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Posted on 10/30/2026 3:59:37 AM PDT by DFG
In 2019, Evanston, Illinois, a Cook County city, announced it would provide $20 million in racial reparations to black people. The city has made $7 million in illegal racial payments, but is being sued for racial discrimination, and its financial problems are leading to a 9% property tax hike.
The whopping $5 million tax increase includes an 8.9% property tax hike, a 25% water rate increase, and a doubling the natural gas tax, which will help push local residents out of their homes, and ironically, the homeowners most likely to be pushed out as a result will be black.
The crushing hikes also include a variety of other Chicago taxes, including a shopping bag tax, a streaming tax, a rideshare tax, and then perhaps, as the Beatles suggested, a foot tax.
Mayor Daniel Biss, the city’s ultra-woke leader and perennial candidate, currently the Democrat nominee for the Illinois 9th congressional district, with an academic history of retracted papers and a relationship with an undergrad behind him, argued in favor of the illegal racial reparations that “it’s something that we’re enormously proud of. I think it’s an important step, one might argue a partial step or an inadequate step, but still a really important step, toward both, on a factual level, reckoning with our past.”
The first step to reckoning with the past would be by acknowledging actual historical facts.
Illinois was never a slave state and one of the first acts of the pre-constitutional Confederation Congress was to pass the Northwest Ordinance which in Article VI laid out that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.” Evanston was spun off from Northwestern University, whose Methodist leaders were vehement opponents of slavery, and the city only became incorporated during the Civil War and never had any slaves.
Its only slaves today are its homeowners.
But the illegal racial reparations helped Biss build a platform for higher office and has now entangled the city in an extended civil rights battle even as it’s struggling to pay its bills.
Descendants of former white homeowners sued Evanston, and, represented by Judicial Watch, complained that they had been barred from applying for the racial grants. Evanston’s lawyers retorted that they hadn’t tried to apply for them while their lawyers pointed out that the grants were only open to black people and the judge agreed that it would have been “futile” to expect white people to apply for grants that the city had already said they were racially ineligible for.
Two years later, the DOJ has joined the lawsuit. ”Handing out money based on race… is not the answer. It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division warned Evanston.
Apart from the cost of the litigation, Evanston will potentially be on the hook for having to hand out similar $25,000 grants to the descendants of white homeowners if it loses the case.
And sizable fines for engaging in racial discrimination.
Evanston’s woke spending sprees are now putting financial pressure on city residents.
Apart from a potential $20 million in racial reparations and the resulting federal civil rights lawsuit, there is also the socialist ‘Guaranteed Minimum Income’ of $500 a month to 100 people that Evanston committed to back in 2021, which comes out to around $600,000 a year.
A ‘Guaranteed Minimum Income’ also means guaranteed maximum tax hikes.
The current budget also lists assorted woke policies such as a climate plan with “100% renewable electricity” from solar panels and wind turbines, 25% electric cars for the government and “100 climate resilience projects”. A few million for racial welfare, a few million for climate graft, and suddenly Evanston is in the hole and needs to raise property taxes by 8.9%.
And instead of cutting any of the woke programs, taxes are being pushed even higher.
The formal proposed tax hike comes after the median property tax bill in Evanston was already up 5% this year and local homeowners are struggling with the high cost of living.
“We cannot, as a default, keep coming back to the taxpayers for more money,” Alderwoman Clare Kelly protested. “People are leaving the city and we need to tighten our belts.”
Even though the racial reparations program had been advanced to supposedly remedy past discrimination against black residents, it’s the black residents who keep leaving because they can’t afford Evanston. The $25,000 racial reparations grants and $6,000 guaranteed minimum income being handed out to some black people are not nearly enough to offset the high costs.
Evanston has been pivoting towards housing projects and urban density solutions which puts the city on track to mirror the usual urban divide seen in cities like New York City and Los Angeles where no one can afford to live except the upper class and the welfare class.
And that would wipe out black homeowners in the city.
Not only have racial reparations failed to protected black homeowners, but they have added additional litigation costs. The disastrous racial reparations program was pushed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: a radical foundation set up with the hijacked wealth of the conservative Republican whose $6.1 billion endowment has been used to promote socialist policies across the country.
But it’s not Mellon or its $6.1 billion endowment that’s on the hook: local homeowners are.
Meanwhile, the racial reparations program continues with a National Reparations Town Hall, a Reparations Repair Expo, a Reparations Program Contractor group, a Reparations Educational Working Group, a Reparations Committee Economic Working Group, and an Economic Development Kickstarter Program with racial payouts of up to $3,000.
And taxes are shooting up 9%.
If Evanston really wanted to help black homeowners, it would make life more affordable, instead of driving homeowners out of their homes to fund higher taxes to achieve ‘equity’.
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“First City to Pass Reparations Raises Property Taxes 9%”
The day for this is long past. British slave owners were paid for each slave they emancipated back in the day. It could have averted the Civil War. No, this ship has sailed.
White liberals that voted for this total lunacy deserve this.
Liquor stores, nail shops and wig shops, should profit nicely.
That’s a huge increase in taxes. Sure couldn’t blame anyone for packing up & moving away from there; actually from Illinois altogether.
Seems like what they are really looking for is “equity of poverty” & by golly, they just are well on the way to accomplishing that.
as the Beatles suggested, a foot tax.
When I saw that, I was intrigued to find out what nonsense this was. Unfortunately I read through the garbage article and couldn’t find a dang on thing. I wanted to have a good laugh this morning on this foot tax but alas, they had nothing to say about it.
We have been paying out repartitions since 1965. Its called Welfare and all its many cousins.
LOL! If 9% appears too small. Be careful I don’t tax it all. Cause I’m the Taxman.
Do the people get to vote on tax levies or are they imposed?
58% white
15% black
https://www.city-data.com/city/Evanston-Illinois.html
Self hating whites I guess.
What no riot taxes?.
From a Brave seach:
“Evanston, Illinois is the first U.S. city to implement a publicly funded reparations program, distributing $25,000 in cash or housing assistance exclusively to Black residents and their descendants who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969. The program, funded by cannabis sales and real estate taxes, has paid out over $5 million to more than 300 individuals to date.
The initiative is currently facing significant legal challenges. In June 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice moved to intervene in a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch and non-Black residents, arguing the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and the Fair Housing Act by using race as the sole eligibility criterion without requiring proof of individual discrimination. A federal judge recently allowed the DOJ to join the case, seeking to block the program and order civil penalties, while Evanston officials maintain the payments are a necessary remedy for historical housing segregation and redlining.”
Failing people.
Evanston, IL, home of the “Christian Socialist” Francis Willard, who “framed the right to vote as the “Home Protection” ballot by arguing that women needed the vote to pass temperance laws. She managed to convince hundreds of thousands of women to join the radical fight for women’s suffrage.” (1870s)
It’s a lyric from the song “Taxman.”
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