It was a luncheon in a large, stately dining room at the Union League Club, one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious private clubs. But the anti-property-tax rhetoric on the menu at last Thursday’s gathering of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago would have played well in a VFW hall on the northwest side.
For starters, the vacancy rate in downtown office buildings remains stubbornly high. At about 18 percent, roughly five points higher than the national average, it’s below the rate in Houston (21.2 percent) and higher than rates in New York (8 percent), Boston (11.5 percent), and Los Angeles (around 15 percent).
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Nevertheless, there’s no sign the city will lessen its dependence on property taxes anytime soon. The result, says the BOMA report, is that we’re in a “vicious cycle”: High property taxes keep businesses from coming downtown, and as a result the city becomes even more dependent “on a stagnant number of businesses to keep funding ever-growing improvement and social programs.”
Last year BOMA took a strong public stance against the city’s proposal to slap a tax on downtown properties to help pay off the bonds on the parking garage at Millennium Park, and earlier this spring it opposed a bill that would have curbed residential property taxes by increasing the home owners’ exemption. Vukas says they commissioned the Roosevelt report because, like other business groups, they intend to play an even more prominent role in urging property tax cuts.
