Chicago Newsroom 04/25/19

Published on Apr 25, 2019

Aneel Chablani, the attorney from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights who filed suit to invalidate the TIF funding for Chicago’s Lincoln Yards project, is one of today’s guests. He’s joined by Brenda Delgado, Board President at Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education. They assert that tax increment funding for a project in such a wealthy community victimizes less affluent populations across the city since it deprives schools, law enforcement and smaller development projects from access to city-based funding. If their suit succeeds, it will cancel about 1.3 billion in city funding that would have been used largely to reimburse the developer for the construction of critical infrastructure such as bridges, streets, lighting and other amenities. But hey insist they don’t want to cancel the TIF program itself. They want to force a re-write of the TIF legislation so that it would be more directly beneficial to economically under-served communities and projects.

If you want to understand how a big city works, you pretty much have to understand its demographics first. Chicago’s demographics are fluid, bordering on chaotic. According to Rob Paral of Rob Paral and Associates, Chicago’s loss of African American population is historic. There’s been almost as much out-migration as there was in-migration during the mid-century 1900’s. Further, our Spanish-speaking population is down slightly, due mostly to reduced immigration. The Latino population, Paral explains, saved Chicago from significant declines in population during the last half of the 1900’s because their immigrants compensated for the loss of whites and blacks. Chicago, he says, has been an incredibly efficient “processor of immigrants,” but that era may be coming to a close. A couple of interesting nuggets: Mexican families are experiencing dramatic declines in fertility rates, down significantly from the eight-children families of a generation ago, and that means fewer immigrants for us. And that popular view that many of Chicago’s black out-migrants went to Atlanta as isn’t necessarily true. They went to Atlanta’s suburbs. Atlanta, like Chicago, is experiencing dropping declining black population.

This program was recorded by Chicago Access Network Television.