-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Summary and audio linked here.
Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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Whoever opens a store on the Mug Mile deserves exactly what they get.
Commercial real estate is the elephant in the room.
No biggie, just backfill it with a Cricket store.
Michigan Avenue Has Lost Three Phone Stores Just This Year – Crain’s Chicago Business
Businesses include wig shops/catalytic converter drop off stores/Pawn Daddy/nail extensions/and a slew of Looters R Us shops.
And peep shows like State St. and the surrounding areas during the 1970’s. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Michigan Ave and River North are going to turn into an cyberpunk futuristic sin city. Imagine cheap housing, cheap hotel rooms, casinos, grimey public transit, weed stores, liquor stores, nightclubs galore, low rent strip clubs, seedy bars, ladies of the night, flashing LED signs everywhere, black market goods being fenced everywhere while the police turn the other way for a couple of hundos in a white envelope carefully slid across the table. The tall buildings, the dystopia… Read more »
Who is going to pay all the huge monthly HOA fees for the new / newer high-rises east of Michigan avenue ( New Eastside?). Building maintenance costs likely won’t decline in this “Union friendly” city.
Nobody is going to pay them. The boards, or really, the petty mob or slumlord figure in charge of the building, will include HOA’s and maintenance in rent. And by maintenance, they’ll all start to look like the CHA projects before they were torn down. Those places were awful, rats, bugs, water leaks, crime. Yet, the buildings were full up until the moment they were demolished, because living for free in squalor is better than living like a normal person but having to pay for it.
Debtsor, I tend to agree with you that an increase in seedyness is in the offing. This usually follows an economic collapse. There’s some literature on this phenomenon related to Berlin during the hyperinflation that occurred during the early 1920s in Weimar Germany. Berlin became a modern day Sodom and Gommorah. Legalized prostitution and pedophilia is gonna be the next big push of the Progressive Adgenda.
On the bright side an enterprising fellow could bring back the Bijou.
Seediness is Chicago’s most promising revenue source for the area as property taxes collapse.
I’m looking for a revival of the old “Puss ‘n Booths” peep shore/porno emporium that used to be around State & Hubbard until c. 1990 – bring on the “nostalgia”…!!!
Old Joe, I do remember the extreme seediness of the RIver North area, particularly around State & Hubbard, 40 – odd years ago – gay hustler bars, hot dog joints, rough lesbian taverns, peep shows… and I remember the Bijou Theater and the head shops in Old Town when that area was not so “gentrified”… and Boy’s Town on Halsted when it was a gang – infested dump, it was a brave thing to open a gay bar in those daze. Even the Loop was not much better. But it was kinda fun, brings back some memories…!!!
That also happened in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of the USSR in the 90’s. The economy and civil society tanked, massive Weimar – like inflation, savings and lives and livelihoods instantly wiped out. Under Yeltsin the gangsters, mafia, and black marketeers ran the place, casinos and gangland doings, prostitutes and pyramid schemes everywhere – and up to the very highest level of government, including Yeltsin himself. People got sick of the corruption and despair, and elected Putin to office, where he still is. Could “it happen here”…??? Who knows…!!!
Of course it could happen here. There’s no reason it wouldn’t happen here. Democrat voting population has a long history of voting for people who ultimately cause the destruction of the world as they know it. Think Jefferson Davis.