Mayor Daley’s annual budget hearings are designed to deceive more than enlighten, but even by Chicago standards, the mayor’s August 23 performance at the South Shore Cultural Center was a masterwork of dissimulation. The most telling part of last Thursday’s hearing–the first of three–was what the mayor didn’t say.
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It’s true our reliance on property taxes to fund education leads to atrocious inequities, as wealthier towns (like Winnetka, Lake Forest, or Oak Brook) get to spend more money on their children than poorer ones (like Chicago, Dolton, or Maywood). But the mayor’s hardly a helpless spectator at the mercy of the bad boys and girls in Springfield.
As you may recall from previous columns on this subject, property taxes are essentially calculated by multiplying a tax rate by property assessments to equal a levy, which is the amount the city, schools, county, and other public bodies will have to spend. The more a property is worth–the higher its assessment–the more the owner will pay in taxes. The problem is that as a result of gentrification, assessments have been leaping skyward, in many cases more than doubling. Long-term residents and economically vulnerable home owners on the south and west sides are being priced out of the city, and even more affluent residents are feeling the sticker shock. A tax cut would bring some relief, but Daley has no intention of cutting the tax rate. He needs to keep revenue coming in, not just for the sake of the schools, as he said at South Shore, but, among other things, to feed tax increment financing districts, which currently gobble up more than $400 million a year in property tax revenues.
What does this all mean for the south-siders who crowded into the South Shore Cultural Center to hear the mayor? Many of them probably won’t be able to afford to live in their neighborhoods for much longer. As Houlihan’s office has been warning, rising taxes together with high financing rates could sweep hundreds if not thousands of residents out of the city, particularly from west- and south-side communities like Lawndale, East Garfield Park, Woodlawn, and Washington Park.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Laura Park.
