CHICAGO | Politics and Current Events

[BorisMolotov]

^ Racist segregation institutional policies aside (Which I really hope are gone or being erased quickly) this city also seems to practice a lot of self-segregation, which directly contradicts some of the ideas that Bonsai Tree and others on this board are promoting. That is step one in getting more economic equality throughout the city.

[moorhosj]

An idea from Susana Mendoza on re-purposing closed schools:

This morning, Susana Mendoza addressed the City Club of Chicago, laying out her bold vision to shape Chicago for the next generation and put the city’s neighborhoods first. During the speech, Mendoza unveiled her 50NEW Initiative to rebuild public schools as strong academic centers and hubs of community activity that will also help address violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods.

50NEW is a comprehensive plan that would use extra space in existing neighborhood schools to offer daycare, supper for students, family services, job training, and more. Instead of closing schools, 50NEW would help transform them into community hubs where Chicago families can access a quality public education alongside the support services they need to thrive.

50 represents the community schools that will be created within existing, underutilized school buildings over the next eight years. NEW stands for Neighborhood Education Works reflecting the program’s steadfast commitment to building a strong public education system for the next generation.

“We have to think boldly and transformationally,” said Susana Mendoza. “Instead of asking which 50 schools we should close next, I’ll be focused on which 50 underutilized schools we should be doubling down on, turning them into true community hubs and stronger academic centers. I’m ready to get to work on our schools at every level, from the neighborhood school my son attends, to implementing my 50NEW Initiative to transform the most under-resourced neighborhoods in our city. I’m excited to work with all Chicagoans to shape our future together – a future based on a vision for the next generation, not just the next four years.”

[the urban politician]

^ How many community centers are we gonna build before we realize that they won't fix anything? Besides, some of these schools are pretty large buildings, and that's a lot of maintenance cost for something that will provide questionable benefit.

The better solution is for the city to convert them into housing for people with Section 8 vouchers. That way, you tap into federal dollars to recuperate the cost of rehab and maintenance.

I should be Mayor! (don't worry, Willie, you're still my number 1)

[moorhosj]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

^ How many community centers are we gonna build before we realize that they won't fix anything? Besides, some of these schools are pretty large buildings, and that's a lot of maintenance cost for something that will provide questionable benefit.

The better solution is for the city to convert them into housing for people with Section 8 vouchers. That way, you tap into federal dollars to recuperate the cost of rehab and maintenance.

I should be Mayor! (don't worry, Willie, you're still my number 1)

Have you examined Willie Wilson's platform? Because he wants to re-open closed schools and mental health centers. They are actually 2 of his top 3 issues.

[Kenmore]

it's always cute watching suburban libertarians and transplants repeat the chicago doesn't have affordability crisis and use cheap southside rents as their reasoning. gross and pathetic.

[Investing In Chicago]

Originally Posted by Kenmore

it's always cute watching suburban libertarians and transplants repeat the chicago doesn't have affordability crisis and use cheap southside rents as their reasoning. gross and pathetic.

Insightful as always...Bleeding heart complains Chicago isn't affordable, then complains when someone points to the affordable housing in Chicago.

[Baronvonellis]

Wealth inequality has gotten larger in the US since the 70's, but that a problem that the federal government would have to solve. If you want the US to be Sweden the federal government would have to arrange that. Chicago isn't a city-state that can control the overall economic conditions of the US, the situation we are in a cause of the overall US market conditions.

Yea, how did the massive housing projects in Cabrini Green work out? I'm pretty sure no one wants that again. But that's the result of what the liberals are suggesting. If a poor person lives next door to me, how exactly would I be helping to uplift them? These people need some personal responsibility as well. Human life doesn't happen through osmosis. All these things are nice in theory, but it doesn't work in the real world.
College professors love to talk and write papers about their pet theories, but they don't live in the real world, and tell their students about their fantasy lands.

[twister244]

As an outsider, it's interesting to see this discussion on affordability in Chicago.

I just took a glance at apartments in River North and found multiple apartments for under $1800/month. I also checked out Redfin and saw MULTIPLE 1-2 bedroom condos in the loop for under $300k......

I just bought a condo here in Denver, a bit west of downtown..... one bedroom..... 700 sq ft... for $315k. And I don't have even half the urban amenities you guys have in Chicago, or a beautiful lakefront.

Even with higher taxes, Chicago is pretty damn cheap compared to other major cities in the country.

[Vlajos]

^ it is cheap. And it's really a great city. We do have an extraordinarily high number of whiners though as someone said here recently.

[Steely Dan]

^ yes, compared to its big city peers around the nation, chicago is a very affordable city, especially for the level of urbanism it possesses.

median home values by zillow home value index:

san francisco: $1,387,700
seattle: $733,400
los angeles: $682,600
new york: $677,500
san diego: $629,000
boston: $593,500
D.C.: $575,800
portland: $422,400
denver: $421,500
austin: $357,800
miami: $334,500
minneapolis: $262,400
atlanta: $252,000
phoenix: $237,700
chicago: $228,600
US median: $221,500
dallas: $198,400
houston: $181,800
philly: $154,400



if you want big, messy, and traditionally urban, only philly beats chicago on price.

but yeah, property taxes here are obscenely high relative to value.

