Revised 16 September 2026

A quantum campus on the South Side will be taxed at the same rate as a bungalow for thirty years

Over a billion in public money, a thirty-year tax rate, and nothing signed with the neighborhood.

Chicago · South Chicago · 13 September 2026

Standing brief · The South Works deal

They are building a quantum computing campus on the ground where my people worked. Four hundred and forty acres on the lake, dark since April 10, 1992. Seventeen plans came and died there. This one is going up. Good. Thirty-four years of weeds is not a plan either.

But there is a parade version of this story and there is a register version, and the register is short enough to read out loud.

What the public put in

The state committed $500 million. Two hundred million of that goes to @PsiQuantum in grants, workforce money, a low-interest loan and other incentives, in exchange for the company investing at least a billion of its own. Three hundred million builds the park itself, much of it a cryogenic cooling plant. The state had already put $200 million into the Chicago Quantum Exchange before any of this.

Cook County put in $5 million cash and invented a new property tax class to go with it. The city put in $5 million from bond proceeds and passed the rebate.

Then the tenants lined up for their own. A little over $5.3 million in state credits for Infleqtion, against a target of 36 new jobs. About $1.8 million for a Canadian cryogenics outfit, against twenty-some jobs. A $25 million state grant tied to @IBM. France's Pasqal got its cut too.

PsiQuantum's own statement put its combined state, county and city package at more than $500 million over thirty years. The neighborhood coalition puts the whole public number past a billion. Nobody disputes that number. They dispute what you are supposed to say about it.

Two registers

The new tax class is called Class 8 MICRO. On property used for quantum computing, it cuts the assessment rate from 25 percent down to 10 percent, and it holds there for thirty years. The city's own analysis put the benefit at more than $175 million over the life of it.

The people who live around the site read that and asked for the same thing. Their list of demands includes a tax break for longtime residents that mirrors the thirty-year deal the campus is getting. They did not get one.

In 1894 a federal commission sat down and looked at Pullman. The company was still paying dividends. It still had a surplus. It cut the wage in the shops and left the rent standing in the houses it also owned. Two registers, one office.

A hundred and thirty-two years later, one office is running two property tax rates on the same stretch of lakefront. Ten percent for the campus. Whatever the assessor says for the bungalow across the street, and going up, because the lot next door just became a global innovation district.

The count

South Works peaked near 20,000 hands. It died with fewer than 700 on the clock.

The campus was announced with 250 permanent jobs on site and a promise of a $20 billion economic impact over ten years, plus a figure of 175,000 quantum-related jobs across the region over a decade. IBM later said 750 full-time. Infleqtion's own agreement targets 36. The cryogenics firm, twenty-some.

The mill treated three generations of my family badly and employed thousands of them. This campus will treat its people better and employ hundreds. Those are different kinds of good and you do not get to swap one for the other on a rendering.

Seventeen dead plans and thirty-four years of nothing is its own kind of answer, and the people who want this built have watched every other promise evaporate. One local business owner, a steelworker's son, calls it the first thing that ever felt real. He is not wrong to feel that.

A billion of public money. A thirty-year tax rate of ten percent for the campus and nothing for the block. Fifty meetings and no signature on a community benefits agreement, which is its own story, told next.

My family does not get the high ground here. Three generations stood in this pipe. They did not build it. They did not fix it either. Passenger seat.

Where's mine

The seal still says Urbs in Horto. City in a Garden.

Mike Royko already answered it, in Boss, in 1971. Ubi est mea. Where's mine.

Sixty years on, it is still the only question that gets you to the bottom of a Chicago deal. Who got theirs. Who got the bill. Write South Works down by name while you can still see it, because the brochure is already printed and the brochure will always be newer.

See also: A 99-year lease on 440 acres of Chicago lakefront, and nobody has read it

The RulesThe RecordArchive