In his previous crusade, north-side activist Tom Tresser went up against the political, cultural, media, and civic elite of Chicago as he fought against bringing the 2016 Olympic games to town.
For an encore, Tresser is trying to get city officials to tell the truth about how they spend your property taxes.
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He is, of course, talking about the city’s tax increment financing scam. That’s the program intended to eliminate blight in the poorest neighborhoods. Instead, the city jacks up your property taxes and funnels the money into a slush fund available for virtually anything the mayor wants, generally in neighborhoods that are neither poor nor blighted. Such as—to pick just one of my favorite TIF deals—the recent $30 million handout to the developers of River Point, an upscale office complex on the banks of the Chicago River downtown, in the hottest real estate market in the city.
That’s where Tresser comes in. Along with assorted academics, computer geeks, and other troublemakers, Tresser has started the CivicLab, which is breaking down the city’s TIF game to see who really wins and loses. They’re setting up a website (civiclab.us/the-tif-report) that reveals what Mayor Rahm Emanuel most wants to conceal, just like Mayor Richard Daley before him: that the program intended to help the poorest of the poor largely benefits the well to do.
Don’t believe me? Well, look at your tax bill. If you live in a TIF district, it will tell you that you pay zero dollars to the TIF, as in no money at all. When, of course, that is not the case. Think, people—if no one paid money into the TIF district, there would be no money to subsidize River Point.
But if you plug the address into Orr’s converter, you’ll discover that in fact only $506 went to the schools. Instead, about $11,922, or 92 percent of the total, went to something called the Near South TIF. Which, interestingly enough, helped finance the development of the very townhouse community where the property’s located.
But don’t expect him to join Tresser’s crusade anytime soon. As any politician will tell you, money is power. And the TIF program gives Mayor Emanuel control of another $500 million a year in property taxes on top of the billions in the regular city budget.
