STRAINS CHICAGO BUSINESS
A STRAINED FAMILY BRAND
Saint Fritz of Iscariot, the guy who betrayed nice folks like Chicagoans, and enjoyed it. Definitely not going to Heaven.
Cook County Democrats Finally Realize Strangling the Tax Base Might Be Bad Politics
In a long-overdue act of political triage, the Cook County Democratic Party has yanked its support from Assessor Fritz Kaegi, whose crusade for tax fairness has left a trash heap of vacant buildings, decimated valuations, and institutional investors shunning Illinois like it's Detroit.
Instead, the party is backing Patrick Hynes—a man whose core appeal appears to be that he doesn’t treat every underperforming office building like a Midtown Manhattan cash cow. “Kaegi may have been right on paper,” said one party insider, “but it turns out you probably shouldn't collect taxes on properties you’ve just driven into foreclosure.”
For commercial real estate owners still paying full freight on half-empty buildings, the news landed like a cautious “high-five”. “It’s about damn time,” said a River North landlord who asked to remain anonymous so their lender wouldn’t know they’re still alive. “We’ve been underwriting taxes like they’re ransom demands for your favorite child. At this point I’d rather lease space to a drunken Romanian circus troop than try to explain Kaegi’s methodology to another investor.” Vacancy-adjusted value? Unrecognized Transaction comps? For years, the only certainty has been uncertainty—and a soul crushing tax bill that felt more like water-boarding than policy.
Fritz Kaegi’s romantic delusion that everything has hidden value didn’t start in public office—it started behind a row of used cars at Campus Motors. His old boss, who still winces at the memory, recalls: “The kid saw hidden value in everything. He’d swear a dented Toyota Corolla was a ‘heritage mileage edition’ and somehow get someone to buy it. Cars came back all the time. But he never stopped pitching. Eventually, we had to let him go.”
As a Boy Scout, Fritz once gave a troop presentation on his sand collection—dozens of meticulously labeled jars of sand from playgrounds, parking lots, and a Little League dugout. “He said they were ‘ancient deposits of historical relevance,’” his Scoutmaster recalled. “It was gravel. He was dead serious.”
While Assessor Fritz Kaegi has become the public face of property tax misery, the real culprit is Governor Pritzker—chief steward of Illinois’ pension inferno and architect of the state’s favorite fiscal strategy: raise property taxes until the building owners go bankrupt. With billions in pension promises and nowhere near the money to pay them, Pritzker keeps feeding the fire while pretending Kaegi lit the match.
Now, in a dazzling act of political jiu-jitsu, Pritzker has floated the idea of investing Kaegi’s entire pension in a boarded-up State Street retail property—just so the assessor can personally experience the tax death-spiral he helped create. When asked for comment, the governor was busy removing 23 toilets from his newly purchased “one-bedroom” penthouse condominium.
The Democratic Party seems to have finally noticed—whether it’s too late to repair investor trust is another story entirely.