A couple weeks back Sun-Times reporters Tim Novak and Chris Fusco detailed in a two-part series how many of the “affordable” housing units in the University Village development near UIC were actually sold to connected and well-off people who turned them over for a quick, handsome profit. The stories noted that the development, built on the grave of the historic Maxwell Street community, was raised with the help of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies pulled out of tax increment financing accounts.
Novak and Fusco wrote: “University Village homeowners pay next to nothing for city services like police protection and public schools. That’s because they live in a city of Chicago ‘tax increment financing district.’”
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Well, yes and no. The folks in University Village pay property taxes—it’s just that what they pay gets diverted from the schools, parks, city, and county and sent to the Roosevelt/Union TIF district account.
In other words, his tax bill was—to put it mildly—inaccurate, despite being painstakingly itemized down to the penny.
But we’ll never really know whether the University of Illinois truly needed all that money—in other words, whether the project wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without it, which is supposed to be the standard for the use of TIF funds. But the city rarely, if ever, asks developers for a public explanation of why the project hinges on subsidization by taxpayers.
And what exactly were they? Who knows? Maybe the money was used as wallpaper. I’m sure Rosati will get back to me any minute now, and when he does I’ll be sure to ask.
