Chicago Teens Deserve Support, Not Blame

Chicago teenagers aren’t the problem. The adults pointing fingers at them might be.

That’s the argument Jack Murphy has been making, and he’s not backing down. The South Shore resident pushed back hard against the chorus of criticism aimed at the so-called teen takeovers that have rattled malls, parks, and downtown commercial corridors across Chicago in 2026. His read on Generation Z behavior is direct: this generation drinks less, sleeps around less, and by most measurable standards causes less trouble than every generation before it.

“Are the bankers of this city so ‘well-behaved’?” Murphy said. “Politicians? Clergy? Get real.”

Hard to argue with that framing.

The teen takeover debate has sat on Chicago’s front burner since Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration moved to revise the city’s curfew ordinance. The gatherings, sometimes hundreds of teenagers flooding a single space, have triggered police deployments and set off alarm bells among aldermen pushing for tighter controls. Some of the rhetoric coming from City Hall treats normal teenage congregation as a public safety emergency. Critics of that approach say the city is criminalizing adolescence rather than doing the unglamorous work of actually building something for young people to do.

Murphy isn’t the only one making this case. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Michael Zaczek from Plainfield spelled out a diagnosis that’s almost embarrassingly simple: teenagers used to fill parks. They don’t as much anymore. Fill that gap, and the malls and downtown corridors largely take care of themselves.

“If they hung out in parks, there would be no more teen takeovers in malls and Downtown shopping areas,” Zaczek said, “and police wouldn’t be dispatched for crowd control and to make arrests.”

That argument deserves a serious hearing. The Chicago Park District runs more than 600 parks across the city. That’s Millennium Park drawing tourists on the lakefront, and it’s also the neighborhood greens in Roseland and Hegewisch that don’t make anyone’s Instagram feed. The gap between those two experiences is significant. Programming budgets, maintenance staff, and structured activities in lower-income neighborhoods have never matched what the system’s raw acreage suggests is possible. A park with broken benches, no staff, and nothing scheduled isn’t an alternative. It’s an empty lot with better landscaping.

Zaczek’s point isn’t complicated. Parks exist to be social. Neighbors who treat a group of teenagers talking too loud outside as a threat worth calling in have lost the thread of what public space is actually for. The teenagers don’t disappear when they’re pushed out. They go somewhere else. That somewhere else tends to be enclosed, commercial, and staffed by security guards with little patience.

City officials haven’t been willing to hear it that way. The revised curfew ordinance that Johnson’s administration developed leans hard toward restriction. Enforcement costs money too, it just doesn’t build anything. Advocates who’ve watched this cycle repeat for years say Chicago keeps reaching for the same tool when something’s easier to police than to fund.

Murphy’s broader argument won’t sit well with everyone, but it’s the one worth wrestling with in 2026. He’s saying that older Chicagoans built the conditions these teenagers are now navigating, stripped out the programs, closed the mental health clinics, and let the recreational infrastructure decay, and they’re now surprised and annoyed when teenagers show up somewhere inconvenient. That’s not a teen problem. That’s an accountability problem.

What both Murphy and Zaczek are really asking is whether Chicago’s political class has any intention of treating young people as constituents worth investing in, or whether the plan is just to keep moving them along whenever they become visible. The curfew ordinance answers that question, at least partially. So does the condition of a park in Roseland on a Tuesday afternoon in January, when it’s 10 degrees out, the fieldhouse is locked, and there’s nowhere for a 13-year-old to go.