"Viral Videos Blame City For Residents’ Flooding Woes — But Can Anything Be Done?," Block Club Chicago
CHICAGO — After the basement of the Lakeview music venue he co-owns flooded repeatedly in the past year or so — including as recently as late July — Nick Heineman is fed up.
“Our property’s being destroyed, our neighbors’ properties, other businesses, all just because of the city of Chicago won’t address their s—,” Heineman said in a video he posted to Instagram last week that has been viewed more than 150,000 times. He accused the city of “purposefully” flooding streets, businesses and homes.
Heineman co-owns Bookclub at 2871 N. Lincoln Ave. Since he and his fellow owners opened the space last year, storms have regularly led to a few inches of water accumulating in its basement, where the venue hosts concerts.
Now, Heineman said it’s only a matter of time before they’ll have to cancel concerts and address long-term building issues due to the flooding.
“We are going to have to deal with this very seriously in our business. We’re going to lose revenue. We’re going to lose shows,” he said.
Other businesses have also had to deal with flooding in recent weeks, and homeowners — especially on the South and West sides — have been grappling with the issue for years, including during historic storms in 2023.
In addition to the frustration online, there are some indications that flooding is turning into a political issue — and a potential liability for Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Mayoral candidate Joe Holberg recently posted a video criticizing the city’s response to recent flooding that garnered 40,000 views. In it, he rolls up his pants and wades through a flooded street in Little Village — barefoot — while calling for the city to “treat thunderstorms like we treat snowstorms.”
“We have to get crews unblocking the sewers so that thousands of people’s houses are not getting backed up and flooded every time it rains like today,” Holberg said in the video.
While there’s no evidence the issue will rise to the level of the city’s failed response to the 1979 blizzard, when poor snow removal helped sweep Jane Byrne into power, the issue has clearly struck a chord with impacted Chicagoans.
Recent videos showing sewer geysers blowing out of manholes across the city during heavy rainfall have also been shared far and wide.
Mayor: Flooding ‘Unprecedented’
Johnson and officials in his administration, however, denied they weren’t doing enough to combat the problem, which Johnson earlier this summer called “unprecedented.”
In remarks this week, Johnson defended his administration’s approach, citing his revival of a city Department of Environment dedicated to a “holistic” approach to flooding and other climate issues, including planting more trees. The city also recently launched an underground stormwater storage pilot on parts of the West Side in conjunction with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.
“We didn’t get here overnight. It’s going to take us some time for full repair,” Johnson said during his weekly press briefing on Tuesday. “The people of Chicago should fully expect that my administration is going to continue to take the bold stance and ensure that we’re responding to climate change and that we’re repairing the infrastructure underground and even above ground to respond to 21st century needs.”
Still, there is only so much Chicago can do without investing tens of billions of dollars or more to address the issue, both city officials and experts said.
The fundamental problem, they say, is the city’s outdated infrastructure is being overwhelmed as climate change brings more intense and frequent storms to the region. And with predictions for even more intense weather incidents in the future, the flooding could get worse.
The Chicago area has logged almost 26 inches of precipitation through July of this year according to the National Weather Service, about eight inches more than during the same period in 2025. A state report published last year predicts rainfall totals during intense storms will continue to increase by 2050 and beyond.
“The new intensity of storms that we’re experiencing today, and the frequency of them repeatedly, year after year, and even in back-to-back months or within the same month, is something that we have not historically seen in the past,” said Kate Evasic, the program lead for climate resilience with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.
While Chicago was built on a swamp and has always experienced flooding and rainstorms, “the intensity has really grown, which is what we’re experiencing, and that is directly tied to climate change,” she said.
Most sewers in Chicago were built well over a century ago and were designed to drain sanitary flow and a limited amount of stormwater directly to the river before wastewater treatment existed, according to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.
Today, Chicago’s combined sewer system carries both wastewater and rainwater to district plants, where it is treated before being released into waterways. During heavy rain, excess flow is diverted into the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, also known as the Deep Tunnel, where it is stored in three large repositories in the suburbs until the plants have the capacity to clean it.
But even the Deep Tunnel system — which includes the largest sewer reservoir in the world — has been strained to near capacity levels this summer due to extreme storms.
The city’s streets — and subsequently, residential and commercial basements — flood when the sewers get overwhelmed before the water can even travel to the reclamation district’s reservoirs, said Matthew Shapiro, a political science professor at Illinois Tech who leads the university’s Stormwater Infrastructure Project.
