Time for TIFs to Be Abolished

After researching the hyper-local impacts of Chicago’s notorious Tax Increment Financing Program for six years, the CivicLab today declares the program to be harmful, unfair, racist, and beyond repair.

Said Jonathan Peck, President and CEO of the CivicLab, “Over the past several years we at the CivicLab have illuminated TIFs and exposed this massive corrupt scheme cloaked in benign rhetoric of helping marginalized and blighted communities. We see this program as a strategic and calculated and targeted attack to displace hundreds of thousands of African Americans out of Chicago all while enriching the extremely wealthy developers and the businesses and affluent movers and shakers of this city. A critical result of this has been the public subsidization of the hyper affluent Northside and Loop communities.”

CivicLab co-founder and Vice President, Tom Tresser, in a presentation given at the “Future of Chicago” lecture series at the University of Illinois Chicago, laid out the evidence for calling for the end of the TIF program. “TIFs are secretive, corrupting, starving public education, showering wealthy developers with hundreds of millions of public dollars, perverting the process of community development, and are fundamentally anti-distributive,” said Tresser. “And for these reasons we assert that TIFs are racist and must be shut down.”

The plague of TIFs follow in a long line of majority-imposed policies on Black and Brown communities that are designed to keep them down, bleed them, fleece them, and make advancement impossible in America and in Chicago. We make this connection: Slavery-> Jim Crow-> Red Lining-> Segregation-> Disinvestment-> Urban Renewal-> Contract Buying-> Predatory Lending/Credit Deserts-> TIFs/Privatization. Chicago's communities of color bear witness to the harms of these policies (persistent poverty, homicide, unemployment, health outcomes and life expectancy, school closings, militarization of their communities, racial profiling, lack of affordable housing).

The CivicLab today launches the TIF Elimination Project to effect the end of TFs and the redistribution of sequestered TIF funds. We have created an online petition directed at Mayor Lightfoot and the Chicago City Council that can be accessed at https://tinyurl.com/End-TIFs-Now and an online Action Center at https://tinyurl.com/End-TIFs-Action-Center.

Said Peck, “I pledge to you that we will continue to speak truth to power and will do everything possible to shut down this racist unjust slush fund called TIFS! Join us in this worthy endeavor and together we can create a more fair and just city for all of our children, youth and families.”

Contact us at info@civiclab.us