Carlos Ramirez-Rosa


Carlos Ramirez-Rosa is an American politician and public administrator who serves as General Superintendent and chief executive officer of the Chicago Park District, one of the largest urban park systems in the United States.
A democratic socialist, he previously represented Chicago’s 35th Ward on the Chicago City Council from 2015 to 2025, where his legislative work spanned housing policy, public safety and policing reforms, immigration and civil rights, and efforts to expand participatory approaches to local governance.
Throughout his career, Ramirez-Rosa has emphasized community-driven policymaking, seeking to involve organized community groups in shaping legislation and local governance.

Early life and background

Ramirez-Rosa was born on February 18, 1989, in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Chicago Public Schools and graduated from Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, where he served as senior class president. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was an elected member of the Illinois Student Senate. As an elected student senator, he supported funding for women and LGBT student programs, campus green energy policies, and fair treatment of university employees. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 2011.
After graduating, he served as a congressional caseworker in the office of Congressman Luis Gutiérrez. After working for Congressman Gutiérrez, he worked as a family support network organizer with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights until he ran for alderman in 2015.
On April 8, 2014, Ramirez-Rosa was arrested while attempting to block a deportation bus leaving Broadview Detention Center in Broadview, Illinois. The arrest was part of the " " campaign to pressure President Barack Obama to stop deportations. Ramirez-Rosa said at the time of his arrest: "I'm a U.S. citizen. I don’t fear deportation, but I know that when you're taking hard-working and decent people, putting them in detention centers and then putting them on buses and separating them from their families, that is an act of injustice."
Prior to his election to the Chicago City Council, Ramirez-Rosa was an elected community representative to the Avondale-Logandale Local School Council.
He is the nephew of Cook County Judge Ramon Ocasio III, and author and activist Magda Ramirez-Castaneda. Ramirez-Rosa's mother is of Mexican descent and his father is of Puerto Rican descent.
In October 2024, Ramirez-Rosa married his longtime partner, Bryan Bautista, in Logan Square, Chicago.
Ramirez-Rosa is profiled in D. D. Guttenplan’s book The Next Republic: The Rise of a New Radical Majority, which examines organizers and leaders associated with contemporary progressive political movements in the United States.

Chicago City Council

Ramirez-Rosa was first elected the alderman of the 35th Ward on February 24, 2015. He received 67% of the vote, defeating incumbent alderman Rey Colón. He was re-elected to a second four-year term on February 26, 2019, and to a third term on February 28, 2023.
Upon his election in 2015, he was the youngest alderman on the City Council at the time and among the youngest in Chicago’s history, and one of the city's first two openly LGBT Latino councilors alongside colleague Raymond Lopez. After a year as alderman, Crain's Chicago Business distinguished Ramirez-Rosa as a member of their 2016 "Twenty in their 20s" class. In 2023, Crain's Chicago Business distinguished Ramirez-Rosa as one of that year's "40 Under 40." He was a member of the Chicago City Council's Progressive Reform Caucus, Latino Caucus, the LGBT Caucus, and the inaugural chair and dean of the council's Democratic Socialist Caucus.
During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Ramirez-Rosa served as the Illinois State Vice-chair for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign.
After Ramirez-Rosa resigned from the City Council to assume leadership of the Chicago Park District, Mayor Brandon Johnson appointed Cook County Commissioner Anthony Joel Quezada to fill the vacant 35th Ward seat, and the Chicago City Council confirmed the appointment in April 2025.

City budget and property tax rebate

In 2015, Ramirez-Rosa opposed Mayor Rahm Emanuel's record $589 million property tax increase, arguing that the city should have "emptied out hundreds of millions in TIF funds before raising property taxes and fees on Chicago's working families." Ramirez-Rosa voted no on Mayor Emanuel's 2016 budget proposal and property tax increase. After the property tax increase passed, Ramirez-Rosa proposed a $35 million property tax rebate for struggling homeowners. Ultimately, Ramirez-Rosa joined with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to sponsor and pass a $21 million property tax rebate program. Ramirez-Rosa said of the compromise: "this proposal ensures that the poorest homeowners who see the largest property-tax increase get the maximum rebate."
In November 2019, Ramirez-Rosa was one of eleven aldermen to vote against Mayor Lori Lightfoot's first budget. He joined all five other members of the Socialist Caucus in signing a letter to Lightfoot which criticized her budget for "an over-reliance on property taxes" and "regressive funding models" that are "burdensome to our working-class citizens, while giving the wealthy and large corporations a pass."
In November 2024, Ramirez-Rosa was among Chicago City Council members who voted against Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed $300 million property tax increase during negotiations over the city’s 2025 budget.

Chicago Immigration Policy Working Group

In August 2015, Ramirez-Rosa was a founding member of the Chicago Immigration Policy Working Group. Ramirez-Rosa and the working group successfully pushed the City of Chicago to provide free or low-cost legal assistance to Chicagoans facing deportation, provide support for DACA applicants, expand language access, and create a municipal ID. In 2021, Ramirez-Rosa and the working group succeeded in removing the carveouts from Chicago's sanctuary city ordinance, ensuring the Chicago Police Department could not work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in any case. Ramirez-Rosa co-sponsored the successful measure alongside Mayor Lori Lightfoot. He first introduced the measure to remove the carveouts in 2017.

