Great spires pierce the sky, rising from flat rural surroundings beside Lake Michigan. Chicago’s edges start slowly and then rise quickly. World-class universities bookend the city of broad shoulders to the north and the south. The world’s biggest supply of fresh water creates the eastern border while the west encroaches into the Great Plains. Railyards drape over the south side, carrying more freight more efficiently than any other land-based form of transportation. One of America’s few effective mass transit systems connects its residents from all over the city to downtown and, unlike the others, to its two airports. Although dense in the center with high-rises creating a concrete jungle, there is plenty of room for growth with enough empty space near bustling population centers to make developers salivate.
Chicago’s promise lies in its combination of a skilled workforce, diverse industry, affordability, robust infrastructure, and access to fresh water (which will become much more important as the climate changes and makes the coasts and the Southwest more difficult places to live). We are not limited geographically; the edges can be pushed further into the plains with no mountains and only one side blocked by water. There is also more room for denser housing stock in neighborhoods near the loop (or the city’s economic center for non-Chicagoans). We also have the existing mass transit lines to accommodate higher density and more economic activity, although it would mean a lower percentage of people would be able to use cars in those areas. Recent investments in quantum computing provide a good example of the kind of thing that could draw more skilled workers and create the city of the future.
A bright future is far from certain, though. Chicago – and Illinois – face grave danger from teetering finances, a mountain of public pension obligations, and enormously costly public services. Unpopular cuts or unpopular tax rises will have to come at some point and Mayor Brandon Johnson seems intent on making the exact wrong decision at every juncture. He has exacerbated the problem and will almost certainly make it worse in the next couple of years, but he is not entirely to blame.
We have had this problem for decades. We pay more for many services while getting less. For example, we spend more per capita on police than 92% of other US municipalities while clearance rates for crimes are one of the lowest of any major city in the US. Diagnosing the cause of this is a discussion for another time, but suffice it to say, dramatically increasing CPS budgets using short-term loans will not help (yet it is more likely than not to come to pass thanks to Brandon Johnson).
CTA, meanwhile, faces a fiscal cliff due to a combination of COVID funding drying up and declining ridership thanks to worsening services. The CTA’s president continues to stick his head in the sand while the mayor defends him for no discernible reason, calling criticisms ‘racist’. A well-functioning transit system is required for the continued growth of the city. This, too, will be a discussion for another time.
The way forward is a treacherous path blanketed in fog. We need to grow our housing stock to maintain affordability while NIMBY residents fight progress at every turn. Chicagoans need to be encouraged to exit their cars and use other forms of transit so density becomes more palatable to commuters. Nearly empty CPS schools need to be repurposed into community centers with vocational training (particularly valuable in low-income communities due to lower cost and less time required before income), small business incubation, and public service offices or they need to be closed to make room in the budget for better education. We need to make opening businesses in the city easier and we need to foster innovation; if we are not growing we are dying. Excoriating existing industries (e.g. Johnson’s hate of our finance industry) is not helpful. Perhaps most importantly, we need to grow our population. The only way out from under our debt problems is a broader tax base. This is just the beginning and I will go into greater detail on each of these things in future posts.