Chicago’s City Council Finance Committee voted this week to advance a $201.6 million tax increment financing subsidy for Foundry Park, a $3 billion mixed-use development planned for 31 acres along the Chicago River between Bucktown and Lincoln Park. The full City Council followed with its own vote the next day. It’s the same general stretch of riverfront land where, in 2019, the city approved roughly $900 million of a proposed $1.3 billion subsidy for Lincoln Yards, a project from developer Sterling Bay that collapsed under rising interest rates and pandemic-era demand before delivering much of anything. Sterling Bay surrendered the northern half of that site to a lender in March 2025.
The tax increment financing mechanism behind both deals, known as TIF, works by freezing the property tax revenue a district currently generates for schools and other city services at today’s level, then redirecting any future growth in that revenue, the “increment,” toward the subsidized project’s public infrastructure costs instead. Supporters describe it as capturing value a project itself creates; critics note it diverts decades of future tax growth away from general city and school funding. Both arguments applied to Lincoln Yards in 2019, and both apply to Foundry Park now, just at a considerably smaller scale.
That scale difference is the clearest sign of what changed. Foundry Park’s total infrastructure package, covering new roads, parks, a riverwalk expansion, and preparation of formerly industrial land, comes to about $235 million, with developers JDL Development and Kayne Anderson Real Estate covering roughly $33 million of that themselves and the city’s $201.6 million TIF subsidy covering the rest. Put differently, the new subsidy amounts to just over 25% of the $800 million in infrastructure work, including road, bridge, and mass transit improvements, that had originally been mandated as part of the full Lincoln Yards plan before it fell apart. Foundry Park itself only covers the northern half of that original footprint; the southern portion, recently purchased by Novak Construction, has no public plans yet…