CHICAGO | Lincoln Yards

[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by Mr Downtown

You seem to be mixing together every facet of municipal finance into some sort of word salad or rage stew.

And you're living in a fantasy land thinking that pensions aren't eating up the municipal budget. Been on another planet lately?

Staying on point: Chicago cannot build this infrastructure. It wants the developer to foot the bill for it and hand it over to them. Nothing wrong with said developer making a win-win deal with the city. This is a win-win deal, it's just that the CTU wants to be bratty about it.

There's nothing wrong with TIFs; it's just wrong to use them to unnecessarily pad the developer's bottom line when a district would redevelop without them.

^ You haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about. What makes you think that a transit line, a water/sewer system, bridges, parks, and a streetgrid will just magically get built by a developer on this site and handed over to the city, along with 600 subsidized apartments, without some help from the public?

The only thing that would get built there without a public subsidy is a giant suburban shopping plaza or perhaps a neighborhood full of McMansions with a private street in, private street out. Nobody wants that.