Residents of Chicago’s south suburbs deal with crushing tax increases

Marc Byrnes remembers the day he opened his property tax bill this summer to find it had quadrupled from the previous installment.

“I think a fair number of people would have damned near had a heart attack when they read what I received,” Byrnes said.

The bill had gone from $1,162.32 due in March to $4,706.75 due in August.

Byrnes had a sense his property tax bill would likely be increasing after chatting in June with a neighbor whose bill had gone up several thousand dollars. He just wasn’t expecting the increase to be so dramatic.

Byrnes lives in his late mother’s house in south suburban Park Forest. He has five siblings, and they all pitch in to keep up the property. They’re not sure what will happen with it long term. Some options include his sister moving in as its main resident or Byrnes buying out the place from his siblings. He’s saved money over the years from various jobs, such as professional driver and laboratory assistant, which has helped him respond to unexpected financial demands like the tax bill increase. Having to make pivots throughout his career taught Byrnes to always save more than he spends in case of an emergency.

“Because I’ve had a few lean times in my, I guess, working career, I’ve become very careful with my financial resources,” he said.

Although Byrnes said he lives frugally and considers himself fortunate to be able to make the payments, he feels angry that his tax bill has shot up while his property’s value hasn’t. He’s trying to understand how these two realities can coexist.

“There comes a point when it’s like, this is so incredibly unfair to the people that are living in this area. This is a kick to the most sensitive part of the body,” Byrnes said. “Our houses have not gone up a million dollars in value. I want to know. I want to ask [Cook County Treasurer] Maria Pappas, right to her face, what’s your explanation for this?”

Byrnes is one of many south suburban residents who experienced a record tax increase this year. Property tax bills rose nearly 20% this year for the median homeowner in south suburban Cook County — the highest increase in three decades, according to the Cook County Treasurer’s Office.

Black residents in the south suburbs have been impacted the most. Of the 15 suburbs with the largest tax hikes, 13 are home to mostly Black people. In those suburbs, residents saw their property taxes go up 30% or more.

A multitude of long-term issues — continual disinvestment, decreased commercial activity, stagnant population growth and increasing assessments — have contributed to the spike. But the problems extend far beyond this year’s record increase. Experts warn that a bleak economic future awaits many south suburban communities, if there’s no intervention. Some are reimagining what changes can be made to ignite the south suburban economic landscape.

In the meantime, Byrnes and other frustrated south suburban property owners are grappling with how to move forward. Some south suburban residents are paying just as much in property taxes as their counterparts in well-to-do north suburban communities whose homes are worth two to three times more.

How did we end up here?

Pappas said "a lot" of people ask her why their property taxes increased. In her more than two decades as Cook County treasurer, she says it’s the No. 1 question people ask her, regardless of whether she’s picking up her dry cleaning or shopping for groceries.

“I have spent a huge amount of time trying to make it understandable,” Pappas said. She cited a recent addition to county property tax bills, "Where Your Money Goes," as an example of her efforts. The section, which appears near the top of the tax bills, breaks down how much money each taxing body is requesting line by line. It also lists what each taxing body charged the previous year and the difference in charges between the two years.

Pappas said she had this section added to the bills because “people don’t know that they paid to 14 different governments. They have no idea.”

A levy is the amount of money a taxing body requests every year from homeowners and businesses within its jurisdiction. Taxing bodies also take in revenue through additional taxes, fees and other sources. Often, municipalities and school districts are requesting more funds through levies.

Matteson School District 162, responsible for the second-highest increase on Byrnes’ bill, posted an FAQ on its website for residents regarding the tax levy. Assistant Superintendent for Business Craig Englert said the levy increase was standard, just 3.1%.

But levies aren’t the only factor contributing to an increase in property taxes. People leaving the region, depressed commercial investment and increased assessments can all lead to rising property taxes, even when tax levies and property values are not.

At a public meeting last week, Englert explained to residents that increases in their tax bills were due to a shift in tax burden from commercial properties to residential properties. He also cited the loss of COVID-19 adjustments for residential property assessments and the fact that commercial property assessments didn’t increase as much as residential ones.

Englert demonstrated this point by breaking down the difference in assessments between 2022 and 2023 in Rich Township. Residential property assessments increased by 52% between those two years, whereas nonresidential property assessments only increased 7%.

Byrnes’ home also serves as an example. The assessed value of his home grew from about $8,170 to $15,000.

Officials with Matteson School District 162 are taking the significant tax bill changes into account as they plan the 2024 levy. Their goal is that, on average, taxpayers will see a 0% change in the amount of taxes paid to the district next year.

“I have to qualify that, because if someone’s house value changes relative to their neighbor’s, they could see a slight tax increase,” Englert said. “But on average, it should be 0%.”

Sluggish population growth can also result in higher property tax bills. As more people move out of an area, there are fewer people to help pay that levy, and each person left ends up having to pay a little bit more of it.

Chris Berry, director of the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute, researches the ways cities are shaped and sustained. He said the current tax situation in Cook County’s Southland is not sustainable.

“We can’t have a situation in which the government continuously, and in the long run, grows faster than the private economy,” Berry said. “I do think that’s essentially the concern in a lot of the southern suburbs ... that the tax base is shrinking, the spending is going up, and those two things cannot continue to happen simultaneously for very long before a jurisdiction goes bankrupt or people move out.”

