On September 3, the New York Times reported on research that ranked Chicago as the “most climate resilient” major city in the world. The study assessed each city for natural risk factors along with their efforts to fortify against climate change, ranking Chicago above 71 others.
The praise came with a flair of irony for the thousands of Chicago residents whose homes have flooded this summer as a series of heavy storms, aggravated by climate change, poured over the city.
Some estimates have ranked this past summer as Chicago’s wettest in eight years as unrelenting rain pooled on city streets and flooded into basements with little time to dry out between major storms.
West Side resident De’Andre Loggins, however, said the streets of his neighborhood have been getting drier.
“Flooding was really bad,” said Loggins, pointing to the stretch of Augusta Blvd in front of Every Block a Village, a faith-based community organization in Austin where he serves as program director. “It was a river. Now, this year, completely different.”
The improvement, he says, came from a simple solution: allowing more plants to grow.
Loggins has been encouraging people in his community to stop weeding or mowing wild plantlife, and to invest in their own home gardens. These new greenspaces, he says, have made a major impact in preventing flooding by soaking up rainwater.
Experts say that building more green infrastructure like this presents a low-cost, accessible and timely intervention for mitigating flooding—one that is sorely needed as storms become more frequent in Chicago and updates to the sewer systems struggle to keep pace.
A growing—and unequal—problem
Chicago’s flooding problem has been escalating for years.
I do think it’s important to note his relationship with the West Side Health Authority. How about this:
“We never experienced this in all my life,” said lifelong West Side resident Morris Reed. Serving as chief executive officer of the Westside Health Authority—a community organization that helps residents to address flooding—Reed has seen escalating impacts of heavy storms in his community. “Normally we have rain, but not rain that comes down so hard, so quickly.”
One torrential downpour in July of 2023 alone flooded roughly 70,000 basements in Chicago. While a weather event of that intensity has not occurred since, aggressive storms are happening much more often.
According to the National Weather Service, Northern Illinois has experienced 11 heavy rain or flooding events in 2026—more than any other year on record.
In some areas of Chicago, even moderate rainfall can be devastating.
“We know in Chicago that a lot of huge negative impacts of flooding occur on the South and West sides,” said Cyatharine Alias with the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a “think and do” tank that focuses on community-led solutions to sustainable living.
Alias pointed to factors in the natural and built environment, like low-lying topography and an aging sewer system, in tandem with financial and health pressures that disproportionately affect those communities.
As a result, four out of five 311 flooding complaints in Chicago over the past five years came from South and West Side community areas, according to TCR’s analysis of records from the Chicago Data Portal.
A lack of green spaces can make it especially difficult for these areas to manage heavy rainfall.
The Department of Environment (DOE) estimates 66 percent of Chicago’s land area is covered by water-resistant surfaces like asphalt and concrete. Due to the legacy of zoning laws around heavy industry, much of the South and West side is covered in these impervious surfaces.
When water can’t be absorbed through the ground, it stresses the combined sewer system and results in overflows. So far this year, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District has already reported 239 combined sewer overflows, compared to 33 in 2025.
Investing in green infrastructure, investing in communities
City and county officials have responded to this growing crisis with massive infrastructure investments. These include a $16 million climate resiliency fund, announced by the Cook County Board in 2023, that is directed at flood-prevention in vulnerable communities. In July, Mayor Brandon Johnson also announced the construction of a $12 million water storage system to relieve the West Side’s overburdened sewers.
This year, CNT and partner organizations completed “RainReady Calumet Corridor,” a nature-based flood prevention initiative spanning six flood-prone communities along southern Cook County’s Little Calumet River. The $6 million project, funded by the county, introduced green infrastructure features including parks and “green alleys”—walkways designed with flood control features like permeable pavement and underground rainwater storage.
The project has also encouraged residential updates like installing backflow preventer valves, setting up rain barrels and building “rain gardens” that capture rainwater and absorb contaminants before they leach into the ground.
Miriam Savad, Chief Strategy and Program Officer at CNT, said these investments provide quicker fixes for issues of flooding than long-term gray infrastructure projects while benefiting communities in other ways through creating jobs and recreational green spaces
Centering community-led solutions
Savad also stressed that these solutions are not one-size-fits all, and that collaboration with residents and community groups is crucial. “Part of our role is taking lived experience and knowledge and trying to convey that into what solutions can look like,” she said.
Community engagement is a key pillar in the City of Chicago Green Infrastructure Strategy, a DOE report from May of this year that outlines how city departments can expand nature-based solutions to manage flooding.
Many residents, however, feel that government aid has fallen short, leaving community organizations to pick up the slack.
“We can’t always rely on a government to provide immediate assistance, because that is not going to happen,” Reed said. His work with the Westside Health Authority has involved implementing the city’s Flood Assistance Repair Program, which provides up to $25,000 in home repairs for those whose basements were damaged by major flooding on the West Side in 2023 and 2024.
Reed says that the process for residents to receive support is bogged down by red-tape, which can take months to work through, and that funding is still far off from meeting homeowners’ needs. Many are still waiting for their basements to be cleaned out and repaired from the 2023 floods, some of them living with dangerous black mold for years at this point.
“It’s so much more work that needs to be done,” Derrick Patrick, a community advocate in Austin, told TCR. “I know people’s patience is waning, you know, they’ve been dealing with it for a long time.”
Patrick has been working with Loggins to promote tree planting in Austin. He also has a hand in several community organizations on the West Side that support urban farming, including the Austin Garden Collective, which maintains more than 25 community farms in the area.
Patrick and others acknowledge that green spaces alone cannot solve Chicago’s flooding crisis, but that community-led solutions like urban farming can be critical in adapting to the challenges of climate change while slower work to fortify the sewer system and reservoirs takes place.
“Maybe it doesn’t do everything, but you can only control what you can control, you know,” Patrick said. “What that gives to people, I think, is a sense of pride and a resilience that they can do something.”