Not Promises. Receipts. Seven Years Delivering for the 25th Ward.

Public safety, built block by block

When City Hall left violence prevention out of the budget, Byron went around it. He brought more than $500,000 in state funding for public safety infrastructure into the ward, plus $80,000 for programming at Rudy Lozano Alternative High School. Together we backed the Community Violence Intervention teams working our blocks, and crime is down 50 percent since 2024.

Out of his regular community safety meetings, neighbors built 2532, a resident-led organization that applies block-by-block strategies to reduce gun violence and address its root causes across the 25th Ward.

He has pushed the Chicago Police Department for accountability on low clearance rates, worked with victims of violence and their families to get answers, and backed residents and business owners raising concerns on their own blocks.

800 units delivered. Two more rising now.

More than 800 affordable homes created or preserved in the ward in Byron's first term alone, many of them family-sized. Tenant protections and property tax relief keep families in the homes they already have. At 18th and Peoria, a developer wanted 500 luxury apartments on 6.3 acres. The community said no more. Neighbors organized, fought back, and demanded eminent domain. Byron blocked the luxury plan, and the city bought the lots for $12 million. In April 2026 the city selected The Resurrection Project to build Casa Nayarit at 900 W. 18th St., 76 permanently affordable homes plus a child care center, phase one of 432 units. The resident-led Zoning Advisory Board reviewed it before it moved forward.

A few blocks away, Casa Yucatán, 98 affordable apartments at 1609 W. 21st Place with rents starting at $551, topped out in March 2026 and is set to finish this fall. Byron also co-chaired the mayor's Affordable Requirements Ordinance task force, helped double the ARO minimum from 10% to 20%, and passed legislation protecting homeowners, seniors, and longtime residents from harassment by predatory developers. Now he has brought the Protect Renters Ordinance to the housing committee, to end junk fees and first, last, and third month's rent just to move in.

The 2022 reassessment took 46 percent from Pilsen homeowners overnight, and the next citywide reassessment lands in 2027. Byron has voted against every proposed property tax increase, and his ward office helps neighbors sign up for the exemptions they are owed right now. His commitment is the 3 percent millionaire surcharge Illinois voters already said yes to in November 2024: no more raises in property taxes, no more defunding our own schools.

Fisk is not Crawford

Byron and PERRO, the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization, are demanding toxics testing, remediation, and a real dust-control plan before Midwest Generation tears down the century-old Fisk power station at 1111 W. Cermak Rd. In October 2025 he threatened to block the demolition outright. Every neighbor in Pilsen and Little Village remembers the 2020 Hilco implosion at the old Crawford plant, and he is making sure it does not happen twice.

They told us we had to accept being the dumping ground for the industry. The community fought back, from the hunger strike Byron joined that helped keep General Iron's pollution out of a working-class community, to the largest community air quality monitoring network in the country, so polluters answer to the people. He won a commitment to a cumulative burden health impact study, pushed environmental justice criteria into every city procurement contract after holding polluters like MAT Asphalt accountable elsewhere in Chicago, and is taking the same fight into the Pilsen industrial corridor, where neighbors are demanding the city add green space and shut down its biggest polluters, including Sims Metal Management.

Now he is fighting to reopen the Department of the Environment so climate and environmental justice concerns are handled by the city, not left to chance.

Health care and reproductive justice for every neighbor

In 2025 the state ended health coverage for undocumented adults, and tens of thousands of neighbors across Illinois lost their care. This community did not wait. Neighbors reopened a public mental health clinic, and a new affordable clinic now offers dental and medical care for children and families.

Byron pushed the Mayor's Office, alongside his colleagues, to increase funding for LGBTQIA+ inclusive social and health services, and supported legislation making Chicago a reproductive health sanctuary city. He is proud to lead the first 25th Ward office with a majority-female leadership team, including his Chief of Staff.

Every Tuesday. Seven years.

Every Tuesday night, for seven years, including through the pandemic, Byron has hosted Ward Night so neighbors can bring their concerns to him directly. During the pandemic, he and his team personally delivered masks, sanitizer, and safety supplies across the ward, neighbors in Chinatown sent PPE and vaccines in solidarity, and his office built an emergency fund of nearly $100,000, raised by the people, for residents who did not qualify for other assistance, including undocumented neighbors.

$6.4 million in street, alley, sidewalk and streetlight improvements since 2023, chosen through MENU participatory budgeting so residents decide how infrastructure dollars get spent. The ward office organizes Clean-Up Saturdays every spring and summer, and holds a standing TIF Review Committee open to the public. His team pushes 311 to fill potholes and fix streetlights, led the repaving of Cermak Road, and every winter his office and volunteers shovel for elderly and disabled residents.

Who will deny a plate of food to a child? When new neighbors arrived by the thousands and were left sleeping in police stations, this community opened a shelter in 48 hours for almost 400 people, and a baby was born there instead of in a police station.

He took Solis all the way to the Supreme Court

Byron took disgraced former Alderman Danny Solis all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court over Solis spending $220,000 in campaign funds on his own criminal defense lawyers. In a ward whose last alderman wore a wire for the FBI, the fight itself is the point. Byron has also strengthened the Office of Inspector General as it exposed the Hilco implosion, the illegal raid on Anjanette Young, and public safety failures in our communities.

Byron has never taken a dime of corporate or developer money since 2015, and he never will. He is fighting for publicly financed elections, a LaSalle Street tax on the more than a quadrillion dollars in financial transactions that pass through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange tax-free every year, and a public bank so our small businesses and residents can access credit on fair terms.

In 2026, when that same political establishment used the courts to strike his name from the congressional ballot, Byron didn't stop fighting. He took Illinois's ballot-access laws to federal court, in his words, so our community never again has to accept an appointed candidate.