Lefties Get It on AH

Chicago's liberal alternative newspaper, the Chicago Reader, finally gets wise on the "affordable" housing scam (This TIF district looks like one of Illinois' gerrymandered congressional districts):

In recent months the city’s given them an ultimatum: if you want $8 million to save affordable housing for senior citizens, you’d better endorse the proposed Hollywood/Sheridan tax increment financing district, which will wind up costing taxpayers about $75 million in property tax dollars. In effect, the city is proposing to divert roughly $67 million in property taxes from the chronically broke schools, parks, and county on the shoulders of an $8 million project. Only in Chicago would this kind of deal stand a chance. [snip]

Then there’s the larger problem of rising property taxes. TIFs drive them up by forcing the schools and parks and all the other taxing bodies to compensate for revenue diverted into the funds. The more TIFs the city creates—and there are now 153 of them—the more residents and merchants have to pay, making housing less affordable. So in the name of saving 198 units of affordable housing, the folks up in Edgewater are contributing to the citywide affordable-housing problem.

Background on Chicago TIFs in this article by Daniel McGraw, Reason:

The experience in Chicago is important. The city invested $1.6 billion in TIFs, even though $1.3 billion in economic development would have occurred anyway. So the bottom line is that the city invested $1.6 billion for $300 million in revenue growth.

The upshot is that TIFs are diverting tax money that otherwise would have been used for government services.

Related posts: Follow the Money, Is YOUR Local Government a BLIGHT on the Community?