A city bent on destroying itself
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8/22/2016
I am a 52-year-old professional. I was born and raised in Chicago, have lived and worked here my entire life, opened a business here 30 years ago, and have operated that business ever since. I also have many clients who are city business owners.
Chicago was always 'rough', a vestige of its frontier origins. But it was, traditionally, also an excellent place to do business. The one-time 'City of Big Shoulders' had a wide and diverse economic base, a multitude of cultural accouterments, and was generally well-managed.
No more. The last 30 years, and particularly the last 15, have been disastrous for Chicago. During the dot-com 1990s and the early-2000s real estate boom, the City was awash in tax revenue. The city squandered all of this revenue on sweetheart deals with well-connected political cronies, and vastly expanded public commitments. No debt was retired - much more was, in fact, taken on. And no funds were retained for a rainy day. Politicos running the city plantation behaved as though the good times would never end.
But they did. Particularly dependent on tax revenue from real estate sales and purchases, the city saw these revenues dry up during the 2008 melt-down. Business taxes, too, plummeted as all businesses saw vastly reduced revenues, and many simply ceased to exist.
The city responded to these events by declaring economic war on its remaining taxpayers. Property taxes skyrocketed. In many working-class neighborhoods where homes had been held by the same family for generations, owners were forced to sell because they were unable to pay these new taxes. Tax rates on businesses, too, were increased dramatically. And the city's army of worker bees (which was not reduced, but increased) was dispatched to find revenue under every rock and log: parking tickets were issued for violations which did not occur; businesses with signs out front for decades were suddenly enjoying $500.00 tickets for lacking the requisite 'permits'; and building violations swelled to control such serious public safety threats as fences exceeding six feet in height and unpainted stairwells. The city also sold prize assets, such as the Chicago Skyway and city parking meters, to private companies just to pay ongoing operating expenses.
Opening a business in the city today is effectively impossible. Endless requirements for licenses, fees, 'polices', wages, health care and payroll have removed any prospect of profitability before the doors ever open. The States of Wisconsin and Indiana, recognizing this foolishness, have dramatically lowered taxes, reduced regulation and adopted business-friendly measures, all of which have served to "vacuum" city businesses into those more accommodating venues, never to return.
Nor has actual public safety been spared. Over the past several years, Chicago police officers have been rewarded with administrative suspension and even imprisonment for the difficult assignment of controlling the city's vast criminal population. The Police Department responded to these actions by effectively abandoning enforcement in the city's worst neighborhoods, a decision which led directly to Chicago achieving the dubious public distinction of "Murder Capitol of the World".
There have been bright spots. For example, the city somehow found millions for mission-critical services such as the creation of bicycle lanes and traffic signals (even though cyclists uniformly menace the population with their aggressive weaving between motorized vehicles during the height of rush-hour, riding in the the opposite direction of travel on three-lane one-way streets, and deliberately 'brushing' pedestrians in an apparent effort to demonstrate their immunity from city traffic ordinances).
Public sexuality, too, has blossomed. In endless displays of 'pride', the city's sexually perverse community routinely sports scant clothing (and less) to children on Saturday afternoons while the commercial sector sits idle to accommodate these critical public service events.
In short, the City of Chicago is broke, mismanaged, crime-ridden and unsuitable for children. Perhaps most distressingly, there exists no prospect for improvement. The city's uniform response to its ever-deepening economic and social morass is to increase further the taxes and regulations inflicted on remaining taxpayers; to strangle further the ability of entrepreneurs to start new businesses; and to liberate further the criminals and miscreants who already run roughshod over the urban landscape.
Chicago has no future. You should not even consider locating here.
John | Chicago, IL