Chicago is really bad at fairly slicing the economic development pie.
Tag: tax increment financing
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Reefer sanity
Mayor Lightfoot’s cannabis cultivation center—finally, a TIF expenditure that makes sense.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
The good old TIF mayonnaise jar
To settle the teachers’ strike Mayor Lightfoot should scrape some more “mayonnaise” from the TIF slush fund.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Lori’s Gettysburg Address
Look for the mayor to blame the budget deficit on Rahm but not Lincoln Yards.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
A modest proposal
As long as Chicagoans don’t care about TIFs, let’s turn the city into a giant TIF district to pay our bills.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Defending the indefensible
The Ed Burke question: If the city’s going to waste millions on downtown TIF deals, why shouldn’t he get a little piece of that pie?
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Chicago poli-tricks as usual
Aldermen just raised property taxes to pay for Rahm’s TIF handout to his pals.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
How Rahm plans to spend the $1.3 billion in TIF tax dollars he’s giving to Lincoln Yards
Hint: it doesn’t involve helping low-income communities.
Posted inNews & Politics
Different planets
A tale of two endorsement sessions—the Tribune v. the Grassroots Collaborative
Posted inMusic
Why won’t City Hall fight for Chicago’s homegrown music scene?
The Chicago Independent Venue League shouldn’t have to push back against the Live Nation handouts in the Lincoln Yards development—but City Hall doesn’t protect Chicago’s homegrown music scene.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Looking out for number Rahm
The mayor’s latest proposal would cut benefits to municipal employees to fund development projects.
Posted inNews & Politics
Mayoral forum recap: all the answers, none of the bullshit
At back-to-back forums last week 11 candidates fielded questions and even provided some answers.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Celebrating Acero’s successful teachers’ strike—and the belated victory for Karen Lewis
Chicago’s City Council hates taking from the schools and giving to the rich but sometimes they do it anyway.
Posted inBlogs
Looks like Karen Lewis may have defeated Rahm after all
As I watched jubilant teachers, wearing union red, from the Acero charter school network celebrate the new contract they’d won after a four-day strike, I had a flashback to the way things used to be. The Chicago Teachers Unions were in the midst of their 2012 strike, which had shuttered all the public schools in […]
Posted inBlogs
Governor Rauner vetoes a tax break for Englewood while offering billions to Amazon
Governor Rauner has put the kibosh on state rep Sonya Harper’s urban agriculture bill on grounds that never seemed to trouble him in the case of upscale development.