Summer youth jobs are worth fighting for

That requires making tradeoffs

Before we get to our regularly-scheduled programming: It was really great to meet so many readers at our event last week. Thanks for coming out! We’ll certainly plan to have more events in the coming months.

Last month, Mayor Brandon Johnson announced the 2025 launch of One Summer Chicago, the city’s summer youth jobs program. The program uses city dollars to subsidize job opportunities for Chicago residents aged 14-24 at a range of public and private sector employers. Expanding the program has been a key priority for Johnson as both a candidate and Mayor.

I think this goal represents the very best of the Johnson administration. The city’s summer jobs program makes an immediate impact on Chicago families and helps bridge long-running structural divides across the city. Most importantly, it results in safer streets and communities. But to grow the program further, we’ll have to make some tough fiscal choices that the Mayor has so far refused to confront.

The evidence for youth summer employment programs is really, really good

Studies in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston consistently find that participants in summer jobs programs are less likely to get arrested. Interestingly, the studies don’t generally find that the programs raise long term educational or employment outcomes for most participants. But they provide critical support and constructive engagement for teenagers and young adults who may otherwise get in trouble over the summer.

Studies found that New York’s program reduced the probability of arrest by 17%. A more intensive version of the program in Chicago aimed at the highest risk youth (One Summer Chicago Plus) delivered dramatically greater reductions in arrests (75% in 2015), with benefits persisting three years after the program concluded. The annual data is of course noisy (you can see confidence intervals on the chart below), but the broader story is clear: high risk participants are dramatically less likely to get arrested for both violent and non-violent crimes.

Source: Poverty Action Lab, summarizing work by Davis and Heller.

You should be skeptical of any one study showing results this good. This is a particular challenge in an area like public safety, where funders and policymakers desperately want to identify ways to make cities safer that aren’t reliant on more police officers. As a general rule, the more we want an outcome to be true, the higher our bar should be for evidentiary support. But in addition to being validated in multiple cities by external academic partners, there are two other reasons to feel good about this evidence base.

The first is that these evaluations are randomized. One of the challenges with interventions designed to change an individual’s behavior is the problem of unobserved characteristics – two teenagers from the same neighborhood might look similar, but if one signs up for an afterschool program and the other doesn’t, that choice can reflect very different underlying characteristics that bias evaluations. But because summer jobs programs generally have far more applicants than slots, and use a degree of randomization to select participants, researchers can compare outcomes from applicants who were offered jobs to applicants with similar characteristics who didn’t get a chance to participate. That gives us a far more compelling evidence base, than simply comparing program participants to other adolescents who didn’t apply with similar characteristics.

The second reason to be optimistic is that we know these efforts can scale. If summer jobs programs only worked for a small number of participants (or thanks to the efforts of a limited number of high-quality mentors or employers), they could be great, but not worth expanding. But in a 2021 follow-up study of One Summer Chicago Plus, Sarah Heller finds that a tripling of program size didn’t dilute the impact of the program – and that participants received consistent benefits regardless of where they were employed or what non-profit administered their programming.

This research indicates that there may be some beneficial tweaks from the program. In particular, policymakers should remember that the core benefit is short-term violence prevention among our highest risk youth. Ideally almost all of the city-funded program slots should be going to high-risk youth in low-income communities who are unlikely to find an alternative summer job. It’s a little concerning to me that the ‘One Summer Chicago Plus’ branding appears to have been dropped by the city – I’d hope that we’re still making every effort to reach the highest risk participants.

More controversially, we may need to think about the gender breakdown of the program. In 2023, the city reported that 55% of participants were female, a figure which received plaudits from some academics for helping address high female joblessness rates. But remember that summer jobs programs *don’t* translate into higher rates of long-term employment; they result in lower rates of violence for high-risk individuals. And the individuals most at risk of engaging in that violence are overwhelmingly male. That implies that we should be pushing in the other direction and aiming for at least a 50% share of male participants.¹

But the most important thing we can do is to keep growing a cost-effective, high-quality program that benefits high-need families and keeps our city safer in the process. Johnson has done just that—total participation in One Summer Chicago has grown by more than 7,000 slots (or 35%) during his time in office.

