Just when I thought I could take no more depressing news about COVID-19, or Trump, or our impending economic collapse, along comes the city with a little happy news to lift me from my funk . . .
Tax increment financing is a program in which the city slaps an undisclosed surcharge on your property taxes and diverts the money into a slush fund the mayor is pretty much free to spend as she wants.
Construction on the medical center should start next year, once the city and Farpoint work out the details of that TIF deal. Which, I assume, they’ll eventually get around to sharing with us.
Well, it’s too early to tell exactly how good it is. As, again, the city has not revealed how much TIF money this thing will cost us.
Two years later that same Mayor Rahm got the City Council to give Sterling Bay $1.3 billion to develop that abandoned fleet facility—and many surrounding parcels—into Lincoln Yards.
In general, Mayor Lightfoot has promised to never, ever sign onto a boondoggle like Lincoln Yards. We shall see.
