Apply for a business license and lose your livelihood, only in Chicago

Image by oskay via Flickr

The city of Chicago’s reputation for driving away business continues unabated. When city health inspectors visited a shared kitchen last week, they destroyed hundreds of dollars of food, then came back and did it again. All in the name of city licensing.

Chicago Tribune reporter Monica Eng was there, observing for an upcoming piece on shared kitchens. Her video and account of what happened describes a small business caught in a maze of rules and regulations in multiple city departments that ultimately do nothing but produce revenue for the city in the form of licensing fees.

Shared kitchens are a growing trend that allows independent operators a professional, sanitary and presumable legal space to produce food for catering or other related businesses. In this case, Kitchen Chicago has been legally licensed to operate, making the facility responsible for  food safety issues. This seems reasonable and right, but the city of Chicago being what it is, the owners were later told the individual tenants need to be licensed too.

So Flora Lazar applied for a business license to operate Flora Confections, and use the Kitchen Chicago facilities. When city inspectors paid the required visit, they found food waiting to be used in Lazar’s candies. The inspectors then ripped open the bags of fruit puree dumped it in the garbage can and doused it with bleach. Fellow Kitchen Chicago tenant Sunday Dinner Club also had food destroyed, and the inspectors promised to return. Cue ominous music.

In all, enough food was destroyed to close down Lazar’s small business for months.

Shared kitchens are supposed to operate as business incubators that will ultimately contribute the local economy. Eng appeared on WBEZ this morning to update the story and describe the Byzantine maze of rules and licenses that operators like Lazar get lost in when trying to do the right thing. The city says it’s about health concerns, but I wonder if it doesn’t have more to do with the short term payoff gleaned from license fees and fines. Kitchen Chicago has 11 tenants, and 12 licenses are worth more than one. And according to Eng, inspectors say if one violation is discovered fines can be issued to every tenant using the facilities, something she equates to the police pulling over a car for speeding and giving the driver and everyone in it a ticket. Again, 12 fines pay more than one. The person at the Health Department who came up with this must be seeing dollar signs.

There are no rules to refer to here, no codes to post that ensure compliance. Just a bunch of people trying to launch and grow their businesses and being thwarted by the city every step of the way. It’s crap like this that makes people move to the suburbs. Evanston requires one license per shared kitchen that covers all the tenants.  The City told WBEZ and the Tribune’s Eng that this
the prospect of losing small businesses to suburbs like Evanston isn’t their primary concern, health is. But no one is saying this food is going to hurt anyone, it’s a matter of paperwork and licensing. And fees.