Back in 1998, proponents of a tax-increment financing district in Pilsen were almost condescending as they tried to sell it to neighborhood residents. The tool, one of Mayor Daley’s favorites, was all about jobs and industry and economic development in this case, they said soothingly, not gentrification. The poor misguided protestors simply didn’t understand. Now, the protestors are protesting a 387-unit condo and townhouse project proposed for 18th and Peoria, in the TIF district. The units would be priced from the $250s to around $700,000.
The fact that former Clinton housing secretary Henry Cisneros is on board the development team isn’t doing much to assuage fears of displacement in the mostly Mexican neighborhood. Pilsen Alliance Vice President Vicky Romero is quoted in the Chicago Journal as saying her group will fight outsiders trying to take away the neighborhood “whether they’re called Cisneros or not.”
We need to gentrify the area to reduce crime!
Outsiders already own the neighborhood: the majority of Pilsen residents only rent there.
Based on the stats, it’s hard to find a more dysfunctional neighborhood than Pilsen. The odds are that most of the residents who would be displaced by gentrification would land in more stable neighborhoods.
Isn’t the Pilsen Alliance the group that felt an American Girl doll story about a family leaving Pilsen for a better life was a slap in the face?
Since the median rent in Pilsen was $453, according to the 2000 Census, and more than a quarter of all residents lived below the poverty line, it’s tough to see how they’ll be able to afford “more stable” city neighborhoods, especially ones close to industry, jobs and good public transportation, like Pilsen. Nearby neighborhoods like Bronzeville and Bridgeport have experienced the fastest appreciation rates in the city. The most bizarre part of gentrification in neighborhoods like Pilsen is that the city actively subsidizes displacement of low-income households with our tax dollars through TIF districts.
The creepy American Girl franchise’s “Marisol” doll — now discontinued — will one day be worth a fortune, no doubt, much like the lawn jockeys that also seem to have faded from public display.
Pilsen (at least the Pilsen of 5 years ago, the last time I visited there) is very familiar to me. I grew up in a place just like it, a place that crippled most of the people I knew there, including my kid brother.
Proximity to jobs and public transportation don’t mean much to the 65% of students who drop out of Pilsen’s schools lacking the skills to get those jobs or the ability to read well enough to get on a bus. Proximity to violent gangs is more meaningful to the 50% of Pilen’s population that’s under the age of 18, and reports say that Pilsen has gangs in abundance.
Hooray for TIFs and other strategies that disperse ghettos. What’s lacking in these places is aspirational role models – even if they’re Marisols or “lawn jockeys.” Lawn jockey is six steps up the social scale for many Pilsen residents.
Here’s a strategy that would genuinely help: take the money being blown on middle-class poverty pimps and academic studies and redistribute it as housing subsidies to enable Pilsen residents to move on. Every social welfare organization in Pilsen would fight that strategy to the death, preferring to preserve their clientele in its current state.
Yes, I’m sure the schools in Englewood and Austin and Garfield Park will be much better and the streets much safer than in Pilsen. These and other high-crime neighborhoods are quickly becoming the only places low-income working people in Chicago can afford to rent. For better or worse, gentrification already had begun in Pilsen before the TIF was established, just as it had already begun in the South Loop and Uptown and in Logan Square and according to a recent study by the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, in the majority of the neighborhoods where Rich Daley is lining the pockets of millionaire developers with our tax dollars.
In the process, because TIFs have become a giant hammer used across the board instead of the surgical instruments they were intended to be, he’s siphoning off massive amounts of money from parks and schools and libraries. No one knows just how much because the accounting on our current 130 TIFs (that’s right, TIFs now comprise 30% of the city’s total land area) is murky indeed.
TIFs don’t just help build infrastructure, they also divert funds from strapped public institutions. And in neighborhoods poised for gentrification, like Pilsen, they substantially increase the prospects and profits of developers building $700,000 townhouses and condos on blocks where low-income renters are struggling to pay $700 a month.