Although the Deep Tunnel is “an amazing resource,” Shapiro said, the challenge is moving the water through an overflowing city sewer system “in a way that doesn’t affect these businesses” and homes.
Flooding Like Clockwork
Heineman said the basement flooding at Bookclub, where he and his co-owners undertook extensive renovations before opening last year, happens like clockwork whenever there’s a big storm.
“It’s coming in through every trap connected with our city water and sewage outlet to the city,” he said. “Every single one of them, you just watch it incrementally come out from the same side of the street, come in, fill up our whole building, and then recess down, only once the rain has ended.”
In his social media video, Heineman said city workers told him during a recent visit to his venue that parts of the city are “intentionally” flooded to handle the distribution of stormwater and keep the larger system from reaching capacity.
He later clarified to Block Club that he was speaking broadly about the area’s stormwater management system, not necessarily just Chicago’s water department.
In an interview on Thursday, Randy Connor, commissioner of the city’s Department of Water Management, denied that city engineers intentionally flood streets or basements — and said the city itself has no power to close or block water from entering the sewers.
“We don’t make a decision to open or close anything. Our system is all gravity-fed, so it all flows south and west, pretty much,” Connor said. “There are no gates for the Department of Water Management, the city of Chicago, to open and close. … The system is designed to hold as much water as it can hold, and then it goes into the [Deep Tunnel].”
What’s more, increased development in the city over the years has also taken over more and more green space, which acts as natural drainage areas.
“The water has to have some place to go, and it goes into the sewer system. And the sewer system only has so much capacity, and once it reaches that capacity, it goes wherever it has to go to be able to relieve itself,” Connor said.
Replacing Current System Could Cost Billions
Holberg, the mayoral candidate, said if he takes over City Hall, he’d go as far as to advocate with the state and federal government to overhaul the city’s sewer system.
“Climate change is here to stay, unfortunately … and if we’re going to continue to stress it by putting stormwater into the sewer system, we’re going to continue to see the reservoirs filled. We’re going to continue to see the backup lines at capacity, and we’re going to continue to see it back up into the streets,” Holberg said.
But to replace the entire system, Connor said, “you’re looking at $10, $20, $30 billion” in costs or more. That price tag could be even greater than the estimated $12 billion cost to replace the city’s 400,000 lead pipes.
That’s not realistic, officials and experts agreed.
Instead, the water department and city are working to expand sewer capacity where the street infrastructure allows it and adopt new ideas, like the Wing Storage pilot program recently announced on the West Side, Connor said. Shapiro agreed projects like that are good steps to take and said converting public park space into marshland to retain more stormwater could make a major difference if it’s scaled up across the city.
While consumers reducing water use during heavy rainfalls is also helpful, Shapiro and his colleagues at the Stormwater Infrastructure Project are hoping the public can help officials figure out where the problems are the worst. They’ve launched an app that allows neighbors to report flooding incidents, and are working with the city to install sensors on manhole covers to learn more about how the stormwater system is working.
Evasic also said it’s important to add more green infrastructure, such as green alleys and playgrounds through the Space To Grow program, which redesigns school yards to help reduce neighborhood flooding. She said preventive measures, including through programs that add more water storage capacity to the system, will likely be cheaper in the long run than governments paying for disaster relief and cleanup efforts every year.
“We’re doing more that is going to help us adapt,” said Evasic, who believes the city is generally doing a good job in retooling its infrastructure to be more flood and climate resilient.
Connor said he’s optimistic about the work the city is doing now to make things better.
“These projects will continue to go for the next 10, 20, 30 years because we know this is not going to get any better,” he said.
While Heineman, with Bookclub, is not sure what the exact solution is, he wants to see the city treat the flooding situation like an all-out emergency by convening experts and leaders across government agencies to come up with a long-term plan not only for businesses like his but also impacted homeowners on the South and West sides.
“This isn’t a blame a specific mayor conversation,’” Heineman said. “Get the people together, make them meet quarterly, monthly, whatever it takes. And present multiple plans, Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. It will do no harm, it will only hopefully inspire updating these systems.”
He added: “We want [the situation] to change for our space, but we need, 30 years down the line, them to have been like, ‘Oh yeah, we just spent a good few decades getting this addressed.”