The 78 Gets $425 Million. Transit Gets Nothing.

Mayor Brandon Johnson proposed a $425 million tax increment financing subsidy for The 78 at today's City Council meeting. Here's the breakdown, per the Sun-Times:

• $199 million — public structures, plazas, and open space

• $104 million — road infrastructure along LaSalle, 13th, 14th, and 15th Streets

• $30 million — river wall improvements

• $11 million — Clark Street improvements

• ~$81 million — utilities, site prep, and other infrastructure

Notice anything missing?

The $425M TIF subsidy breakdown for The 78. Every dollar goes to roads, plazas, river walls, or utilities. Transit: nothing. Source: Chicago Sun-Times, June 17, 2026.

In a city where the CTA is suing the federal government to get $2 billion in frozen transit funding restored, where the Red Line Extension groundbreaking happened just two months ago with financing still in legal jeopardy, where the RTA faced a $230 million shortfall going into this year — the city just proposed nearly a half-billion dollars in public infrastructure for a 62-acre South Loop megaproject and allocated exactly zero dollars to getting people there by transit.

What TIF Money Can and Can't Do

To be fair — and this matters — TIF money is legally constrained. The Roosevelt/Clark TIF district that covers The 78 was created specifically to fund on-site and adjacent infrastructure to make the land developable. It isn't a general transit fund. The City of Chicago doesn't directly fund the CTA from its capital budget either; that runs through the RTA and its own capital program, currently a $9.25 billion five-year plan funded by state, federal, and bond sources.

So when the city proposes $425 million for The 78 infrastructure and nothing for transit, it's not technically robbing the CTA. The money couldn't have gone to the CTA anyway under the rules governing this TIF district.

That structural separation is precisely the problem.

The 78 is being positioned as a transformative neighborhood — a literal new community area, Chicago's 78th. The Fire FC stadium opens there in 2028 for a reported 22,000 fans per match. Related Midwest envisions thousands of residential units, millions of square feet of office and retail, and an innovation campus anchored by the Discovery Partners Institute. When all that's done, how do people get there?

The Transit Access Problem Is Not New

This question has been on the table since 2018, when the Roosevelt/Clark TIF was first created. At the time, Related Midwest explicitly floated the idea of a new CTA Red Line station at 15th Street as part of the development vision. Curbed Chicago reported on it as a project that would "knit together" downtown with the South Loop, Chinatown, Bronzeville, and Pilsen.

That CTA station was never funded. It still isn't. The 78's own website lists transit access as: CTA buses (routes 22, 29, 62, 146, 130, and others) and Metra stations — none of which are close. The nearest Red Line stop is Roosevelt, more than half a mile from the southern end of the site.

A 22,000-seat stadium with a half-mile walk to the nearest rapid transit. In Chicago. In 2026.

A Chicago Tribune opinion piece from last year floated the idea of a "CTA Super Loop" — an underground transit connector that would run north from The 78 through Union Station and Ogilvie — as the only serious solution to the site's connectivity problem. It went nowhere. The city's $425 million proposal today includes nothing for it.

The Numbers in Context

The original TIF district approved in 2018 authorized up to $551 million in future tax increment for The 78's infrastructure. Mayor Johnson's $425 million proposal represents a negotiated reduction — Related Midwest CEO Curt Bailey had promised a "substantial reduction" from the original figure. So the administration is framing this as fiscal restraint.

Maybe. But $425 million is still the single largest TIF commitment in Chicago history, by a significant margin. For comparison, the Foundry Park (formerly Lincoln Yards) project just received a $201.5 million TIF approval from a city panel earlier this month — itself a record-setting deal that generated controversy. The 78 is twice that.

All of it — every dollar — goes to roads, plazas, river walls, and utilities. None of it creates a single new transit connection.

This pattern isn't unique to The 78. We've written about how Chicago's infrastructure spending consistently subsidizes cars while transit funding gets treated as someone else's job. And as we laid out in our breakdown of stadium financing, "public-private partnership" in Chicago usually means the public pays for everything surrounding the venue while the private party builds the venue itself.

The Structural Argument

Here's what the structural separation between city capital funding and transit funding actually produces in practice: the city can pour hundreds of millions of public dollars into making a site ready for development, and transit access to that site remains entirely someone else's problem.

It's the CTA's problem. It's the RTA's problem. It's the state's problem. It's the federal government's problem — which, right now, means it's a lawsuit's problem, because the Trump administration froze $2 billion in CTA funding in October 2025 and a federal judge only temporarily ordered it restored in March.

Nobody's problem, in practice, means it doesn't get solved.

This is not unique to The 78. It's the same dynamic that produced Wrigley Field with no parking and somehow survived. It's the same dynamic that gave Lincoln Yards $201.5 million in TIF money this month with traffic concerns explicitly described as "unresolved." Chicago builds things and then figures out how people get to them, or doesn't.

The difference at The 78 is scale. This is a planned neighborhood of tens of thousands of residents and workers, anchored by a major sports venue, built on a site with no rapid transit access, backed by the largest TIF subsidy in the city's history. The transit gap isn't a footnote. It's a fundamental planning failure that's being papered over with the word "infrastructure."

What Would It Actually Cost?

A new Red Line station is expensive. The CTA's new stations on the Red Line Extension — at 103rd, 111th, and 115th Streets — are baked into a $5.75 billion project cost. Industry benchmarks for a single new urban rail station in an active system typically run $200–$400 million depending on complexity.

That's not cheap. But it's also not $425 million for roads and plazas.

The city didn't have to fund transit directly out of this TIF. But it could have used this negotiation — which reduced the subsidy from $551 million to $425 million, freeing up $126 million in projected future increment — to require Related Midwest and Joe Mansueto to contribute to a transit fund, or to coordinate with the RTA on a funding structure, or at minimum to condition the TIF approval on a credible transit access plan being in place before the stadium opens in 2028.

None of that appears to have happened. The proposal went to City Council today with no transit component and no transit condition attached.

What Happens Next

The $425 million TIF proposal still needs to clear the Community Development Commission, the City Council Finance Committee, and the full City Council. That's a meaningful amount of runway for aldermen to ask hard questions — or to wave it through like most TIF approvals do.

The Fire FC stadium at The 78 opens in 2028. The Red Line Extension, even with its federal funding fight resolved, won't reach the Far South Side until sometime in the 2030s at the earliest. A 15th Street Red Line station for The 78 has no funding, no timeline, and no champion.

What The 78 will have in 2028 is a $650 million privately-funded stadium, $425 million in public infrastructure investment, and a bus.

Make up your own mind about whether that's the right set of priorities. I've made up mine.

This piece was researched and drafted with AI assistance and edited by the ward51 team. Primary source: Chicago Sun-Times, June 17, 2026. TIF district background via the City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development.