It’s beyond exaggeration to say that Mayor Daley has “spent his entire career ignoring” South Side neighborhoods. Chicago’s renaissance swept north before it came south. Your North Side neighborhood was not always so gilded. It enjoyed revitalization many years ago. In recent years, the South Loop has improved, Douglas has improved, Bronzeville has improved, Kenwood has improved–certainly not to the posh standards of Lincoln Park, but there’s a lot of economic history to be overcome on the South Side, and a lot less economic currency to work with.

In a long-term urban revival, which revives first, a street surrounded by stores and apartments (like North Clark Street) or a street surrounded by vacant lots from insurance fires (like South Prairie)?

Which has money flowing through it?

The city built a new Kennedy-King College further west in Englewood as part of the effort to revitalize the area. Washington Park and East Englewood were beginning to show signs of growth when the economy collapsed and the growth froze. Some buildings that had been boarded up were renovated, a few new buildings went up, and more were planned: The city sold lots near Washington Park to non-profit developers for new low-income housing. But the wave of revitalization that swept across Chicago petered out, pardon the pun, at Washington Park, where the Olympics might have kept it going.

Political leaders always could have and should have done more. But it’s a convenient fallacy to blame a political leader for every long-term problem he hasn’t solved. What if someone said, “The Clintons spent their career ignoring America’s health.” That statement, parallel to yours, would be especially cynical coming from someone who opposed health care reform under Bill Clinton. And likewise, blaming Daley for not solving problems when you’ve just campaigned against their solution strikes me as cynical. (But thanks for nicely embodying my last paragraph above).

If Mayor Daley has such tender concern about Englewood and black people in Chicago, as you seem to suggest, why has he spent his entire career ignoring them? Couldn’t he have invested years ago, in more direct ways than the Olympics, instead of letting Englewood fester like a cesspool?

Oops, that’s two questions. I can’t even count!

The Olympics would have been a challenge, for sure, but the biggest millstone would have been the divided tribe. When we’re divided, we might get something more in the direction of the 1968 Democratic Convention. But when everyone shoves in the same direction, Chicago can lift.

As for TIFs, I once again refer to the Reader. Ben Jarovsky is a local treasure and expert in the area. Writes Jarovsky:

“By law TIF money is to be spent in the districts where it’s collected. In fact one of the big selling points for program, articulated by aldermen down through the years, is that TIFs keep tax dollars in local communities.

“But a loophole in the state law allows the city to spend TIF money collected from one district in any adjoining TIF district—this is called porting. To raise the money for the schools, city and school officials worked out a scheme in which money was ported from one TIF district to another district. For example, the school board’s building a new South Shore High School located in the 71st and Stony Island TIF. But that TIF doesn’t generate enough money to pay off all the bonds on the $89 million project. So the city’s moving money into the Stony Island TIF from adjoining TIFs, including the Avalon Park district.”

You’re welcome to Uptown’s TIF funds. They’re being used to build parking garages, 100% subsidized high-rises and a fish farm that would employ two people. And a non-union Target store.

Please read more about TIFs and see how the South side can get in on the action.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/when-the-slush-dries-up/Content?oid=1104177

I think Jeff has pointed out that Englewood has a long term ownership which can only mean that the owners who are now residing in the area in their single family homes would see the value of their properties rise, instead of being undesirable real estate. If nothing else, homeowners would profit from this.
As far as people being displaced further into Roseland and Lawndale, these are not the only South Side neighborhoods that could be alternative for those who would leave. They are the more problematic ones you hear on TV about and that’s why they are used to say that it would only shift the population from one bad neighborhood to another.
Jeff, thanks for pointing out the perception that money just can be diverted from one account to another and the 11:55 reaction and outrage over the parking deal. The story was out there and I even posted in on my FB wall , but very few people paid attention to it.

The mayor doesn’t really have a TIF fund, he has a whole bunch of TIF accounts. TIF funds have to be spent in the district in which they’re collected. And before they can be collected, the district has to begin growing.

There is a Washington Park TIF District, and the funds are targeted to redevelop the land where the Robert Taylor Homes (notorious housing project) once stood and to fill in those vacant lots I mention above. That TIF was bringing in $1-$2 million a year with an Olympics on the horizon. Not only is that paltry compared to the Olympic billions, but it’s likely to dry up now.

