This article uses the global city of Chicago as an urban exemplar of a thirty-year worldwide economic shift toward public (state) private (corporate) partnerships. Advanced by racialized youth-development discourses in Chicago, private corporations, public education, and social housing are in alliance to transform "the problems of urban America." This move to restore American cities to places of "safety" and "progress" is code for the modernized redevelopment of white and of color, poor and working class youth. The author's intention in this article is to highlight the insidious meta-narratives of American progress inherent in neoliberal youth development discourses for the purposes of marking them. The author wants to make it more difficult for the language and practice of American youth development to go unseen by educators and their students. Her hope in providing Chicago as a case study is to critically attend to and expose a U.S. economy of socio-political methods and spatial practices deployed transnationally to ontologically manipulate youth, aggravate their core of decency, and produce them as either owners or low-wage-earning laborers. (Contains 12 notes.)