BAD KAT!
Progressive isn't enough.
You have to know Chicago.
Stop Importing Policies
That Don't Fit Illinois
Washington doesn't nee politician who learned about Chicago from a textbook. The 9th District has spent decades building something real, a progressive community with hard-won lessons about what actually works here. The 9th District deserves a representative who arrives knowing our cities, state, and neighborhoods. Not Kat Abughazaleh, who needs two years just to learn what the rest of us already know.
LET ILLINOIS REPRESENT ILLINOIS!
ima steal ur representation
She Read About the Housing Crisis. Chicago Lived It. Kat Abughazaleh's housing platform calls for co-sponsoring the Homes for All Act to build over eight million public housing units nationwide, reviving the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, and introducing legislation to have the Army Corps of Engineers lead the infrastructure development for new affordable housing. These are big, bold ideas, and in Texas cities, they might even make sense. But this ain't Dallas. This is Chicago, and Chicago has a very specific, very expensive, very painful relationship with exactly this approach, but we have a better solution. Chicago invented the skyscraper. It gave the world Frank Lloyd Wright, the Chicago School, and two UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Its early skyscrapers are currently under nomination for a third. So when a candidate proposes sending the Army Corps of Engineers to build mass public housing in our neighborhoods (the same approach that gave us Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes) it's not just bad policy. It's an insult to everything Chicago has already learned, and everything our architecture represents. Chicago Already Ran This Experiment Robert Taylor Homes was once the largest public housing project in the world — 28 high-rise towers housing 27,000 people along a two-mile stretch of the South Side, designed for half that number. Cabrini-Green packed 15,000 residents into 23 towers near the North Side lakefront. Both were built with exactly the kind of federal ambition Kat is proposing: centralized, government-directed, built fast and at scale. Both became symbols of concentrated poverty, disinvestment, and failure. Both were demolished at a cost of billions of dollars. In 2000, Chicago launched its $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation, promising to replace those towers with mixed-income communities. Twenty-five years later, over 100 acres of Chicago Housing Authority land sits vacant. Fewer than 8% of displaced families ever made it into the replacement units. At the current pace, housing experts project the transformation won't be complete for another 30 to 40 years. Sending the Army Corps of Engineers (a military infrastructure organization built for dams, levees, and disaster response) to build housing in Rogers Park and Edgewater isn't a new idea. It's a repackaged version of the exact federal overreach that Chicago spent the last half-century trying to undo. What Actually Works: Transit-Oriented Development The picture next to this section tells the story better than any policy document: a Metra transit-oriented development in Glenview (mixed-use, human-scaled, walkable, designed to complement its surroundings rather than dominate them). That's the model. Chicago's Connected Communities Ordinance expanded transit-oriented development zones to a half-mile around every CTA and Metra station in the city. Since 2016, over 144 transit-oriented developments containing more than 24,000 residential units have been approved citywide. These aren't luxury towers or public housing blocks, they're mixed-income buildings with ground-floor retail, designed by local architects who know the neighborhood, built where people already live and already ride. The 9th District has eleven Red Line stations. Every one of them is an opportunity to build affordable housing the right way: dense enough to make a dent in the shortage, human enough to complement the neighborhood, connected enough to eliminate car dependency, and designed by Chicago architects who understand the history of the streets they're building on. Section 8 Vouchers: Giving Families the Choice The other proven tool Kat's platform largely ignores is the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, which lets families choose where they want to live in the private market rather than placing them in government-controlled buildings. Vouchers build mixed-income communities organically. They don't concentrate poverty. They don't require the Army Corps of Engineers. And they have decades of evidence behind them showing they work better than public housing towers in virtually every measurable outcome for families. The 9th District's affordable housing crisis is real. Rogers Park is 75% renters. Rents have risen nearly 7% in a single year. Families are being displaced from buildings on Glenwood and Morse and Clark every month. Those families deserve a representative who knows the difference between a policy that sounds bold and a policy that actually builds homes and who trusts Chicago's architects, Chicago's transit system, and Chicago's hard-won experience to lead the way. This City Deserves Architecture, Not Barracks Chicago is not just any American city when it comes to the built environment. The Robie House in Hyde Park and Unity Temple in Oak Park are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, recognized alongside the Taj Mahal and Machu Picchu as among the world's most significant cultural landmarks. AIA Chicago and Preservation Chicago are actively pursuing a UNESCO World Heritage designation for Chicago's Early Skyscrapers, buildings that literally invented the modern city. The 9th District itself sits within some of the most architecturally significant transit corridors in America. The Uptown neighborhood along the Red Line contains one of the densest concentrations of early 20th-century theater and commercial architecture in the Midwest. The Broadway and Wilson corridors have been the subject of detailed historic preservation transit-oriented development plans precisely because the architecture and the transit are inseparable, they were built together, and they must grow together. Army Corps-built housing doesn't complement that legacy. It erases it.
