've since done: there's a famous legal wall here called the public trust doctrine, and it was invented on OUR lakefront, in Illinois Central v. Illinois (1892), the Supreme Court ruled the state holds the submerged lakebed in trust for the public and couldn't just hand it to a railroad. The same doctrine is what sank the Lucas Museum in 2016. So any new land is public land by construction: parks, beaches, harbors, transit. Which was the point anyway: built-for-the-public-forever is the anti-greed insurance, written right into the deed.)

BUBI

Brains Universal Basic Income. Two Universal Basic Income plans supporting brains, our number 1 resource, hence BUBI: a floor, and a ladder.

First off, the floor: traditional Universal Basic Income, or General for GUBI. If we provide financial stability, we are providing Safety, we are enabling Education, we are giving people the power to choose the direction of their lives. Giving people money is simply the best way to help people in need because they know what they need. That's just a fact we've learned from studies, and developing policy otherwise would be ugly pride with no purpose. So we set up some sort of graduated system so you get less the more you make. One of the variables in that system is how much we contribute. We can set up a structure and start today, there is no minimum amount necessary. The base principle here is the equanimity of brains. GUBI is basically a well-defined bucket we can choose to allocate funds to, or people could donate to. Something you can trust, and seriously reduces the government's ability to mess things up. You know you will be directly supporting other people in your city who have less, and in fair proportion and minimal waste. (The receipts are in the Guaranteed Income plank above: Chicago's 5,000-household pilot, Cook County going permanent in 2025, and how our city quit mid-application.)

The top 10% in this country own 68% of the wealth, this middle class junk is just overdone storytelling. What about our most vulnerable brothers and sisters in this city? Everybody can feel safe when everyone IS safe. On your worst day, getting fired from a job or filling out job application #263, what if you knew that at the end of the day you would still have a place to sleep, plumbing, food to eat, and barebones healthcare? Could you live a little lighter knowing that the city had not only your back, but your family and friends' too?

The second half of BUBI is my own creation. It is the city acting as an income-share investor in its own people. You bring a plan that creates value (a credential, a business, work the city needs) and the city fronts the money; you pay it back later as a small share of your income above a threshold. A worked example: a certified nursing assistant wants to become a registered nurse. Tuition is roughly $30,000 she doesn't have, and an RN in Chicago out-earns a CNA by $40,000+ a year. The city pays the $30,000. In return, once her income passes $50,000, she pays the city 5 cents of every dollar above that line for ten years: a few thousand a year in the good years, zero in the bad ones, capped so she never repays more than twice the investment. She is never underwater, the city roughly doubles its money over time, and every repaid dollar funds the floor (GUBI) or the next investment. You can have as many brackets as you want; a job that contributes to everyone's health helps your petition, but you can pitch anything if the numbers align. At first, Chi-GUI (with human approval on every deal) starts ruthless; it only has so much money, so it funds the clear doubles. Each success eventually funds two more, and as it grows it can give better deals. It still wants to profit, because profit goes to GUBI.

Now the honest caveat, because the private sector already poisoned this well: income-share agreements have been a consumer-protection disaster. Regulators had to force the industry to admit ISAs are loans; Purdue shut its program down after students ended up repaying 2.5x; the Lambda School bootcamp got banned from lending for lying about its terms. Notice the common thread: every scandal was a company maximizing extraction. A public version inverts the incentive: caps written into ordinance, terms in plain English, zero owed below the threshold, and the "profit" motive pointed at funding the floor. That's not a loophole in my plan; that IS the plan.

We can be very selective with who we give money to at the start. I would propose a mix of prioritizing deals that will pay it forward manyfold alongside people wanting to work in professions we need. We could support teachers, nurses, nannies and other caregivers, by investing in their education and long-term health. This could be algorithmic, based on labor stats.

Fuck Kanye first and foremost, for making me do this shit, Nazi motherfucker. I want to save Kanye. "This prayer's for everybody that feel that they're too messed up, For everyone that feels they've said "I'm sorry" too many times, You can never go too far when you can't come back home again." Kanye West does not particularly deserve to be saved. But we are all family, everyone deserves a home to come back to. If Kanye stays lost, that's because we haven't shown him the way home. Imagine what Universal Basic Income could have meant for a young Kanye. Instead of the fear of being homeless, he could have focused on his career. He would have never needed to leave Chicago to begin with. If we could teach Kanye how to take care of his mental health, he would pass that on to many people. Keep in mind though, we aren't making a Kanye pitch, we are advocating for mental health. Getting through to Kanye is just a final test of our messaging. (this was written before his latest apology, but it still applies)

Process changes

Ranked Choice voting. For everything. Mayor and School Board seem like an obvious start (the stats and the Springfield fight are in the plank above). Ideally, all elections have equal spending between candidates. I for one hate ads. Filth being thrown into our minds without consent. Your brain doesn't have defenses like a computer, you're continuously vulnerable to your context. The forefront of the modern science of the mind has consistently been weaponized against other people for the sake of money. Ads are AIDS, literal brain AIDS. They use your brain's natural defenses to further their goals. I don't want to campaign on ads, I want to campaign on a broad coalition of people who want to accomplish the same goals. Hence the conspiracy. So please let me know what you think, or share this with someone who may be interested.

Too many things have been decided by greed or chaos, we need to demand engineering-based answers. We need to track what works and iteratively improve. Everything possible should be open source. We can mathematically prove that we are making the right decisions with an open process. Any popular competing idea can get its fair shot at proving itself. It's a way of fighting back against corruption by removing the human element at key junctures. It's also a way to combat past injustices, like how the auto industry stole American streets through propaganda and (lobbying) bribes. And that's not a metaphor here: Chicago ran the largest streetcar system on Earth, over 1,000 miles of track, and the last car rolled down Vincennes in June 1958. Use of public space is a pet peeve of mine. I want engineers optimizing how we can best share the space, not some bullshit status quo established by the most manipulative people of their time.

I will not seek re-election. I would much rather foster the growth of others and shine the light on their work. After 4 years of that, hopefully you guys get some good option to choose from (with ranked choice of course). If not, then I failed and don't deserve another term anyways. I only feel comfortable demanding the throne because I have put in many years of thought and I truly believe that these ideas will have a massive impact if I get the green light. I don't want fame or power, I'd rather not be recognized on the street. I don't think it's going to be a problem eventually, because once I cover up the light pollution and cut out the bullshit, you guys will be amazed by all of the stars that have been hiding.

(Bonus Parking Rant)