A casualty of tough budget math

Yet while the program has been growing, it hasn’t come close to the promise Johnson made as a candidate to double the number of participants to 40,000. It’s not even back to the levels reached prior to the pandemic, when the Emmanuel Administration funded 32,000 positions in 2019.² And during last year’s budget negotiations, efforts to grow the program ran into opposition—as part of the fraught budget negotiations at the end of last year, a coalition of 27 alders pushed back on the Mayor’s effort to expand the program from 28,000 to 30,000 participants. The council landed on a budget figure that allowed the program to grow slightly to 29,000 participants.

The problem, of course, is the brutal reality of Chicago’s current fiscal situation.³ With a sluggish economy and steadily rising required pension outlays, the city is caught in a fiscal squeeze. That means more funding for summer jobs needs to come from some combination of tax increases or other program cuts.

If you’re reading this from the Fifth Floor of City Hall, the answer might feel obvious: summer youth jobs are a really good idea, and it’s worth raising taxes to pay for it. But the appetite for more tax hikes simply doesn’t exist. During the campaign, Johnson also promised not to raise property taxes, then reversed himself only to see his proposed $300 million property tax hike go down 50-0.

But if half of this trap is a result of the city’s fiscal squeeze, the other half is of the Mayor’s own making. As Conor noted last year, total city spending in 2025 was $5.6 billion higher than it was in 2020 – that’s a roughly 50% increase in a 5-year period. That includes a lot of spending that’s far less effective than One Summer Chicago.⁴ If the mayor was willing to accept cuts elsewhere, he’d have the space to fund more summer youth jobs, deliver on other campaign promises, and have more flexibility to meet the city’s other challenges.

Unfortunately, the mayor and his team have rejected that approach out of hand. His initial 2025 budget included no cuts. Just last week, when asked about potential cuts for the 2026 budget, Johnson responded: "What would I like to cut? Nothing, I mean, why would I cut anything?”

Under this logic, all public spending is good spending. If the value of government can be measured by how much it spends, instead of what that spending buys us, then almost by definition any budget cuts are unacceptable.

A now-deleted Tweet from the Mayor’s political account, aiming to highlight his accomplishments during testimony in Washington DC.

We talk a lot here about how a kludge of endless process has slowly strangled the city’s ability to deliver decent public services. That doesn’t mean progressives lack transformative ideas to make people’s lives better—but those ideas are dying on the vine in the face of astronomical costs, decades-long timetables, and a refusal to acknowledge tradeoffs between conflicting policy priorities.

An aversion to any spending cuts, ever, is a sort of twisted fiscal equivalent.⁵[5] In a world of tight budgets and limited runway for additional revenue, even if a transformative agenda item could be delivered on time and near-budget, it would still require some offsetting spending cuts. Under a ‘first in, last out’ approach to government spending, new initiatives will inevitably remain subscale.

Progressive ambition stuck in low gear

The city’s summer youth jobs program is one of the best things our tax dollars pay for. The Johnson administration deserves real credit for fighting to expand it in the teeth of a brutal financial picture. Hopefully, a more collaborative and thoughtful budget process will make it easier to fund a larger program next year. But until the Mayor accepts the reality that more funding must come at the expense of other city spending, we’ll continue to make fewer transformative investments in people than we should.

1. This does not mean that we should dismiss concerns about black female employment, or that the city shouldn’t try to address this challenge. But rather than trying to shoehorn a different policy goal into a program that’s highly effective at reducing violence, we should target summer jobs at the individuals who are most likely to benefit from them, and utilize other tools (like job training programs, community colleges, other private sector partnerships) to address longer-term unemployment.

2. Add this to the long, long list of ways we’re still recovering from the impact of the pandemic.

3. It also probably didn’t help that the Mayor delayed the release of a budget and then tried to ram through an initial version without much partnership with the council. A longer timeline and real visibility into city expenses might have made it easier to get a deal with Alders skeptical of the city’s topline costs but open to funding more youth jobs.

4. Examples include: Adding HR positions to navigate a Kafkaesque hiring process that we should simplify instead of running more resources through, and bumping up the Streets and Sanitation budget by 50% even though the department claims to have gotten much more efficient at key processes like tree trimming.

5. This issue hasn’t popped up in the national discourse as much thanks to the Federal Government’s ability to run prolonged deficits, and the wider set of programs progressives feel more comfortable targeting for cuts (defense spending, agriculture subsidies, etc.). But at the state and local level, governments have to balance the books. In an environment of rising interest rates and less federal aid, an unwillingness to make cuts will start to translate into an inability to make new investments.