In the fall of 2019, leaders at The Chicago Community Trust and Cook County Land Bank Authority reached out to Christopher R. Berry, then the director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the Harris School of Public Policy (CMF). Both were familiar with Berry’s research on the impact of property tax inequities.
“People at the Land Bank and the Trust were interested in what happens to people who can’t pay their property taxes,” recalled Berry, the William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor at Harris and director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. “They were concerned that the Cook County property tax sale system caused vacancy and blight and created barriers to neighborhood revitalization efforts. That’s not an aspect of the system that anyone had really studied before. They urged us to look into the system here.”
Supported by a grant from the Trust, Berry and the Principal Researcher at CMF, Maxwell Schmidt, got to work.
About four years later, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has signed a bill that will, among several changes to the Illinois Property Tax Code, speed up the time it takes to move tax-delinquent property in disinvested communities to productive use—reform that was grounded in and sparked by CMF’s research.
“What our work did was allow us to take an evidence-based perspective and show that it wasn’t just anecdotes or observations that indicated the system wasn’t working,” Berry said. “Our research showed that it is in fact not working and allowed us to pinpoint exactly the ways in which it is not working. That evidence was compelling enough to persuade the media, public, and policymakers to want to act on it.”
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This story was first published by Harris Public Policy.
