Do Chicago’s TIF-subsidized deals deliver the jobs they promise? The city now publishes a scorecard that lets anyone check, deal by deal: a file of “The number of projected jobs created versus the actual jobs created for new redevelopment agreements in the Reporting Year,” drawn from the TIF annual reports. Read whole — 110 rows across report years 2022 through 2025, effectively one per agreement per year with a single filed exception noted below — it shows the 2025 reports projecting 1,688 permanent jobs across their 39 rows while the actual column sums to 543, about a third of the projection, with the reports still arriving yearly. And the ledger cuts both ways: one Harrison/Central agreement projected 70 jobs and reports 130, and a Kinzie Industrial Corridor organization that projected zero reports 59.
TIF Annual Report — Job and Increment Creation (vci7-3z5g), 110 rows, report years 2022–2025, retrieved September 5, 2026; the whole file was downloaded and every figure recomputed · rows are agreement-by-report-year entries (one agreement-year is split across two rows, as noted in the piece) — 35 of the file’s 50 agreements appear in more than one year, so totals on this page are within a single report year, never across the file · the district-by-district annual reports themselves live on the city’s TIF reports pageHow this file has to be read
The portal describes the rows as covering new redevelopment agreements in the reporting year, yet the same agreements recur: BJ Wright Preservation LP files in 2022, 2024, and 2025 with the same 150-job projection, and the Kinzie Industrial Corridor’s biggest increment line appears three years running — spelled “mHUB” in two of them and “M-Hub” in the third, printed here as filed each time. We state both facts and adjudicate neither. The consequence is arithmetic: summing the whole file would count the same promise twice or three times, so every total below stays inside one report year. One further quirk, as filed: Encuentro Square’s 2023 report year occupies two rows — the jobs columns on one line, the increment column on the other. An actual column, likewise, is a snapshot as of that report — 93 of the 110 rows show zero actual permanent jobs, and this page draws no conclusion from a zero on a deal whose buildings may not exist yet.
Four report years, summed within their lines
| Report year | Rows | Jobs projected | Jobs actual | Temp. projected | Temp. actual | Increment projected | Increment actual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 8 | 106 | 0 | 0 | 0 | $10,665,550 | $0 |
| 2023 | 26 | 838.5 | 0 | 1,839 | 446 | $21,144,708 | $218 |
| 2024 | 37 | 498 | 197 | 2,468 | 1,009 | $31,689,003 | $0 |
| 2025 | 39 | 1,688 | 543 | 3,498 | 1,316 | $28,636,238 | $3,557,558 |
The 2025 reports carry the biggest slate: 39 rows, 1,688 permanent jobs projected, 3,498 temporary; $28,636,238 in projected increment against $3,557,558 actual. The 2022 and 2023 report years’ permanent-actual columns sum to zero — a reading of those snapshots, not a verdict on those deals.
The deals that beat their own line
Seventeen rows report actual permanent jobs above zero, and a handful outrun their projections. B.U.I.L.D Incorporated (Harrison/Central) projected 70 permanent jobs and reports 130, in both its 2024 and 2025 rows. Covenant House Illinois Inc. (Kinzie Industrial Corridor) projected zero and reports 59, twice. M-Hub — same corridor — projected zero and reports 30 in 2025. American Blues Theater (Lincoln Avenue) projected 6 and reports 11. And on the money side, Yellow Banana’s 71st/Stony Island line reports $1,152,928 of actual increment against a $508,235 projection, with its 63rd/Pulaski line at $81,104 against $39,322. The file holds overshoots as plainly as it holds zeros.
The big promises on the 2025 reports
The largest permanent-jobs projection in the 2025 report year belongs to Encuentro Square Redevelopment (Pulaski Industrial Corridor) at 350 — the same agreement whose 2023 jobs line projected exactly 2.5 permanent jobs, a fraction we print as filed. Second is a row whose district column reads simply “0” and whose agreement line is an address, 4715 N. Western Avenue, at 209 jobs — as filed, again. Third, BJ Wright Preservation LP’s standing 150. On the increment side, M-Hub’s $8,296,906 projection leads, ahead of 4300 Roosevelt LLC’s $7,466,344. Thirty-eight district labels appear across the file in all.
- Source: the city’s TIF Annual Report — Job and Increment Creation file (vci7-3z5g): 110 rows, effectively one per redevelopment agreement per report year — with the disclosed Encuentro Square 2023 exception — 2022–2025, retrieved September 5, 2026. The whole file was downloaded and every figure recomputed; the quoted description line is the portal’s own.
- Grain: 35 of the file’s 50 agreements (keyed on TIF number plus normalized agreement name) appear in two or more report years, so all sums are within a single report year; spelling variants and the district label 0 are printed as filed.
- What a zero means: nothing, by itself — actual columns are snapshots as of each annual report, and this page passes no delivery verdict in either direction. The deal-level detail lives in the district annual reports on the city’s TIF reports page.
- Not here: no tax rate, no program terms, no assessment of any TIF district’s merits; agreement names are business and organization entities as the file prints them.
Computed by KCM Desk from the city’s TIF annual-report scorecard file, retrieved September 5, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.