Scoreboard: How did Chicago do in 2024?
And/or 2023, subject to data availability
On any given day, City Hall can be preoccupied by a million different controversies. It’s easy to focus on the scandal or fight of the moment. Some of that is necessary: voters care about all sorts of stuff, and politicians have to be responsive – even if there are more important things to pay attention to than the Mayor’s hair-care budget.
All of the short-term noise can distract from the actual outcomes of politics and public policy. So we thought it would be a good idea to build a scoreboard, and take a look at how Chicago did in 2024 (or 2023, depending on the data source). We’ve tried to pull the most important metrics for the city - from population and economic health, to public safety, transportation, education and housing.1 We’ll plan to report the same metrics in 2025.
While this is a Chicago-focused publication, it’s also useful to see what our peers are doing. Sometimes this is about taking lessons from other cities (like how Minneapolis made housing more affordable, or how Denver cleared more non-fatal shootings). In other instances, it’s about how we stack up (like how expensive it is to build here, or how much crime we have).
So for context, we’ve also included average scores for other 4 largest cities in the country. Conveniently that peer set includes both the cities we most commonly compare ourselves to (New York and Los Angeles), as well as two Sun Belt cities that have been growing much more rapidly (Houston and Phoenix).
Population: Much has been made about migration patterns in Illinois - and an unfortunate reality is that Chicago has been treading water at best, with our population down ~0.3% (about 8,000 people) in the past year. Our peers are largely flat overall (down -0.02%), but that masks variation across the group - New York City is down nearly a percentage point, Los Angeles is flat, and Houston/Phoenix are seeing population growth of around half a percent. The deeper demographic story of Chicago is complicated, but the reality is that this isn’t a great starting point for the city.
Economy: The Chicago economy is a pretty mixed bag. The obvious reality is that we do have a very large economy; the aggregate GDP for the Chicago metro area is around $725 billion in 2017 dollars - that’s lower than the mean $963 billion for our peers, but only because New York is so massive (the other three cities average around $650 billion). Otherwise we really have a tale of two peer groups here. New York City and Los Angeles have similar or higher incomes per capita, similar GDP growth, and similar unemployment rates to Chicago. Meanwhile, the Sun Belt duo of Houston and Phoenix have much smaller aggregate GDPs and meaningfully lower incomes, but faster GDP growth and much lower unemployment rates to offset that. I think it’s obviously fair to say we need to emphasize GDP growth more, but we don’t stand out as obviously terrible against our peers here.
Public Finances: Here we get to a far more challenging set of metrics for the city. Let’s start with the preexisting grades in public finance: municipal bond ratings. Our peers typically enjoy bond ratings in the AA to AA+ range, signifying a very low risk of default. Chicago, meanwhile, stands at a much worse context, ranging from Baa3 at Moody’s to A- at Fitch as of 2024 year-end. Beyond just making us look comparatively bad, that translates into a real cost to the city, in the form of higher interest rates on our borrowing. It’s also not getting better; we’re showing you the 2024 year-end ratings for the city, but the 2025 scoreboard already includes a downgrade from S&P.
It’s easy to see why this is when you dig into the fundamentals. As we’ve covered before, for instance, Chicago has some of the worst-funded pension systems in the nation. Our four city systems combine to stand at a meager 25% funded rate, compared to nearly 80% for our peers.2 That shows up in our indebtedness metrics as well - our total long-term debt and pension liabilities amount to over $24,000 per Chicagoan. That’s more than twice the average of our peers. Clawing our way out of this hole remains our greatest fiscal challenge as a city, and a challenge where the basic facts simply look very, very bad compared to our peers.
Public Safety: Chicago’s murder rate dropped this year, continuing a trend since the height of the pandemic. But while homicides here fell, they fell at a faster rate across our peer group. And the overall levels remain distressingly high, both in absolute and relative terms. The only peer city with a homicide rate even half of ours is Houston, at 14 murders per 100,000 residents.
This remains Chicago’s greatest and most painful problem. But it’s also a reminder of how much potential the city has. Chicago is a world class city despite this violence. And this is a solvable problem. In the 1980s and early 90s, New York and Los Angeles had homicide rates that matched Chicago. We don’t have to split the atom here: we just have to achieve something that our peers have pulled off.3
Transportation: CTA ridership continued to recover in 2024, up 12.5% from the prior year. That’s a progress relative to our peers, but don’t break out the good champagne at Dorval Carter’s retirement party just yet: the CTA’s staffing challenges have meant that other systems bounced back much faster than we have from the pandemic. The improvements from ‘23 to ‘24 mostly reflect how much more work we have to do than other transit agencies (with the exception of BART, which functions a bit more like a commuter rail agency).
Source: Joey Politano, Arpitas Economics
In a funny statistical quirk, Chicago’s average transit trips per resident per year (115) is identical to our peer average. That’s because the average New Yorker takes the MTA almost once a day (325) and LA Metro ridership is better than you might expect (81), but the numbers in Houston and Phoenix fall off quite a bit.4 Even in its current, battered form, our transit system remains a huge asset for the city and the region.
Education: There are some positive signs for CPS here. In 2023, students picked up a third of a grade level for math scores, and two thirds of a grade level for reading. That’s faster progress than LA (the only other city with 2023 data in the Education Recovery Scorecard project). It’s also faster than the national average: nationally, students recovered 23% of a grade level of reading, and17% of a grade level in math.
Reading scores have now recovered to 2019 levels after taking a dive during the pandemic, while scores remain below their 2019 levels for math. Another encouraging sign is enrollment, which ticked up slightly (0.36%), even as it fell 2.5% across districts among our big city peers.
Housing: First, the good news – Chicago remains much more affordable than most of our peers. In 2023 (the most recent year for which Census data is available), median rents were $270 - nearly 20% - lower than our peer average. New York and LA are substantially more expensive, and even in Phoenix, median rents are $250 a month higher. Houston is our only peer with similar costs. And while rents rose 5% from 2022 to 2023, they were up 7.3% across the board.
The bad news is that data is from 2023, and more recent trends are concerning. Homelessness rose dramatically, although it remained below rates in peer cities (likely due to our lower cost housing stock). Most (but not all) of the increase was driven by asylum seekers, who arrived in large numbers during 2023, and were counted as part of the shelter population in January 2024. Those numbers have since fallen. Also note that the point-in-time count has its issues (namely, it’s done on one day in January, and doesn’t capture doubled-up households). But it does allow for a standardized comparison to other cities.
The other piece of bad news is that we’re building a lot less than peer cities. Chicago’s 127 new permits per 100,000 residents is dead last among our peer set – and one quarter the rate of the highest performer (Phoenix). The rate of new permitting also declined here, while it rose among our peers. Without a mix of land use and building code reforms, this problem is likely to get worse.
A great city that continues to punch below its weight
All told, in 2024 Chicago continued to climb out of a pandemic-sized hole. While the population appears to have dropped slightly, poverty and violence are down, and both the transit and school systems notched some improvements. On many of the most important metrics of city life, things got a little better.
But with the notable exception of CPS, our peers seem to be recovering from the pandemic at a faster pace. And while Chicago remains a big - and relatively affordable - world-class city, our public finances and public safety remain critical challenges for the future.
We have a lot of work to do in 2025.
Absent from this scoreboard is the performance of our city’s actual sports teams which, well… the less said the better.
Phoenix, the worst funded of those peers, stands at around 57% funded, or more than twice Chicago’s rate
And yes, we also split the atom.
Take those numbers with a grain of salt, because transit systems don’t overlap directly with municipalities. We’re also not counting any other transit providers that serve the city (like Metra), for the purposes of this analysis.