It's the same question you'd ask about your own household. Here's Joliet's answer in plain numbers, and why the city's own books already show it owes more than it owns.
Every figure comes from the City of Joliet's own audited annual reports.
Does Joliet own more than it owes?
The first number is already printed in the audit. Keep scrolling for how both are built, in plain English.
Picture adding up your family's finances. On one side, everything you have that's basically money: checking, savings, investments. On the other, everything you owe: credit cards, the car loan, the mortgage. Subtract. What's left tells you whether you're ahead or behind.
A city has this exact number. Accountants call it the net financial position. It answers one human question: does the city own more than it owes? Almost no city puts it on a billboard, so we did the math from Joliet's own report.
A billion dollars is an abstraction, too big to picture. The same bill split across your street is a conversation. So alongside the citywide total, we also show the numbers per household. It's like judging a car by miles per gallon instead of miles per tank: the smaller, shared number is the one people can actually picture and weigh.
Joliet owes about $1.24 billion more than it holds in money-like assets. Most cities in this position need a hidden bill to reveal it. Joliet doesn't: the shortfall is already in the audit.
Split across every household in town, that's about −$24,300 owed per household.
It does. The official "total net position" is about −$25 million. But it gets there by counting roads, pipes, and buildings (about $1.2 billion) as assets. The city can't sell those to pay pensions or bondholders. Net financial position is the stricter, more honest test: the money the city actually has, against what it owes, and that's −$1.24 billion.
But that is only part of the picture.
The shortfall isn't a mystery overspend. It's three real obligations the city has taken on, all owed to real people:
These are promises made over decades, to people who did the work or lent the money. The debt was always on the books; bonds and loans always show up. The striking part is the other two pieces: until a few years ago, the pension and retiree-health promises, together by far the largest, sat nowhere on the city's balance sheet.
In 2015 a new accounting rule (GASB 68) forced cities to put their full pension promises on the books. In 2018 another (GASB 75) added retiree health care. Tens of billions appeared overnight across the country: debts that had always existed, suddenly visible. In 2014, before those rules, Joliet's books looked like a healthy city's: assets nearly four times its liabilities. The money was always owed. The rules just made Joliet show it.
Even after pensions and retiree health care, one real cost is still missing from every statement: what it would take to fix worn-out roads, pipes, and buildings.
Joliet's audit already admits the wear: about 37% of the value of its roads, pipes, and buildings is used up. It just never adds up what fixing all that would cost. So we used the city's own two numbers, the method any resident can run with the Strong Towns worksheet:
Per household, that's another $24,000 to $31,000, on top of what's already owed.
This is a back-of-the-envelope range, on purpose. The point isn't the exact figure; it's that the figure is large, and nobody publishes it.
A typical household is already $24,300 behind, with another ~$28,000 repair bill that no statement shows.
Joliet's official bottom line looks nearly balanced. These two bars are what that headline leaves out, and what residents are left to carry.
Joliet is not an outlier here. The pension and retiree-health shortfalls are shared by cities across Illinois, and the city is in the middle of an essential ~$1.45 billion Lake Michigan water program: its aquifer is projected to no longer meet demand by 2030, so a new water supply isn't optional. The point isn't blame. It's that these numbers should be in plain view while there's still time to plan around them.
A −$1.24 billion financial position is a difficult starting point, harder than most cities face. But a number you can see is a number you can plan around, and Joliet has real assets to build on: a large and growing economy, a rising tax base, and a water investment that secures the city's future. Whether those become a way out or a deeper shortfall depends on the kind of growth the city chooses, which is the next question.
There's also a choice worth naming plainly: a city can choose what it takes on next. Every new subdivision, road, and pipe is another maintenance promise owed forever. Funding what's already promised, and weighing what's added, are both choices.
Ask Joliet for three things: fund the pension and retiree-health promises on a real, published schedule; publish a "state of good repair" number every year (what it would cost to bring what we already own back to good condition); and weigh every new commitment against what's already owed. Federal agencies must publish that repair number. New York City's charter requires it. Joliet can too.
"These figures come from Joliet's own published reports. The city publishes no single estimate of its deferred repair costs. If this picture is wrong, the city should publish the numbers that show it."
It's the most natural response to these numbers: we're behind, so let's expand the tax base. Attract development, add warehouses and rooftops, incentivize new revenue. If the city were simply short on income, that instinct would be right.
But the shortfall isn't mainly an income problem, and growth isn't free money. It's the one move that brings cash now and bills forever, which is exactly why it has to be done carefully. Three things make "aggressive, incentivized growth" an unreliable fix here.
First, the shortfall is mostly promises growth can't touch. Most of the −$1.24 billion is pensions and retiree health care already owed to people who worked for decades. A new warehouse doesn't shrink that by a dollar. It adds employees, which means more pension and retiree-health promises, and new pavement to maintain. Growth can add to the liability it's meant to reduce.
Second, incentives divert the revenue they promise. Joliet already runs at least six tax-increment-financing (TIF) districts, plus business-district allocations. By design, those capture the new tax growth and spend it inside the district, often for two decades or more. So incentivized development frequently never reaches the general fund or the pensions while the incentive runs.
Third, Joliet has largely run this experiment. Over the last decade it became one of the country's largest logistics hubs, with a fast-rising property and sales tax base. Across those same years the financial position kept sliding, from −$82 million to −$1.24 billion. That growth didn't improve the balance sheet.
There's also a particular catch with the kind of growth Joliet attracts. Warehouses and intermodal yards generate property tax, but they rely heavily on public infrastructure: thousands of trucks a day, and a single loaded truck does road damage many times that of a car. They tend to bring low jobs per acre, high pavement per acre, and a public incentive to land them. It can still pencil out, but only if someone checks.
It's an argument for growth that pays for itself. Incremental, tax-rich-per-acre development, the kind that fills in what the city already maintains, can genuinely help. Subsidized, infrastructure-heavy, low-yield development usually can't. The difference is arithmetic, not ideology.
"Before we incentivize anything, show the math: over its full life, will this generate more than it costs the city to serve and maintain, and will it help fund what we already owe, or add to it?"
You don't need a finance degree. The math is middle-school arithmetic, and every number is public.
A neighbor can raise it at a coffee shop. So can a city council member, a budget director, or a CPA who lives and breathes GASB rules. They'll all recognize the numbers, because the numbers are the city's own. That's the whole point: it's one number, at the kitchen table, that everyone can argue about together.