Chicago Needs Stewards. Kevin Warren Is the Wrong Answer.
Jennifer Pritzker has argued that preserving Chicago's history is one of the most future-focused investments the city can make. She's right. Which makes it worth asking what Kevin Warren is doing.
By Dear Kevin Warren · 2026-03-24
Jennifer Pritzker published an op-ed in the Tribune. The occasion is America's 250th anniversary. The argument is about stewardship: that preserving Chicago's history is not sentimental. It's economic, environmental, and civic infrastructure.
She's right. Tourism generates $20 billion for Chicago annually. People don't come for the new high-rises. They come for the architecture, the lakefront, the places that carry a story.
Then there's Kevin Warren.
What Soldier Field actually is
Soldier Field opened in 1924. It was built as a war memorial. It sits on Chicago's lakefront, protected by the 1836 public trust doctrine and the Lakefront Protection Ordinance, within walking distance of the Museum Campus and Grant Park.
It is one of the most distinctive outdoor venues in American professional sports. There is nothing else like it in the NFL. Not the colonnades. Not the lake behind the south end zone. Not the view of the skyline from the upper deck. Not the history that goes back before most living Americans were born.
The Bears' lease runs through 2033.
What Warren is proposing
Three hundred and twenty-six acres of former racetrack in Arlington Heights. No restaurants within walking distance. No hotels. No transit that reaches it. A highway interchange and a toll road.
The stadium would sit empty more than 340 days a year. The spending that stays inside a downtown stadium — where fans walk out and cycle money through the city's existing businesses — drives straight to the parking lot at a greenfield site.
Indianapolis built Lucas Oil Stadium on the same model. The NFL promised $300-400 million in Super Bowl economic impact. Indiana University economists found $100-150 million in actual activity. The rest was the NFL taking its share home.
Warren is promising Arlington Heights the outcome Indianapolis never got.
The stewardship question
Pritzker writes that "preserving our past is one of the most future-focused investments we can make." She's talking about buildings and neighborhoods. The logic applies to a stadium that a city has already paid to renovate.
Illinois is still repaying the bonds from the 2003 Soldier Field renovation. $1.1 billion total, running through 2032. The Bears contributed roughly 16% of the construction cost. They have zero legal obligation to help with the rest.
They are now asking Illinois to finance a new privately owned building in a suburb while that debt is still running.
This is not stewardship. It is the opposite.
What gets lost
Pritzker's piece lands on something most stadium debates don't talk about: the thing that makes a place worth coming back to is continuity. The accumulation of events, memories, and history that makes a building more than square footage.
Soldier Field has a century of that. The 1926 Army-Navy game drew 110,000 people. Ali fought here. The World Cup played here. Every generation of Chicago Bears played here.
When Warren says the team needs a new facility, he is not wrong that facilities matter. He is wrong about where the value lies. The Bears are not a real estate company trying to maximize square footage per acre. They are a hundred-year-old institution embedded in a city that cares about them in ways that no suburb ever will.
Abandoning Soldier Field for a cornfield highway interchange is not a business decision. It is a statement about what the Bears think they are.
On America's 250th anniversary, Chicago is being asked to walk away from one of its most recognizable landmarks because one executive decided the revenue model is better somewhere else.
Jennifer Pritzker is asking Chicagoans to become stewards of their city's history.
Kevin Warren is asking them to let him leave it.
Both of those things are happening at once.