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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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“Most of our institutional investors have basically redlined Chicago,” Diedrich said. “They are not going to deploy capital here.”
Tells you all you need to know, right there. The death spiral has officially begun.
So basically, the ‘smart’ money is leaving the city and county, leaving only the local goofs who have nothing better to do than make ‘deals’ for a living, for better or for worse. These guys, if they’re not making ‘deals’, they’re not working, and there’s no point to even going in to the office in the morning. So they’ll make bad deals, knowing that they’re bad, just to justify their jobs, because they have to. “Combined sales of office, apartment, hotel and industrial buildings in Chicago totaled $3.9 billion through the first three quarters of 2019, on pace to fall… Read more »
This article touches on the issues raised in a Points and Figures blog a few weeks ago. The author of this blog indicated that as large of a problem as property taxes are and likely will be in the future, of greater significance are the socio-economic requirements for affordable housing and the like, which require a great subsidy from the qualifying renters to be viable. Note that the author uses the terms “renters”, as renting is far more preferable than owning in Chicago. A fascinating perspective. Note that while so-called dumb money will stick around to do deals locally, at… Read more »
The affordability crisis will solve itself in time as soon there will be too few renters for too many rental properties.
debtsor is absolutely correct on that last point