Brian Carlisle
Candidate for Mayor, Chicago, on the ballot February 23, 2027
AI summary
The platform
Housing: Change zoning and permitting so more homes get built, protect two-flats, and bring back single-room housing for people on the street.
Safety: Put money into detectives so shootings get solved, expand jobs-plus-therapy programs, and send mental health teams to crisis calls around the clock.
Money: Tie pension reform to a new income tax, run more city work in-house instead of through contractors, and replace the property tax with a tax on land value.
Also: Replace every lead pipe, run trains and buses more often, and adopt ranked-choice voting. Most policies name a city that already did it.
Next to the other candidates
Only Carlisle: A land value tax, a new income tax tied to pension reform, ranked-choice voting, and ending aldermen's control over zoning.
Mental health: Holberg, Quigley, and Carlisle would send mental health teams to crisis calls. Quigley and Carlisle would also reopen neighborhood mental health clinics.
Cash to households: Carlisle backs guaranteed income, Cardenas proposes $3,000 yearly stipends for working families, and Brooks proposes a $3,500 credit for family caregivers.
Not covered: Recruiting businesses and jobs, which Holberg, Mendoza, Brewer, Kelly, and Su put near the top.
the more perfect platform
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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, and Chicago-area costs rose ~30% from 2020 to 2024. Subsidize…
- 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…
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
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…
- 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…
- 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…
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…
- 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…
- 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…
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
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…
- 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…
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…
- 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…
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…
- 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…