In May 2001 Chicago proudly unveiled the Englewood Tax Increment Financing District, local aldermen proclaiming that it would transform one of Chicago’s poorest communities.
Nine years later, Coleman and Troutman are both gone—Coleman lost her seat to JoAnn Thompson in 2007 and Troutman got busted for taking bribes from developers in 2008. And Englewood remains untransformed. The TIF has generated virtually no new commercial development at all.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As most of you know by now, TIFs were originally intended to bring in development and bolster the tax base of the poorest of Chicago’s poor communities, places where if there were no TIF subsidy there’d be no development at all.
There can be no denying that Englewood, in economic decline since the 1960s, needed help. In 2001 it was a high-crime, high-poverty community with roughly 7,500 vacant lots. The TIF district, whose zigzagging boundaries range from 55th on the north to 67th on the south and from Halsted on the east to Loomis on the west, was supposed to reverse this decline by subsidizing private development and rebuilding old and decaying infrastructure.
The city has yet to create a significant development deal using the Englewood TIF. Developers haven’t been willing to invest there because the risks are high and the potential returns low. About $5 million has been spent to rehab local grammar schools and another $1 million or so to install new streetlights at key intersections. These are worthwhile projects, but they’re not the sort of private development boost—either housing or commercial—the TIF’s initial supporters had in mind because they don’t directly raise the tax base.
In October, Mayor Daley announced that he would withdraw $180 million from 25 of the city’s 160 or so TIF accounts to help reduce the deficit. I asked Pete Scales, spokesman for the city’s budget department, to explain the criteria for determining which TIFs to take from. He never got back to me. I also called aldermen JoAnn Thompson and Latasha Thomas, whose 16th and 17th wards contain the TIF—they didn’t get back to me either. (Redistricting has removed the 20th Ward almost entirely from the TIF.)
But if we get rid of TIFs that don’t accomplish anything in poor neighborhoods, let’s also get rid of TIFs in wealthier communities, where it’s not at all clear why developers need the assistance TIFs give them. In fact, with Daley on his way out, maybe it’s time to blow up the whole program and try something else.