I have a hunch that motorists want to slow down and talk about the parking issue for the same reason Republicans want to slow down and talk about the climate bill — so they can buy time to kill it. The parking deal was not exactly made at midnight. I remember when the original hearings were held and stories were published. Most people just didn’t wake up to it until it was done. Maybe retroactive journalism is the cause of preemptive journalism.

And the bottom line on that issue: drivers are a much bigger problem than parking.

I absolutely agree, the south side loses out again. But it doesn’t have to be that way and I don’t think we need an Olympics to make it happen. My opinion, opposition and distrust of Mayor Daley et al, is pretty well rooted in how mismanaged city resources are.

The city already owns the property where the Olympic village was to be built. There is more than $500 million allocated to the Olympics and more than that in the Mayor’s TIF fund. Developing blighted areas is exactly what TIF’s are for. Instead, the mayor and alderman have used money taken away from schools and parks, and given it to campaign donors in the form of subsidies. TIF money would be well spent in the neighborhoods you mention. Instead, it’s given to the Board of Trade, the Willis (Sears) Tower or of all things, a car dealer (Grossinger) to build among the highest priced, market rate commercial property in country (the Clybourn Corridor).

And the parking thing? It’s being used as example of the kind of backroom dealing that makes us so distrustful of city officials. Not about a lack of parking. It’s just one example of secretive maneuvers made by a mayor who does things in the dark of night. It’s easier to understand than TIFs, and effects more people on a daily basis, but it’s not really about parking a car. I suspect you know that.

If only we can start some kind of discourse on how to change the way the city works.

It seems like your entire argument rests on a false dilemma. One either helps these neighborhoods by infusing millions of dollars into the area, or one allows them to remain blighted. The problem is that while, yes, people are quick to yell out ‘gentrification’ when caught in the throes of some very beneficial economic development (such as the east edge of Pilsen), the extent to which the south and west sides of the city would have been affected by said investments would have results in thousands being displaced and their parks rendered unusable. Property values and tax hikes would have rendered these areas unaffordable for the people who currently resided in them, and would push them further west and south into areas like Lawndale and Roseland. Those who remain would see their parks–most notable Douglas and Washington–torn up in the throes of Olympian construction projects and increased security presence.

All in all, and in the same vein as the thus-far poorly executed Plan for Transformation which is resulting in the relocation of hundreds of families to the worst areas of the city, the plan for the 2016 may have improved the neighborhoods, but at the cost of the people who currently live there.

But to address the claim that those of us who didn’t support the Olympics “missed the boat,” the fact is that it was not just a concern for higher taxes that had 45% percent of the city’s residents fighting against the Olympics. It was a city deficit that is going to hit $500mil by the end of the year regardless of 2016’s presence (the school system alone has a $475mil deficit, independent of the cities coffers). It was an already suspect level of insider dealing that had people such as Michael Scott, a developer who consulted one of the firms that was hoping to develop the area around Douglas Park (where the Velodrome was going to be built), on the 2016 board. It was the fact that Daley loves to spend money he doesn’t have in order to remain politically shiny, at the cost of city services and programs.

In the end, it was a poorly executed plan that failed in a way that only Chicago knows how to fail. And it was a plan that would have not brought about such rosy images as you paint here.

And may I just add, Edge, that I love your guitar work.

Chicago certainly has its problems; what city doesn’t? But the proliferation of bike lanes, the explosion of residential real estate in places where people never lived before, the downtown-transforming effect of Millennium Park which came as a shock to so many of us how nice it was, the proliferation of better schools even if they do mostly serve white and Asian kids. The city is a nicer place than it was 15 years ago when I was in high school at Whitney Young, Michelle Obama’s alma mater. You can point to crime in the city being bad, but I remember a classmate at my academically high flying school getting beat to death in a park when I was a kid, too. Crime happens, tragic as its consequences are.

In any event, I wasn’t opposed to the Olympics heading to Chicago; no longer being a resident of my home city, I wouldn’t have a dog in the fight. However, I was opposed to our President being involved in the Olympics bid for the reasons I described. In arguing that the city doesn’t need to be transformed, I was trying to say there isn’t a need for our POTUS to get involved in the Olympics bid as he might for say Detroit or New Orleans, city’s that do need to be rebuilt.