Last February members of the Rogers Park Community Action Network saw an article in Loyola’s student newspaper, the Phoenix, about a proposed tax increment financing zone for the area surrounding the university, and their blood began to boil. For several years members of RPCAN, a community organization that fights for affordable housing and tenants’ rights, had worried that someone would try to put a TIF in the neighborhood, and now someone was trying to.
Three years ago RPCAN members had heard rumors that a TIF was being proposed for the Morse Avenue commercial strip. They held meetings and organized a march they say drew 400 protesters. The local alderman, Joe Moore, who’s clashed with RPCAN many times, says the idea of a Morse TIF “was casually kicked around from time to time” but was “never talked about as anything tangible” and never became an official proposal. The chairman of RPCAN’s board, Fran Tobin, insists Moore talked about specific plans for a Morse TIF at a meeting attended by city officials and the local development group DevCorp North during the summer of 2000. Moore doesn’t remember saying anything specific at the meeting, and DevCorp North director Kimberly Bares says that while representatives of her organization did make a presentation, it was primarily about streetscape improvements for Morse Avenue.
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At any rate, there’s no doubt that plans for a TIF in the area around Loyola University exist. The idea was first discussed by the local aldermen–at the time the area included parts of the 40th, 48th, and 49th wards–and city planning officials several years ago. The city even allocated money for a feasibility study, which looks at such things as a neighborhood’s vacancy rates, the age and condition of its buildings, and the amount of new development to see if it qualifies for a TIF. But Moore says a TIF wasn’t a high priority for him or the other aldermen, and the study was never done.
Both O’Connor and Moore went for the plan, and Loyola hired S.B. Friedman & Company to do the study, which started last January. Loyola’s director of community relations, Jennifer Clark, says that since the study isn’t completed, there’s no estimate yet on how much it will cost.
But many people are suspicious of TIFs. In the past year they’ve been the focus of at least three lawsuits in the Chicago metro area. In July, Robin Realty & Management sued the village of Hoffman Estates claiming that a proposed TIF would make it harder for a shopping center the company runs to attract tenants, because they’d be afraid the village would seize the land using its powers of eminent domain. In June the Illinois appellate court supported the Pleasantdale school district, which feared it would lose tax dollars and had argued that the town of Burr Ridge wasn’t blighted and therefore shouldn’t qualify for a TIF.
Jones and the NCBG are concerned that instituting TIFs of any sort in relatively well-off neighborhoods such as Hyde Park and Albany Park is having a negative impact on the city’s general revenue. He says that last year the city’s 128 TIFs sucked up about $392 million in taxes–money that might otherwise have gone for things such as schools and infrastructure repairs. “With all these TIFs in lucrative tax-generating areas on the north side,” he says, “you’re putting taxing bodies in danger of not being able to collect the revenue needed for public services.” He says he isn’t against TIFs in general, but he thinks there are better ways to stimulate development in already vibrant areas like Rogers Park and Edgewater.
“They should have people from nonprofits, people who have been homeless, renters, people of different races on the task force, but they don’t,” says Robin McPherson, an African-American mother of two and RPCAN member who owns an apartment in a co-op at Pratt and Ashland. “I think the process was unfair and unjust. We need to have a say in how our tax dollars are used too.”
