The Creation of a 70–acre TIF district on Chicago’s North Side
The Need:
Loyola University’s Lakeshore Campus consists of 50 acres of property along Lake Michigan in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. Over the past 20 years, this diverse neighborhood has undergone demographic and economic changes resulting in a lack of private investment, inadequate utilities, deteriorated infrastructure and reduced property values. Loyola wanted to serve as a catalyst to promote economic development that would improve the lives of Rogers Park residents and enhance the Loyola student experience.
The Assignment:
Loyola retained Newcastle Limited to create a strategy for obtaining public support through tax increment financing. Newcastle helped Loyola master plan five acres of underutilized land adjacent to the campus, oversaw creation of the TIF, and established a framework for garnering community support and input for the plan.
The Result:
The City of Chicago approved formation of the Devon–Sheridan TIF in 2004. Newcastle successfully negotiated a redevelopment agreement with the City granting Loyola $46 million in benefits to help fund an $85 million renovation of a national historic landmark on its campus. The result is an economic development tool that will make Loyola’s campus and surrounding area more attractive to students, faculty and neighbors.
Newcastle Limited
BLOGNOTES: I'll have more on the tax payer funded, Loyola based piggy bank in the future. But now the question is - What do you think? Was the public duped from the very beginning?
5 comments:
A really curious, and amazing, element here is the plan to build $3000/month rental apartments on Sheridan north of Devon, on the site of the old pancake house which was being used as Loyola's Fine Arts Building. It was announced at a meeting there in February.
The public was not "duped" so much as over-ridden, in that the "public" is not empowered to stop the Corporate Welfare jauggernaut from steamrolling over us all.
This is a topic that never fails to enrage me, because of the multiple gross injustices and the obvious harm being done to the city and its citizens, who are being bled dry and blown out of their houses to provide lavish benefits to a well-endowed and completely private institution, while our essential services deteriorate and our citizens are impoverished and forced to sell their homes or are priced out of rentals because of taxes that have to escalate to offset the "future" tax revenues that are diverted by this and the 150 or so other TIF districts in this city.
The sick part is that a couple of studies conducted here in Chicago show that most of our TIF districts have resulted in a net loss of businesses, jobs, and gross domestic revenues.
However, the Loyola TIF does indeed have its supporters among the general public-people who think that the rest of us exist, work, and ante up taxes for no other reason than to hand our earnings to a private institution that gives us, as individuals, nothing in return.
I can add that it gives the "public" very little in return beyond an attractive campus and cheerful college kids, what benefits are amply provided by numerous other educational institutions, as well as by all the private citizens who spend (and risk)only their own money and efforts in beautifying their property AND our parks and other public areas, without the benefit of public funding.
Worse, Loyola has never and will never pay a dime into the public till, being tax exempt.
It's time to get all the hands out of the public till. I can remember when the City of Chicago never ran budget deficits, yet now it almost always does. We need more police, we need to improve our public schools to compete with suburbs for middle-class residents, we need to repair our ageing infrastructure, and we need to plan for a future that may be economically vastly more challenging than the present because of dwindling resources and growing population.
Our non-rich citizens are being impoverished and deprived of the wherewithal to provide for their own needs in order to fund boons for our pols and their super-rich cronies. We paid for the destruction of Soldier Field even though the vast majority cannot afford tickets and do not stand to benefit from the financial windfall which that was for the football team's ownership. The same could be said for the Sox stadium, now in private hands; for the ludicrous Block 37 el station whose cost could almost fund another complete rail line, and for a dozen other project whose benefits accrue only to a small coterie but whose cost is born by all of us.
We do NOT need to be robbed at gunpoint to provide freebies worth tens of millions of dollars to a private institution that serves mainly students well-off enough to ante up over $20,000 a year for higher education.
Don't get me wrong, I like Loyola and enjoy having the campus here. However, I also value the other excellent educational institutions in this city, that add at least as much value and often much more to the city's cultural life.
Trouble is, there is no way we can stop this unless we get the 1952 state legislation that made this possible, repealed. We can sit here and ask now what our legislators were thinking of when they passed legislation that basically enabled priveleged corporate entities to venture tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-conceived ventures, or waste the money on pure fluff (like a campus building)while being totally insulated from any risk.
How do the rest of us jump on this gravy train? I would really like to be handed tens of millions of dollars to build, say, a big box power center, with no business or financial risk while being able to keep the bulk of the profits.
you're right. i'd much prefer the route the morse avenue area is using to attract business and residents. oh wait, there is no plan. instead of protesting devcorp and loyola (and for that matter any other individual or organization that attempts to improve our neighborhood), why don't you do a little more advocating? You all say you want to see better retail and better residential options, yet you aren't willing to part with what we currently have. quit being so damn schizophrenic. you either want things to change or stay the same (ie continuing to have a hell hole). it's great that you all are trying to hold on to whatever kind of utopia you envision, however, you're being naive if you think that things work in a vaccuum. they don't. and as for public education being undermined by this TIF, that's crazy talk there. if you have issues with the way education is funded, then you need to talk to the governor and the state congress. they control the funding.
Jarvis, why do people persist in believing that TIF districts and other corporate welfare bring development, when it's been proven that they almost ALWAYS result in a net loss of business and jobs?
Maybe it's because I'm a radical pro-free-enterprise Libertarian, but I believe that any business worth having will be able to get itself funded without government subsidies, and that welfare for the rich is even more destructive than welfare for the poor- while a bunch of welfare boobs can only crud the neighborhood up one building at a time, the rich corporations can stick us with overscale, inappropriate, and uneconomical development that will be with us for a loooooong time, often in the form of vacant buildings unusable for any other purpose than the one for which it was built.
Remember the Brickyard Mall TIF? The March First TIF? No? If you don't remember these, it is because they were resounding flops within five years of the implementaion of the plan, like hundreds of others in Chicago and the rest of Cook Country alone, whose names and purposes are forgotten. The March First fiasco sent ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS down the rathole. The LaSalle Central will divert $500MM away from the public till over its life.
Do you really believe that we can call ourselves a free market when we are sheltering rich corporate entities from all business risk and handing them hundreds of millions of dollars, which their smaller, upstart competition is taxed to provide them? Is this really a country where "anyone can make it" when we must pay to subsidize our own richer, politically connected competition so they can better put us out of business.
Yeah, I want development, but I don't think I and other tax payers should have to subsidize someone else's profits. Capitalism is a "value for value" deal where you are free to accept or reject a deal according to the benefit you believe you will or will not derive from it.
Sorry, but this is socialism at it's worst- a deal where the beneficiaries do not pay and take no risk, while the people who pay receive no benefit in return.
We will NOT get economic development that lasts and sticks past the expiration of the TIF, if indeed it is even allowed to expire. What we will get is the renovation of at least one campus building that we as individuals can make no use of, plus a handful of business including a superluxury apt. building for which there will almost certainly be no market, least of all the homeowners and renters of Rogers Park and Edgewater.
Get rid of the crime and the subsidized low income housing, so that self-funded businesses who must pay their own way and bear the costs of their mistakes will come here, and so that more middle income people will move here and be happy to send their kids to the local public schools.
This city was not built and made wealthy by public spending on vanity projects and by throwing public money at private cronies. It was built by people who founded and built the vital heavy industry and commerce that has since been driven out of this city to the hinterlands and finally abroad by bureacracy, layers of taxation, and obstructionism.
This kind of thing impoverishes communities. It does not build them.
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