World Business Chicago, the city’s economic development agency, released its ambitious strategy for Chicago’s economic goals over the next decade, targeting $1.4T in annual output.
The sweeping 80-page report could serve as a road map for commercial real estate players looking to align investment and development decisions with the city’s priorities. WBC’s pursuit of its top-line revenue goal will mean more companies hunting for space in the Chicago area, said Hannah Loftus, vice president of research at World Business Chicago.
“Our aspiration and North Star was maintaining our leadership as a top three economy in the U.S.,” Loftus said. “Tangibly, that means growing our employment base and growing our output to our businesses.”
WBC’s goal for the regional economy in 2034 is $1.4T in annual output and 5,050,000 people employed. That means the region would need to generate roughly $100B more in annual output and roughly 300,000 additional jobs than Moody’s Analytics projects for 2034 at the area’s existing growth pace.
Bill Lussow, vice president of the Chicago chapter of the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors, told Bisnow in a statement that WBC’s goals are achievable but will depend on execution from the private sector rather than political messaging.
Businesses are already adapting to regulatory friction, shifting tax burdens and public safety concerns by adjusting underwriting assumptions, site selection and employee location strategies, he said.
“The plan itself is strong; however, its success will require a civic environment that supports capital deployment with regulatory clarity, tax stability, and improved public safety rather than one that introduces new headwinds,” Lussow said.
The economic development agency has outlined three main areas for near-term strategy: economic growth, future-readiness, and quality of life and promotion. Most importantly for CRE, WBC defined nine industries it is focused on retaining and expanding:
- Manufacturing, particularly food and metals
- Transportation, distribution and logistics
- Professional services
- Finance and insurance
- Life sciences
- Digital tech and artificial intelligence, including data centers
- Clean energy
- Quantum
- Vibrancy, including sports, arts and tourism
WBC’s economic development team will identify leads on companies in these industries and manage inbound leads on companies interested in Chicago. The organization will help connect interested businesses to available incentives from the city and state, as well as to local brokers or Chicago-area counties that may better fit a company’s needs than the city proper.
WBC chose those industries by considering future growth, employment trends, economic impact, and research and development spending, among myriad factors, Loftus said. The organization also compared its list to strategic plans from the state, city and surrounding counties to avoid planning in a vacuum.
“We looked at everything, narrowed it down based on removing things that aren’t traded, really, that aren’t going to bring in new money,” Loftus said. “We narrowed that list down to high growth, high job density.”
Robert Habeeb, CEO of Maverick Hotels and Restaurants, said a targeted focus on specific industries helps build momentum for investment. When Habeeb moved to the city in the late 1990s, he estimated travel to the city was 65% corporate and 35% leisure.
Today, those percentages have roughly flipped, which Habeeb said was a transition driven by heavy investment in leisure-oriented attractions like The Bean, Navy Pier and museums.
“It’s good that they’re focusing on specific industries rather than just a shotgun approach,” Habeeb said.
WBC’s priority to attract and bolster capital availability, including from foreign investors, will also buoy commercial real estate. To do so, WBC is launching an initiative called ChiFoward that is meant to bring capital into the Chicagoland for key projects, Loftus said.
The initiative involves creating an investment prospectus for development opportunities that need capital throughout the city and pitching it to foreign investors. The platform will link projects with investors who can move quickly and direct capital toward high-value neighborhood and downtown projects.
The region already has a steady pipeline of outside investment. Of the 1,234 deals analyzed between 2019 and the third quarter of 2024 by PitchBook, the top five foreign investors by deal count in Illinois-based companies were the United Kingdom with 195 deals, Canada with 190, India with 69, Singapore with 68 and Switzerland with 59.
But that foreign investment isn’t spread equally across sectors, Lussow said. Industrial, logistics and data infrastructure assets are performing at coastal-market strength and attracting long-term institutional capital, such as Canadian pensions and foreign investors from Western Europe, Japan and Singapore.
But the central business district is being redlined by many of those same institutions due to declining fundamentals and policy risk, Lussow said.
“Chicago’s competitive advantage is cost basis and labor; its handicap is policy instability,” he said. “Fix that, and long-horizon institutional and foreign capital will follow.”
Habeeb said that in his conversations with foreign investors, some of whom have funded his projects, the perception of the city is very negative. If foreigners learned about the “soundness” of investing in Chicago, Habeeb said, he thinks more outside capital would be attracted to the area.
“It’s about time someone pointed out all of the good things about Chicago,” Habeeb said. “Unfortunately, when in the business world, when you talk to people from out of the city, they have this really jaundiced view of what’s happening here.”
The WBC also aims to make Chicago the easiest place in the U.S. to build and do business. Part of that is the ongoing implementation of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Cut the Tape initiative, which was rolled out in April 2024 with more than 100 recommendations to better the development process.
The initiative includes speeding up development through streamlined approvals, permitting development in more locations and creating more partnerships between the city and other entities.
Ciere Boatright, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, told Bisnow in August that the large-scale projects that have gone through the Plan Commission have seen approval timelines reduced from 135 days to 79.
“If the city wants true velocity, it needs faster permitting cycles, defined entitlement pathways, consistent outcomes, and fewer discretionary or unpredictable administrative hurdles,” Lussow said.
The Chicago 2050 report is the first in a two-part series outlining the agency’s long-term business growth strategy. The second chapter, which will present a vision of what the city could look like in 25 years and draws on the existing report, will likely be released at the beginning of 2026, Loftus said.
“This one is a little bit more ideation around what 2050 can be. It’s not quite as rooted in data,” Loftus said. “It’s meant to create some really lofty goal posts for us to help organize around.”