It's Not All Brandon’s Fault

The city has real problems. But let's be honest about who actually caused them.

Let me say something that’s probably going to make some people uncomfortable.

We have been too hard on Mayor Brandon Johnson. And I say that as someone who has plenty of critiques, as someone who lives and works in this city, and as someone who pays close attention to what our leadership is actually doing versus what the narrative says they’re doing.

Chicago has real problems. Nobody is disputing that. But somewhere along the way, we decided that every problem this city has ever had started on the day Brandon Johnson walked into City Hall. And that’s just not honest.

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Take the Bears.

The conversation about the Chicago Bears leaving Soldier Field for the suburbs has been in the air for years. Years before Johnson was mayor. George McCaskey was publicly scouting sites outside the city before Johnson even announced his candidacy. The lease, the stadium negotiations, the NFL’s interest in a new venue, none of that started in 2023. What started in 2023 was that Johnson was now the one holding the bag when a decision no one but the Bears’ ownership group controlled became final. He inherited a negotiation that was already broken, with an ownership group that had already mentally checked out of Chicago proper.

But when the Bears officially moved toward Arlington Heights, whose name was in every headline? Brandon Johnson.

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The same logic applies to youth gatherings downtown.

Every summer. Every single summer, for as long as I can remember, groups of young people have gathered on the Magnificent Mile, on the lakefront, near Millennium Park. Before Trends, it was groups gathering downtown, doing what immature young people do… This was happening under Rahm Emanuel. It was happening under Lori Lightfoot. It was happening under Mayor Daley. It will happen after whoever comes next. The way we talk about it, the frustration, the fear, the calls for a mayor to “do something” has always been louder than the actual understanding of why young people gather in public in the first place.

Young people gather because they are young people. They are immature. And granted, parents can and should do more, however, in a city where neighborhood resources have been stripped for decades, they go where there is life, light, and something to do. This is not an empty excuse. It’s causative, and that is not a Brandon Johnson problem. That is a generations-deep disinvestment problem that no one mayor created and no one mayor can solve in a single term.

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Now here is what I don’t hear nearly enough people talking about.

Violence in Chicago is down. Not dramatically. Not perfectly. But the trend line has been moving in the right direction. Youth jobs have been doubled under this administration. The city made real commitments to reducing youth unemployment, which, if you understand anything about the research on community safety, is one of the most direct levers a city has. My Chi My Future expanded programming, funding, and access for young people across the city. These are not small things. These are the kinds of investments that take years to show up in a data set, but they are the work that actually moves a city forward.

You would not know any of this from most of the coverage. You would think nothing good has happened. You would think Brandon Johnson has been mayor of a city in complete free fall, with no wins, no progress, no results worth naming.

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And I have to be honest about something else.

There is a pattern in who gets the hardest scrutiny in this city. Past mayors made significant mistakes, budget decisions that hamstrung neighborhoods for years, school closures that destabilized communities on the South and West Sides, infrastructure deals that benefited downtown while everywhere else waited, parking meters and skyways sold for payday loans. Some of those mayors are now celebrated as tough pragmatists. Some of those mayors have libraries, highways, and bridges named after them.

Brandon Johnson makes a budget decision, and it becomes a referendum on his entire fitness for leadership. Every misstep gets amplified and dissected in ways that were not applied to his predecessors with the same intensity. I am not saying he is beyond critique. He has not been perfect. I am saying we should be honest about who we choose to critique hardest, and ask ourselves whether the standard is being applied consistently.

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Here is the thing about leadership that nobody tells you until you’re standing in it.

Leadership means you get all of the blame and very little of the credit. It means you inherit 40 years of decisions you didn’t make, and you still have to answer for them. It means the things that go wrong on your watch carry your name, even when the root cause was planted long before you arrived. And it means the things that go right, the quiet wins, the trend lines bending in the right direction, the young people who got a job this summer and didn’t end up in a statistic, almost never come back to you.

That is the job. And it is a hard one.

I am not asking anyone to give Brandon Johnson a free pass. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. I am asking for the same standard we apply to everyone else who sits in that chair. I am asking us to be honest about what he inherited, what he has actually moved, and what this city was already dealing with long before his name was on the door.

Chicago deserves that kind of honesty. And frankly, so does he.