Housing: Transit is the Answer
She Means Well. But She's Only Talking to Part of the District Kat Abughazaleh's education platform spends five paragraphs defending universities from Trump — and she's right to do it. But when 27% of the 9th District's residents were born outside the United States, when Illinois is projected to be short nearly 15,000 nurses and 6,200 doctors by the end of this decade, and when AI is quietly erasing whole categories of office work that hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans depend on, a platform built around student debt cancellation and university protection isn't a workforce policy. It's a campaign talking point aimed at one slice of the electorate. Kat's education platform has five priorities: protecting public schools from defunding, establishing universal Pre-K, raising teacher salaries, canceling student debt and making college free, and defending universities from the Trump administration's attacks on academic freedom. Every one of those is a legitimate fight worth having. But read her platform closely and something is conspicuously absent: any serious policy for the majority of working people in the 9th District who will never set foot on a university campus, or who already have degrees the United States refuses to recognize. The Doctor Living in Rogers Park Who Can't Practice Medicine Right now, in Rogers Park, there is a man named Filipp Prikolab. He was a family care doctor in Moscow until 2019, when he left Russia for the United States. Today, he works as a medical assistant at Advocate Lutheran General. He is one of over 12,000 Illinois residents with an international medical degree they cannot use. The Migration Policy Institute predicts Illinois will be short 6,200 doctors by 2030. Meanwhile, over 12,000 Illinois residents possess international medical degrees they cannot use, according to Upwardly Global. Illinois is also projected to face a shortage of nearly 15,000 registered nurses by 2025, with the consequences falling hardest on communities with limited access to healthcare, making the nursing shortage a critical concern for health equity. These two facts live right next to each other and the math is not complicated. We have thousands of people in this district with the training, the skills, and the drive to fill one of our most urgent public health needs. What we lack is a federal policy that treats their credentials as real. Illinois took a meaningful step in 2023, passing legislation that creates an alternative pathway to full licensure for internationally trained physicians, replacing the residency requirement with two years of supervised practice in areas with unmet medical need. That's a state-level fix that Congress could supercharge with federal funding, streamlined credential evaluation timelines, and immigration pathways that match the workforce we actually need. Kat's platform does not mention this once. Canceling Debt Doesn't Help the Nurse's Aide on Devon Avenue Student debt cancellation is a genuinely important policy for Americans carrying it. But consider whom it doesn't reach. The Nigerian-born doctor who completed her medical degree abroad and moved to Chicago to be with her family has no American student debt to cancel. The Filipina nurse working a second job to put her daughter through Truman College has no debt relief coming. The Eritrean welder who came up through a union apprenticeship program has never seen the inside of a four-year university. Kat's platform mentions making "public college and trade school free for all" in a single sentence, buried inside her student debt proposal. Trade school is not an asterisk. It is the primary economic ladder for a huge share of this district's working class, and treating it as an add-on to college policy tells you exactly where the platform's priorities really lie. Illinois's registered apprenticeship programs have grown 77% since 2014, with over 22,000 active apprentices statewide. Their graduates see hiring rates 44% higher than bachelor's degree holders. Truman College in Uptown runs the largest ESL and GED program in the state. City Colleges of Chicago launched affordable continuing education AI courses in 2024 specifically to help workers whose jobs are being reshaped by automation. These programs exist because the need is real and urgent, and none of them require a four-year degree. AI Is Coming for White-Collar Work, and We Need a Plan The 9th District has more than 34,000 office and administrative workers and over 36,000 sales workers. These are exactly the occupations that economists and workforce researchers have identified as most exposed to AI-driven displacement over the next decade. Entire job categories are being automated: scheduling, data entry, customer service, claims processing, paralegal research. The workers losing these jobs are not going to recover through student debt cancellation. They need retraining that is fast, affordable, and tied directly to what employers are actually hiring for. A serious workforce policy for the AI era looks like short-cycle certifications at Oakton Community College, federally funded apprenticeship pipelines into healthcare and skilled trades, recognition of foreign professional credentials so that the surgeon working as a phlebotomist can actually practice surgery, and ESL programs integrated with vocational training so that the immigrant workforce can access all of it. That is what the 9th District's working class needs from its representative in Congress. Kat cares about working people. Her record makes that clear. But a platform that centers universities and student debt, while treating vocational training as a footnote and ignoring the 12,000 internationally credentialed professionals already living in Illinois, is not a working-class platform. It is a platform for a particular kind of college-educated progressive, but a large portion of this district deserves more than that.
Education: Every Path to a
Good Life Deserves Support
Not one member of Illinois's federal delegation has endorsed Kat Abughazaleh. Illinois progressivism was built here, and the people who built it aren't buying what she's selling.
If you learned something here, send it to a neighbor
Your neighborhood.
Your representative.
Your vote.
Register to vote.
Paid for by Connor Blandford. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. It was created and funded independently by a resident of Illinois's 9th Congressional District, published solely for the benefit of the voters of this community.
REBECCA C. BERRY EXPERIENCED RESULTS DRIVEN LEADERSHIP
2035