From Tom Tresser:

PUBLIC POLICY ISSUES RAISED BY THIS RESEARCH

TIFS CONTRIBUTE TO INEQUITY AND THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY IN DISADVANTAGED COMMUNITIES.

The top performing TIFs are all in or near the Loop or Central City.

Having TIF districts all across the hottest performing real estate in the city bloats those TIF funds with over 600 hundred million dollars in property taxes that can’t find their way to build parts of the city suffering from disinvestment and the “blight” the TIF program is supposed to combat.

By contrast, TIFs placed in the poorest parts of the city naturally continue to under-perform and will not produce revenues to improve those communities.

In this way TIFs are anti-distributional and contribute to Chicago’s history of neglecting poor communities of color.

Ironically, the ward with the most of its land mass in one TIF or another is the 24^th Ward which includes West Lawndale, a community that needs serious civic attention and investment.

This problem was recently aggravated by the rush to approve two super-TIFs in April of 2019 – The Cortland/Chicago River TIF for $1.3 billion to support the Lincoln Yard Project and the Roosevelt/Clark TIF for $1.1 billion to support the 78 Development along the Chicago River.

These two TIFs contain a total of $800 million in finance charges.

THE ENTIRE TIF PROCESS IS FRAUGHT WITH MYSTERY AND OPACITY

TIFs have often been characterized as a slush fund controlled by the Mayor.

Our own work substantiates this claim (see http://www.tifreports.com/slush).

We have shown here that almost 50% of all the TIF funds collected in Chicago are moved out of the area where the dollars have been collected and spent on a range of projects that are extremely difficult to track and completely unknown to the local taxpayers.

We also find that the Department of Planning and Development captures $8.1 million from all the TIF dollars that flow through its grasp.

This constitutes a skim of a larger skim. 

It is understandable that Tax Increment Financing in Chicago is seen as a slush fund that is completely malleable and subject to the Mayor’s will.

IS CHICAGO REALLY BROKE?

We have conducted this analysis of Chicago’s TIFs since 2012. 

We have found between $1.4 and $1.7 BILLION in property taxes sitting in the TIF accounts at the start of the calendar year.

The Mayor, the local media, and major well-funded civic groups repeat the message that we are out of civic funds and that we must pay more in regressive taxes and fees AND suffer service cut0backs.

—————————————————————————————————

The TIF research was coordinated by Lead Organizer Tom Tresser (www.tresser.com). Tom is a long time educator and organizer and public defender in Chicago. He was the co-founder of the CivicLab with Benjamin Sugar – which is a “do-tank” dedicated to collaboration, education, fabrication and innovation for social justice and civic engagement. The CivicLab operated a co-working space for two years in the West Loop and closed on June 30, 2015 (www.civiclab.us). He is working with Jonathan Peck and Phillip Thomas to power up the CivicLab in 2020. The CivicLab is 501 c 3 tax-exempt organization. Tom teaches public policy at National Louis University.

In 2008 Tom was a co-founder of Protect Our Parks which sued to stop the privatization of Lincoln Park (www.wesavedlinconpark.org). In 2009 he was a co-organizer of No Games Chicago which worked to defeat the bid for the 2016 Olympics (www.nogameschicago.com). He curated and published “Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the City We Deserve” in July of 2016. This book has triggered 62 public meetings across the city (www.wearenotbroke.org). In May of 2017 he co-founded The POWER Institute (People Organizing to Win, Engage & Resist) with Jonathan Peck (www.powerinstitute.us). He can be reached at 312-804-3230, tom@civiclab.us

The 2018 TIF data was harvested at the City Bureau under the supervision of Darryl Holliday. Founded in 2015, City Bureau is a civic journalism lab based on the South Side of Chicago. The City Bureau brings journalists and community members together in collaborative environments to promote responsible media coverage, increase civic engagement and hold powerful forces to account. Their three programs are the Public Newsroom, Documenters and Reporting Fellowship (www.citybureau.org).

The TIF Illumination Project is online at http://www.tifreports.com. Since 2013 it has revealing the impacts of TIFs at the ward level. We show how much property taxes are extracted from inside each ward by the TIFs IN that ward. We produce graphic posters that contain a map of the ward showing:

• The shapes of all TIFs that are in the ward
• How much revenue those TIFs took from properties just IN the ward
• How much revenue FROM the ward was left in the in-ward TIF accounts at the end of the year
• Who has received TIF funds inside the ward
• How much money was transferred in our out of these TIFs
• How much money the Department of Planning skimmed from these TIFs for its own use

The TIF Illumination Project distributes these graphic posters at TIF town meetings, or Illuminations, that have been independently organized by residents of the community. Since February of 2013 we have been invited to present at 77 public meetings in front of over 6,400 people. Our heartfelt thanks to the dozens of volunteers who help organize these meetings. A record of these meetings is online at http://tifreports.com/tif-town-meetings. Presentations from these meetings can be purchased at our TIF Data Store at http://www.tifreports.com/store.

We have produced two TIF training videos via crowdfunding campaigns.

• “TIF 101” (22 minutes) explains the basics of Tax Increment Financing and features Professor Rachel Weber from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Cook County Clerk David Orr.
• “TIFs Off the Rails – Public Policy Problems with Chicago’s TIF Program (17 minutes) features Professor Richard Dye of the University of Illinois and Professor Stephanie Farmer of Roosevelt University. These videos are available on YouTube at http://www.tifreports.com/training_videos.

The CivicLab gratefully acknowledges the support of the Voqal Fund which helped keep the CivicLab open in 2014 and thus provided a base for the TIF Illumination Project to do its work. We are also thankful to the Sum All Foundation, the MoveOn Action Fund, the Crary Family Fund, and the Crossroads Fund for their past support. The Chicago Community Trust funded our 2018 Civic Harambee in August of 2018 through their “On The Table Program.”