[moorhosj]

Originally Posted by Baronvonellis

Yea, how did the massive housing projects in Cabrini Green work out? I'm pretty sure no one wants that again.

You admit that nobody wants it, then you use it as a strawman to argue against. There is a wide middle ground between placing 15,000 people in 70 acres and having zero public housing in wealthier areas.

All you have to do is look at the still-standing rowhouse portion of Cabrini to see a different option. Nobody is advocating for the building of entirely new communities of exclusively poor people.

[bnk]

Originally Posted by Baronvonellis

…

Yea, how did the massive housing projects in Cabrini Green work out? I'm pretty sure no one wants that again. But that's the result of what the liberals are suggesting. If a poor person lives next door to me, how exactly would I be helping to uplift them? These people need some personal responsibility as well. ....

The area turned out quite well.


https://www.chicagobusiness.com/cons...ers-right-here

December 18, 2018 09:42 AM |UPDATED 22 hours ago


The fastest-growing concentration of high earners? Right here.



Cook County has the areas with the No. 1 and No. 7 biggest increases in $200,000-plus households since 2000—and No. 1 is the area where Cabrini-Green once was.



(Bloomberg)—U.S. unemployment is near a 50-year low, economic growth is brisk and the stock market—despite a disappointing 2018—has paid generous returns since the financial crisis of a decade ago.

But not for everyone. The chasm between rich and poor hasn’t been this wide since data collection began in the 1960s. Workers experience starkly different versions of America depending on which city or neighborhood they live in. One way to measure the economic fortunes of a place is by the concentration of households earning $200,000 or more, the highest threshold in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Nationally, 6.9 percent of American households bring in that much. What follows are the areas (known to the Census Bureau as tracts) that have shown the biggest increases in concentration of $200,000-and-up households since 2000, according to calculations by consulting firm Webster Pacific. It used data released Dec. 6 and adjusted for inflation. (The ranking excludes recently created tracts, those defined as tracts of significant change and any tract with fewer than 100 households in either 2000 or 2017.)

COOK COUNTY









Cook County, which includes the county seat of Chicago, is home to the No. 1 and No. 7 fastest-growing concentrations of $200,000-plus households. No. 1 is, ironically, the area around where the Cabrini-Green public housing projects once stood. Cabrini-Green was notorious for violent crime, poverty and de facto racial segregation until its demolition beginning in the 1990s at the behest of the Chicago Housing Authority.

Even back then, authorities fretted that redevelopment plans might displace low-income families. They were right to be worried. Two decades later, the area’s concentration of $200,000-plus households has skyrocketed from zero to 39 percent. For some of the longtime residents who remain, the neighborhood’s transformation has been isolating.




Latanya Palmer, 53, grew up in the Cabrini Rowhouses. While she moved into a nearby mixed-income development in 2005, the hypergentrification has occasionally made her feel like a stranger in her own home. That sentiment echoes across the country, as poor and working-class Americans are increasingly pushed aside by frenzied development and prohibitive living expenses.


...

[Khantilever]

Originally Posted by Baronvonellis

Wealth inequality has gotten larger in the US since the 70's, but that a problem that the federal government would have to solve. If you want the US to be Sweden the federal government would have to arrange that. Chicago isn't a city-state that can control the overall economic conditions of the US, the situation we are in a cause of the overall US market conditions.

Yea, how did the massive housing projects in Cabrini Green work out? I'm pretty sure no one wants that again. But that's the result of what the liberals are suggesting. If a poor person lives next door to me, how exactly would I be helping to uplift them? These people need some personal responsibility as well. Human life doesn't happen through osmosis. All these things are nice in theory, but it doesn't work in the real world.
College professors love to talk and write papers about their pet theories, but they don't live in the real world, and tell their students about their fantasy lands.

I was like you once. Very skeptical of the idea that lower-class people would be better off living next to higher-class people, except through the indirect benefits (lower crime, better schools, etc). But there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence now that there really is something else going on, with the best theory being that it’s peer effects for young children. Basically, your life goals are really heavily determined by those around you.

I saw this myself growing up attending relatively mixed-income schools; the friends I made early on who didn’t go into the honors/AP track ended up thinking the only ways to make it is to hustle by selling Chinese-made crap or other cockamamie get-rich-quick schemes rather than go into a solid profession (which are very attainable for even lower-than-average students). I remember that in middle school someone that a lot of these friends admired was a guy we knew who was very successful selling cell phones at the mall. Thank God I had cousins who were doctors and investment bankers who were my role models. (I also spent one harrowing year at a middle school where a lot of kids admired their drug dealer cousins—and when one of MY cousins dropped me off at school in a BMW, I kid you not, the kids asked me if he was a drug dealer too).

