Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi lost big where property taxes in city, suburbs soared

The frustration Cook County homeowners feel about rising property taxes came out loud and clear in Tuesday’s race for county assessor — losing incumbent Fritz Kaegi performed the poorest in areas of the county hardest hit by rising property taxes, helping pave the way for Lyons Township Assessor Pat Hynes’ surprising victory.

Last year, Chicago's median residential tax bill rose 16.7%, to $4,457 — the largest percentage increase in at least 30 years. It was the third year in a row median homeowner taxes increased by more than 15%, according to the Cook County treasurer’s office. It came as taxpayers were asked to pay $872 million more in taxes.

Many of the wards where tax bills rose the most backed Hynes. He netted 4,717 more votes than Kaegi across the five wards that saw median property tax bills increase the most last year.

In the 24th Ward, where bills skyrocketed the most — the median homeowner tax bill increased nearly $2,000, about 102% — Kaegi won just 34% of the vote while Hynes came away with nearly 66%.

The 16th Ward, which encompasses the Chicago Lawn, Englewood, Gage Park, New City and West Englewood neighborhoods, saw a 92% median increase in tax bills. Hynes landed more than 68% of the vote in that ward, compared to Kaegi’s roughly 32%.

Overall, Kaegi won just over 50% of the city’s votes.

Even more stark was the 35,000-vote gap between Kaegi and Hynes in the suburbs, where property tax increases were even more pronounced, and where Hynes markedly outperformed Kaegi.

In Cook County's northern suburbs, where homeowners picked up 60% of the new tax burden, property taxes grew by 3.7%, compared to a 3.1% increase in the south suburbs, according to the treasurer’s office.

In far south suburban University Park, which saw a median tax bill increase of nearly 255% in 2023, Hynes garnered nearly 70% of the vote, more than twice what Kaegi got. The gap between Hynes and Kaegi was roughly the same in Markham and Dixmoor, which saw 2023 bills increase by 89.5% and 76.7% respectively.

All three towns came out for Hynes with bigger margins than his hometown Western Springs, where he got 65% of the vote.

The county uses a triennial reassessment schedule, meaning a third of the county is reassessed every year. The south suburbs were hit with increases in 2024 while the city saw them in 2025. North suburbs will be reassessed next year.

“The work ahead is about fairness and justice for those who have been harmed over the last eight years,” Hynes said while accepting the nomination Tuesday.

The blame game

Kaegi maintains he isn’t to blame for rising property taxes and instead points to the Cook County Board of Review.

“Our property tax appeal system, such as it is, is a legacy of those machine politics,” Kaegi said moments after conceding the election. “But that fight doesn’t end tonight, it’s bigger than one office and bigger than any one person.”

During the pandemic, he modified assessments for homeowners based on expected unemployment and predictions that market values would go down. Instead, they went up. Hynes called it an “unforced error.”

Homeowners would have, in theory, seen lower bills. A University of Chicago study of assessments during his tenure concluded that Kaegi’s office made valuations more fair — reducing overassessments for lower-value homes and underassessments on higher-value homes.

But at the same time, the county's tax burden was shifting away from the city’s economic center amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Commercial value dropped as large businesses and wealthy land owners appealed assessments at higher rates to the Board of Review — and more successfully — ultimately shifting more of the tax burden onto low-income homeowners as they received cuts, according to a November Cook County treasurer’s office report and a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of five years of tax bills. Businesses’ tax bills dropped nearly 20% while residential bills increased by more than 16% during the 2021 to 2023 reassessment cycle.

Successful appeals by businesses, which appealed 64% of the time, caused their collective tax bills to drop by $3.3 billion, or 12.5%, while residential tax bills jumped by $1.9 billion, or 6.9%, as homeowners appealed just 27% of the time. Businesses won far larger assessed value reductions while more than 250,000 households saw tax bills jump 25% or more in the same period, according to data from the Cook County assessor’s office last year.

Impact on homeowners

The Cook County treasurer's office found that in Gage Park, a low-income, majority-Latino neighborhood where only 5.2% of homeowners appealed their assessments, tax bills rose nearly 23% after appeals. In parts of North Center, a high-income, majority-white neighborhood where 60% of homeowners challenged their assessment, tax bills rose less than 15%.

Pat Quinn — a former Illinois governor and treasurer, and commissioner on what’s now the Cook County Board of Review — said more needs to be done to inform low-income homeowners of their right to appeal. Kaegi’s office was holding 200 outreach events per year by the end of his tenure.

“People were paying more than they should, residential especially, but they didn't know they could appeal,” Quinn said.

The combination helped lead to the whiplash affecting homeowners now.

As a factor in property taxes, the COVID shift was “dramatic,” said former Cook County Assessor James Houlihan. He campaigned as a reformist candidate like Kaegi, and they faced parallel issues. In 2003, the year after Houlihan was first elected, valuations skyrocketed — but Houlihan worked with the Illinois General Assembly to pass a seven-year cap on property tax increases.

Houlihan, a protege of Hynes’ uncle — former Cook County Assessor Tom Hynes, who also served as president of the Illinois Senate — said the cap provided relief to taxpayers at the time, and could have made a difference now.

“The COVID impact on Downtown value was real, and had to be recognized because you follow the market,” Houlihan said. “It’s sad there was such finger-pointing that it distracted from a real discussion of the underlying issues, and part of that related to the consultants hired by the county to update and improve the system. Unfortunately that ran into the very serious problem of implementation.”

Former Cook County Clerk David Orr defended the incumbent, and said Hynes was part of the Cook County Democratic Party’s “machine” system “nourished” by former Ald. Ed Burke and Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

“[There are] some mistakes when there’s 1.8 million parcels of property,” Orr said. “He’s done so much in the direction of fairness that they wanted him out... It’s the old machine leaders for the wrong reason. The non-endorsement of Fritz put us back in the toilet.”

No easy fixes

As he took a victory lap at his election night party in Hodgkins, Hynes said his commitment to the people was simple.

“We will make property taxes more accurate, more equitable and more transparent,” he said.

But is the job ahead truly simple — or even in the hands of the assessor?

The legislation Kaegi has championed, circuit breaker bills, which would trip tax relief if bills rose too high, has stalled several times in Illinois House committees. He had also pushed for automatic renewals of exemptions like the senior freeze.

Hynes has said he wants to make development in the city easier to widen the tax base and take pressure off homeowners, in addition to getting better data to make assessments more accurate. Quinn said it “sounds good if you say it fast.”

Quinn said the system, which had “gone out of control for decades,” had “defied reform” and needed something larger.

His proposed fix is a 3% tax on individual income over $1 million, which would put at least an additional $4.5 billion in Illinois’ coffers every year, a 2024 state estimate showed. That money, Quinn said, should go toward tax relief.

“It’s a method of giving property tax relief to some people,” Quinn said. “This system will not be reformed unless the voters do it. If the incumbents are any sign, it’s not going to get nibbled away with this or that statute that doesn’t deal with the universal problem that people need relief.”

Houlihan says a key fix entails solving the problem of a school funding system that relies on property tax revenue, a fight Houlihan has been waging since his days as assessor, which ended in 2010.

“We’re coming out of it now, but [COVID’s impact on property values] shifted an incredible burden onto homes that were being reassessed,” Houlihan said. “It requires the same treatment and capping residential assessments over time to let it grow as a solution... [But] the fundamental solution is changing the tax structure itself.”

Contributing: Nicole Jeanine Johnson, WBEZ