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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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Here ya go, this tells the whole story: https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=20407 2021 Transit Data “Transit agencies carried 45 percent as many riders in 2021 as in 2019. To do so, they operated vehicles 81 percent as many miles as in 2019. However, they managed to spend 98.5 percent as much money on operating costs, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. The annual National Transit Database reports are based on the fiscal years of the transit agencies, which can end anywhere from March 31 to December 31. This means the 2021 data are the first full year since the… Read more »
Fantastic resource! Thank you for the link.
Thanks! I love the site, it strips the mumbo – jumbo away by simply using facts… and the facts in this case are astonishing…
Thanks for that site. We need to get on that.
Someone needs to tell this dope that hope is not a strategy. The party is over.
COVID funding runs out in 2 years?? The pandemic is over. The funding must stop now
Seems like he’s only focusing on the revenue side of the problem, no mention of the expense side of the problem.
Cut good paying union jobs?
Let’s not get too hasty.
See my post above with data from The Antiplanner, it is a damning indictment of their profligate spending habits…
I’ve always thought that it was such terrible urban design to funnel 1,000,000+ commuters per day, coming from far flung suburbs and even different states, into a central business district, 5 days a week, between the hours of 7-9 am and 4-6 pm. Our metro region is just too big and sprawling. It worked for decades, but it meant packing hundreds of thousands of people onto standing room only trains and buses, coughing and sneezing on each other. I haven’t been in an environment as crowded as an 7:45 am metra express train, or a 60 madison ave bus, in… Read more »
Yep, I used to think being able to walk to the Argyle Red Line station was a bonus. Now it just allows hood rats to get here more efficiently.
Sometimes I fantasize about a 6.9 tremblor hitting Chicago and the el being at ground level afterwords. The Chicago way will ensure a decade long rebuild.
Yup, “Transit – Oriented Development” is not such a big draw now that the L is an utter sewer…
No city or state leaders have the vision to resurrect downtown Chicago. Plus they would rather spend tax money on their woke projects instead of those that would benefit the general populace. Downtown Chicago will slowly be emptied out over the years, as companies and retailers give up one by one, as they come to the realization that the downtown’s former vibrancy is never coming back. The cost to maintain an office or store or restaurant will become so high that abandoning the downtown will be an easy decision. If Metra is smart, they should already be planning on which… Read more »
The problem with downtown started 20 years ago with the blowing of the commercial real estate bubble. An ever increasing spiral of fake valuations, CMBS being sold to every muppet money manager across the globe and pension funds, dear lord they loaded them up with toxic crap. Nobody can afford the rent it takes to keep the illusion going and then bam, Covid hits right as the Fed started buying CMBs to prevent a panic. You tell me if it was a coincidence. My point is downtown will come back when the market is allowed to clear and settle on… Read more »
The floor on downtown pricing, especially for the Class C buildings, is probably lower than than the real estate taxes. Do you want to get onto a crowded standing room only metra train at 7:45 am in the middle of January, so you can walk walk five blocks through snow and slush in 2 degree above zero weather to get to your office? I sure as heck don’t and probably half of downtown staff doesn’t want to do that either. Downtown isn’t ever coming back. Lori shut it down ‘for equity’ and everyone said ‘great, I’m moving on’. And no… Read more »
I thought the suburban market would pick up the slack now that downtown is half abandoned, but that hasn’t happened. It seems businesses and employees decided it was better to leave the state altogether rather than move to some post-war suburb.
Thanks JBPutin, that’s the unintended consequence of living in a woke state! No one but wokesters want to live here, and when things inevitably go bad, they don’t want to live here either!
How does a downtown bar or restaurant stay in business if the number of office workers remains low, Friday is the day with the least attendance, and your coworkers that you normally hang out with are not in on the day that you’re in?
On my old job in the securities industry, my ex-coworkers only have to be in the office 3 days a week, with only one of those days being a day where everyone is in the office at the same time. I don’t see how even a coffee shop survives under these economic conditions.
What’s really bad are the ones that are in the building and aren’t visible from the sidewalk. The only people that know they are there are the limited office workers. My building has 13 restaurants and 7 of them are still closed, I assume permanently.
The country is fully open now. Nowhere in the entire US is shut down because of coronavirus. This is the new normal. There is no reopening of downtowns or coming back to the office. This is it. This is the new normal. There is no returning to what we had before.
The fallout from the cratering CRE will take years to fully understand, and it will take much of the economy down with it.
debtsor, good point, and you are correct. What we are seeing is definitely the new normal, yet politicians and their media enablers are still publicly acting as if we are still in the process of coming out of the pandemic. They keep acting as if the missing people are going to come back. The Kastle Data Systems office occupancy rate for Chicago has been the same for many months, so that’s very telling. https://www.kastle.com/safety-wellness/getting-america-back-to-work/ Now imagine downtown after an upcoming harsh Winter, a worse than normal regular flu season, and next year’s hard recession. There are just too many negative… Read more »
Being from Detroit I lived thru what Ataraxis describes. It’s kinda like trying to get your virginity back…….
Speculators can buy abandoned office buildings in Detroit for a song even now…
And none of them are refurbished. Occasionally one is torn down to make way for a new development. Very sad too. I’m the early 60s my doctors office was in an office building in downtown Detroit. There’s still hospitals in downtown Detroit but nobody schedules a doctors appointment there anymore as there aren’t any primary care provider offices located there now.
“Do you want to get onto a crowded standing room only metra train at 7:45 am in the middle of January, so you can walk walk five blocks through snow and slush in 2 degree above zero weather to get to your office?” I used to do just that, but in the 90s the trains ran on time and were not as crowded as 5 years ago and I had a short walk to and from the trains. I enjoyed it, had a good routine, had coffee shops and restaurants I frequented. Now I walk everywhere because I live in… Read more »
WFH will fizzle out but the office they return to might not be downtown. My opinion is that the downtown RTW is going to be severely depressed for a decade or more. Like 1970’s redux. My spouse works downtown and they have a really hard time filing positions. Sure, they get applications but people reject an interview when they learn that they will need to relocate to Chicago/come into the office 3 days a week. Sure a severe recession and high unemployment rate will change people’s attitudues towards coming into the office, but, the longer downtown remains vacant, the harder… Read more »
Change is difficult, especially if you’re a dope.
Whistling past the transit graveyard….
Whistling indeed. A very large whistle.
It is not Federal COVID-19 aid dollars. It is taxpayers money.
Time for the COVID money train to stop.
Where exactly does he think all these riders will be going? Ogilvie Station, Downtown Chicago!?
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! tee hee…