Housing and development

Throughout his tenure on the Council, Ramirez-Rosa supported and advanced several affordable housing developments in his ward. Among them was the Lucy Gonzalez Parsons Apartments, a 100-unit, all-affordable transit-oriented development built on a former city-owned parking lot adjacent to the Logan Square Blue Line station. Developed by Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation, the project includes units affordable to households earning below 60 percent of the area median income and was named in honor of labor organizer Lucy Gonzalez Parsons.
In Albany Park, Ramirez-Rosa supported the construction of the Oso Apartments, a 48-unit, all-affordable housing development located near Montrose and Kimball avenues.
After a fire destroyed the Independence Branch Library in Irving Park, Ramirez-Rosa supported rebuilding the library at a new site co-located with affordable housing, combining a new public library with residential units for low-income seniors.
In addition to supporting affordable housing, Ramirez-Rosa has advocated for rent control. In 2021, he sponsored successful ordinances to establish minimum density requirements, and a demolition impact fee for portions of his ward facing high displacement. Ramirez-Rosa argued these ordinances would help preserve naturally-occurring affordable housing.
In September 2024, the City Council approved Ramirez-Rosa's Northwest Side Housing Preservation Ordinance, expanding and codifying anti-displacement protections in portions of Logan Square, Avondale, Hermosa, Humboldt Park, and West Town. The ordinance strengthened protections for multi-unit residential buildings by restricting demolitions and limiting conversions of multi-unit buildings into single-family homes. It also established tenant purchase protections by providing tenants with a right of first refusal when their building is offered for sale.
In November 2018, he supported the creation of the First Nations Garden on a large city-owned lot in his ward. The First Nations Garden was created by American Indian youth as a place to heal and connect back to nature. The garden was inaugurated with a land acknowledgement ceremony that included a Chicago City Council resolution passed by Ramirez-Rosa that acknowledged Chicago as an "indigenous landscape."
In 2020, Ramirez-Rosa supported the legalization of accessory dwelling units in much of his ward. He supported historic preservationist efforts in his district, including the allocation of $250,000 in public landmark funds to help restore Logan Square's Minnekirken.
Ramirez-Rosa worked with community organizations and the Chicago Department of Planning and Development on rezoning initiatives along Milwaukee Avenue, including sponsoring the Milwaukee Avenue Special Character Overlay District, which established design guidelines intended to preserve the corridor’s historic character while allowing context-sensitive development aligned with existing neighborhood patterns.
In May 2024, Ramirez-Rosa broke ground on a more than $27 million Milwaukee Avenue and Logan Square redesign project — previously known as the Logan Square Bicentennial Improvement Project — which reconfigured the historic Logan Square traffic circle, rerouted Kedzie Avenue, and added new pedestrian and public spaces, a change he championed through a multi-year community input and design process involving Chicago Department of Transportation and Logan Square community organizations.

Participatory democracy

Ramirez-Rosa has consistently expressed his belief in participatory democracy as central to his work as a democratic socialist elected official. In 2017, he told The Nation Magazine: "I’m a big believer that we can build socialism from below. We need to create these opportunities for working people to hold the reins of power and govern themselves." Likewise, in 2017, he told Jacobin magazine: "democratic socialism means that the people govern every facet of their lives, whether it be the economic structure or the government that’s determining the policies that impact their lives."
As part of this approach, Ramirez-Rosa helped found United Neighbors of the 35th Ward, a neighborhood-based political organization active in his ward. In These Times described UN35 as an "independent political organization," engaging residents in collective decision-making and electoral activity, and noted that Ramirez-Rosa viewed his City Council seat as an extension of community base-building and co-governance rather than a solely individual mandate.
In 2019, Ramirez-Rosa explained to writer Micah Uetricht how he seeks to put participatory democracy into action in his elected office: "In the thirty-fifth ward we have what we call 'people-power initiatives.' To date, those are three programs that we run through my office. They seek to show people’s ability to govern themselves and collectively come together and make decisions. We don’t need the Donald Trumps of the world, the Jeff Bezoses of the world... telling us what our communities should look like or how we should live our lives. We collectively, from the grassroots, from below, can determine our own destiny."
The three "people-power initiatives" Ramirez-Rosa supported through his elected office were "community-driven zoning and development" - a local participatory planning process, participatory budgeting for the allocation of infrastructure improvement dollars, and a local rapid-response deportation defense network called the "community defense committee." The "community defense committee" distributed immigration know-your-rights cards door-to-door, organized know-your-rights trainings, and trained ward residents in how to engage in civil disobedience to stop deportations.
Ramirez-Rosa has also called himself a "movement elected official," stating his "role is to be an organizer on the inside for those movements that are organizing people-power bases on the outside."