My wife, on the other hand, lived in one of the highest-income school districts in the state and her friends are all extremely successful to the point that her “stupidest” friend—someone who they all openly consider a “dumb as rocks ditz”—has a top 5 MBA. This is admittedly just an anecdote and obviously she must be intelligent, but I get the impression that had she attended another school she’d just be trying to be an Instagram influencer or something.

Raj Chetty’s recent work on re-evaluating the Moving to Opportunity experiment is making waves because of how incredibly robust his results are in showing these effects. Of course, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on here, and as a matter of external validity it’s unclear whether we would see the same effects if we had a massive level of socioeconomic integration. But it’s hard to dispute that the effect exists, and suggests that at least at the margin integration would be a good way of improving outcomes for low-income children (not just income but their marriage rates, etc).

[bnk]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...218-story.html


Bill Daley tops $3M raised in Chicago mayoral race, gets backing from a Kennedy


By Bill Ruthhart
Chicago Tribune



December 18, 2018, 7:35 PM



Bill Daley topped the $3 million mark in fundraising and extended his financial advantage in the Chicago mayoral race Tuesday, thanks to a round of checks that included support from a member of the Kennedy clan.

Daley reported adding $137,714 to his campaign war chest, including a $10,000 contribution from the campaign committee of former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy II, a Democrat from the famous political family who held a Massachusetts Congressional seat from 1987 until 1999.


Daley also reported a $10,000 contribution from Thomas and Victoria Vallely of Boston. Thomas Vallely is a senior adviser at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The Massachusetts money came as part of an East Coast fundraising swing that took Daley to Boston and Washington, D.C.

His campaign confirmed he attended a pair of Washington, D.C., fundraisers hosted by veterans of former President Bill Clinton’s White House, where he served as a U.S. commerce secretary. Many of those Clinton veterans and Washington donors did not turn up in the contributions Daley reported Tuesday, a sign that the former banking executive is poised to report more contributions soon.





Daley, the son and brother of two former mayors, now has reported raising more than $3.1 million since entering the race for mayor in September, after Mayor Rahm Emanuel made the surprise announcement that he would drop his bid for a third term. When Emanuel departed the race, he had raised more than $10 million toward his re-election effort.

The three other candidates who entered the race after Emanuel got out trail Daley in fundraising.

READ MORE: Bill Daley promises property tax freeze in his first TV ad for Chicago mayor »



In his latest filing, Daley also collected $56,000 from six law partners at Kirkland & Ellis, including $25,000 from John R. O’Neil and $10,000 each from Bill A. Levy and Daniel Perlman. The former executive with JPMorgan Chase also reported $19,500 in contributions from nine attorneys with Jenner & Block.

Also listed in the fundraising report: $4,714 in food for a fundraiser at Gibson’s Italia, a new restaurant that overlooks the Chicago River downtown. That tab was covered by Daley nephew Robert Vanecko

…








I guess when you have all of the elites and business in his pocket he can go low brow in this TV ad

• Video Link

[the urban politician]

Sadly, I'll probably still take a machine politician over a Toni Preckwinkle--she's turning out to be a nightmare:

1. Seems to have an overly lenient stance on criminals.
2. She favors rent control in the City of Chicago
3. Already has the backing of all of the public employee unions that have dragged this State down
4. Would rather impose a new tax than fire unneeded public workers (see the Sweetened Beverage tax debacle)

Regarding #4, she had to fire a few hundred people because her precious tax got knocked down and.......has anybody noticed a difference? You can probably get rid of 50% of Illinois' public employees except for teachers, police and fire and nobody will ever notice....hell, the State will probably run even better.

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

Sadly, I'll probably still take a machine politician over a Toni Preckwinkle--she's turning out to be a nightmare:

1. Seems to have an overly lenient stance on criminals.
2. She favors rent control in the City of Chicago
3. Already has the backing of all of the public employee unions that have dragged this State down
4. Would rather impose a new tax than fire unneeded public workers (see the Sweetened Beverage tax debacle)

Regarding #4, she had to fire a few hundred people because her precious tax got knocked down and.......has anybody noticed a difference? You can probably get rid of 50% of Illinois' public employees except for teachers, police and fire and nobody will ever notice....hell, the State will probably run even better.

For sure. Prekwinkle is almost my last choice. It's sad, when she first was elected Cook County President I was a huge fan. But she's just as bad as Todd Stroger now. Maybe worse.

[Steely Dan]

preckwinkle is pretty much in "i'll vote for anyone else" territory for me.

her pop tax debacle showed her true colors.

and i don't even drink soda.

[UPChicago]

Cook County has been very well run under the management of Preckwinkle and is in a much better financial position than the state or city, she has proven herself to be a good leader. She definitely has my vote!

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by UPChicago

Cook County has been very well run under the management of Preckwinkle and is in a much better financial position than the state or city, she has proven herself to be a good leader. She definitely has my vote!

I don't think I've heard anyone say Cook County is well run. It seems like a black hole for tax money to me.

[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by UPChicago

Cook County has been very well run under the management of Preckwinkle and is in a much better financial position than the state or city, she has proven herself to be a good leader. She definitely has my vote!

Cook County is well run? More like "well-oiled"