How Chicago Real Estate Donated in November Election

Property tax lawyers, building owners and other real estate players are throwing their support behind Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers Jr. — a known Fritz Kaegi critic — in his reelection campaign this November.

Real estate also put some money into the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and the first-ever races for the Chicago School Board. But Rogers’ recent donors featured the most real estate names, from small dollar donations to a $5,000 contribution from the Building Owners and Managers Association Chicago.

The bulk of real estate industry donations to Rogers’ campaign came from property tax attorneys and appraisers, but a few Chicago-area brokers also chipped in as well as Sterling Bay’s Andy Gloor and Keating Crown, who donated $1,500 each, according to Illinois State Board of Elections data. Sterling Bay did not respond to a request for comment.

The Neighborhood Building Owners Alliance PAC, an interest group representing local building owners, gave $2,500 to Rogers’ reelection campaign.

Aron Bornstein, head of the NBOA PAC, said their support of Rogers came from a desire to maintain the independence of the Board of Review as an appellate body that taxpayers use to appeal the assessed value of their homes and, with that, their property tax bills.

Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi “has attempted to use his vast personal resources to reshape the board with his own hand-picked commissioners, undermining the independent oversight taxpayers deserve,” BOMA/Chicago Executive Director Farzin Parang said.

In the March primary, Kaegi loaned a total of $680,000 to a new super PAC that supported the campaign of Rogers’ challenger, Larecia Tucker, according to reporting by the Chicago Tribune and Crain’s.

Rogers won out in that challenge, but Bornstein said the NBOA is concerned with Kaegi’s previous donations to try to unseat incumbent Board of Review candidates such as Republican Commissioner Dan Patlak, who served in his role until 2020.

“When it happened again with Larry Rogers, we were very worried about that because obviously the vast increases (in assessed values) that have gone on would be so detrimental to the NBOA’s membership and to the Chicago real estate community in general that we want to keep the board as independent from the assessor,” Bornstein said.

This tension flows in both directions. Rogers said Friday that, if reelected, he “plans to work very hard to get (Kaegi) out of office.”

Rogers also has significant personal resources. His largest source of campaign support this year was self-funding. He had loaned himself $850,000 this year as of the end of September, according to the State Board of Elections.

Issues of focus for Rogers include increasing awareness of the appeals process among homeowners in the 3rd District, particularly those hit hardest by overvaluations of their homes on the South and West Sides of the city, and providing relief to business owners hit hard by inaccurate valuations of commercial properties, he said.

He is interested in “broadening our authority at the agency to affect value” beyond his typical role of comparing assessed values to comparable homes in the area to check the fairness of each assessment, Rogers said.

“A simple example would be a block of bungalows that we find has been over-assessed in totality, but we only have one appellant, meaning only one person filed,” Rogers said. “If we could expand our jurisdiction to correct the values for all of those properties, we could provide more widespread relief.”

Rogers’ sole opponent is Nico Tsatsoulis, a Libertarian candidate who has not reported any donations to the Illinois State Board of Elections as part of his view that “we shouldn’t be spending money in politics.” He has spent his campaign talking to “regular folks” and putting some of his own resources into his website and social media.

After running for assessor in 2022 and losing to Kaegi by 54 percentage points, Tsatsoulis threw his hat in the ring for the Board of Review Commissioner Race earlier this year.

Like Rogers, Tsatsoulis is staunchly against Kaegi’s approach to his role as Cook County Assessor.

“We are both anti-Kaegi’s, but Larry Rogers is part of the broken system, so he’s fighting Kaegi within the system, within the parameters of the system,” Tsatsoulis said. “They are basically fighting over who’s going to pay more. Is it going to be the residential property owners, or is it going to be the commercial property owners?

“I’m fighting for that, but also for different things,” he continued. “I’m fighting for the tax levy — that it’s too high. I’m fighting for the fact that there is no relationship between the value of our properties and the underlying tax. It can be anything.”

His campaign priorities push the boundaries of the Board of Review Commissioner’s jurisdiction. They include advocating for a 1 percent cap on the property tax rate in a proposal similar to California’s Proposition 13 — something that Bornstein said is highly unlikely in a state like Illinois that has some of the highest property taxes in the country.

But Bornstein, too, lamented Mayor Brandon Johnson’s recent plan to raise property taxes by 4 percent to fix a hole in the budget.

Without checks in place, “it becomes an easy way for politicians to generate new funds, and it comes on the back of our membership, and that’s, of course, passed down to the tenants who live or run businesses out of our properties,” Bornstein said.

Beyond the Board of Review

The NBOA also endorsed candidates in nine of the 10 districts where candidates are running for Chicago School Board, and financially supported a handful of them, Bornstein said.

The candidates they endorsed include: Michelle Pierre (District 1), Bruce Leon (District 2), Carlos Rivas (District 3), Ellen Rosenfeld (District 4), Andre Smith (District 6), Eva Villalobos (District 7), Angel Gutierrez (District 8), Miquel Lewis (District 9) and Karin Norington-Reaves (District 10).

The NBOA had long discussions about whether to get involved in the local school board races, as there are many issues that do not directly concern the organization, like bussing or school sports, Bornstein said. Its stake in the game, though, comes back to property taxes and, more specifically, tax dollars spent by Chicago Public Schools, he said.

“We want centrist, moderate people on that school board who are going to say, ‘Hey, we can’t just constantly go to the property tax, to the owners of the city of Chicago and ask them to fund these things endlessly. We need to rein in spending, and we need to do it in a way that gets results for our schools,’” Bornstein said.

In the presidential race, Illinois real estate leaned heavily toward Vice President Kamala Harris. However, many in the industry chose to hedge their bets this election cycle by donating to both Harris’ campaign as well as the campaign of former president Donald Trump, pointing to a perception among industry folks that it will be a close race.