Saturday, September 17, 2005

* Who's TIF is It? Part 1

So now that the TIF dust has settled and there's not much we can do about it, the truth finally comes out.

Too bad.

There goes all the land for the much needed park space in the southeast corner of Rogers Park, the most park poor area of the community!

AND we're going to add 400 more residential units (that could be close to a thousand people) who also will be without park space or lakefront access (Hartigan Beach is looking smaller all the time)...

Guess all that talk at the TIF meetings, that Loyola has no plans and that they weren't funding the TIF study for their own benefit, was so much smoke screen.

Well pray tell!

Of course, I'm sure they'll say this development proposal came out of meetings soliciting community input.

If you consider the approximately 30 people (some of which were Loyola employees/students), who attended the so-called charette, as representative of the community.

Donald Gordon
Executive Director, Rogers Park Conservancy

1 comment:

Hugh said...

>We lost this fight.

Thanks for your post. Of course I agree with your main point, to some extent we get the government we deserve. And trying to do anything civic-minded in a home town as brutally and ritualistically disempowering as Chicago is of course extremely frustrating.

But we have not lost. If we want it, the ongoing opportunity to shape the TIFs in our neighborhood is there. The Loyola TIF will be siphoning the public property tax money of the future to the private sector for the next two or three decades.

The Neighborhood Capital Budget Group

Tax Increment Financing

How can our neighborhood organize an oversight panel for our TIF?

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