But the Southland’s economic troubles compound both the shrinking tax base and the increased government spending. Growing disinvestment and the lack of commercial activity mean fewer property tax dollars from businesses. On top of that, the region’s struggling economy also limits the range of viable revenue sources for school districts, municipalities and other local governments to provide services. For many government agencies in the Southland, property taxes are one of the few revenue sources upon which they can faithfully rely.

Berry said it’s an economic picture in stark contrast to other municipalities with a wider tax base and more robust economic activity.

“Think of Chicago, obviously, and we’ve got all these properties in the Loop (downtown), and that’s a really important part of our tax base,” Berry said. “A lot of the southern suburbs that we’re talking about don’t have nearly so much commercial activity, and so the commercial share of the tax base is much lower, which just means residents have to bear all that much more.”

Holding the line on property taxes

Residents like Glynis James-Watson are debating what to do with this larger slice of the levy pie. She moved to the south suburb of Harvey in August 2021 after receiving her calling from God to preach — a spiritual awakening that she thought might lead to a pastor position. She graduated from seminary just a few months before her home purchase.

“I kind of followed what I felt I was being directed to do, and the pastor position didn’t open up. So I’m like, ‘OK, Lord, what’s going on?’” James-Watson said. “So that’s how I ended up in Harvey. The way I got the house was kind of a miracle. And you know, everything was going well. The payments were well within my means.”

However, James-Watson said she was “flabbergasted” when she opened her 2023 second-installment property tax bill, which was $8,170.39 — an amount more than seven times the price tag of the first installment bill of $1,066.97.

“I feel like I’m fortunate in the sense that I can afford to pay it, but that just obliterates any other items on my budget,” she said.

On her latest bill, the city of Harvey charged James-Watson $3,470.76, nearly five times the $717.29 the municipality charged her a year ago.

Back in July, in response to the dramatic property tax increases, Harvey Mayor Christopher Clark announced an effort to “Hold the Tax.” He pledged not to unnecessarily raise property taxes in fiscal year 2025 and called on other mayors to do the same. Clark said he’d look for alternative sources of revenue, like collecting tax money that is already owed to the city but going unpaid.

“We have a 52% collection rate, property tax collection rate, so we still have 48% worth of dollars that we can actually go out there and try to capture,” Clark said.

Some taxes must be raised due to court orders and settlement agreements, but Clark said the pledge is a crucial step toward righting the taxing issues that the state and county need to address.

“It should benefit [our residents], because once we start having the real conversations about what we’re going to do about the tax system in the state of Illinois, that should help them long term,” Clark said. “Also, just for instance, if a bill has gone up, and the city of Harvey portion of it was $500, we just saved them $500. If no one else commits to holding the tax, and we just do it ourselves, we’ve already benefited our residents.”

A struggling economy in need of a boost

Berry with the University of Chicago said these financial woes make it crucial to boost the private economy in the south suburbs. Since 2019, the nonprofit Southland Development Authority has been trying to provide that lift by investing in opportunities for economic change. The organization partners with local governments and small businesses to find and provide capital for projects to help boost the area.

Bo Kemp, the group’s CEO, said there is a major opportunity to build robust neighborhoods through capitalizing on existing investments that could impact the south suburbs — for example, transportation investment.

He cites the Metra Electric Community Initiative, which aims to modernize 13 stations across the South Side and south suburbs, and the CTA Red Line extensions, both reaching far south.

“The ability for us to leverage that transportation means that a future world where there will still be cars, but not as many cars, and people are going to be much more reliant on public transportation, allows for enough property density around those nodes here in the Southland to create places where people live, shop and work out in the Southland and are still connected to the city of Chicago,” Kemp said.

The Southland’s economy has endured a couple of rocky decades. According to data from the Illinois Department of Employment Security, the southernmost parts of Cook County — including Bloom, Bremen, Calumet, Orland, Rich and Thornton townships — collectively lost more than 35,000 jobs from March 2001 to March 2021. The heaviest losses were in the manufacturing, retail trade and construction industries.

The area’s economy has rebounded some in the last few years. Data shows an increase of more than 6,000 jobs from March 2021 to March 2023. The strongest growth has occurred in the transportation and warehousing industry, thanks in large part to the opening of two massive Amazon warehouse facilities in Markham and Matteson.

Even with all the complex issues facing the area, Kemp argues that people are sleeping on the Southland as an area primed for growth.

“The western suburbs, the northern suburbs, are already built,” Kemp said. “So, we present ourselves as the best opportunity for that kind of growth — and growth that can be done in a way that maintains the legacy residents who’ve been here for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, while also incorporating new residents.”

The future of the south suburbs may depend on the capacity to bring in that kind of vitality. But it’s not clear how long residents will hold out and wait for that growth — and the satisfaction of paying a property tax bill justified by the value of their homes and the public services and amenities they receive in exchange.

Resources

If you’ve experienced an outsized increase in your property taxes, here are some courses of action you can take:

• Appeal your property assessment with the Cook County Assessor.
• Use Cook County’s Payment Plan Calculator to make partial payments on delinquent property taxes.

Adora Namigadde is a metro reporter and host of The Rundown (morning episodes) for WBEZ. You can follow her at @adorakn.