TIF 101

The great Ben Joravsky, who has forgotten more about TIFs than most will recall, has written about the CivicLab and our TIF Illumination Project. He keeps talking about Tom Tresser, but the No...

Here is the real break down of where our property taxes are going:   TIFs are collecting and keeping 34% of the property taxes collected by the City of Chicago!      ...

From The Joplin Globe comes news of the fall-out when new TIF districts are created. Local public schools loose. Increasingly, school district administrators are pushing back. No wonder the Chicago Teachers Union, parents...

Check out this heat map ginned up by one of CivicLab’s fearless volunteer civic coders. It shows how much revenue was extracted from Chicago’s 50 wards in 2011. The grand total was $454...

Missouri real estate developer Fred DeMarco published an op-ed piece in the Columbia Daily Tribune entitled “TIFs are a growth industry” where he rejects the notion of being subsidized by the public to...

According to Cook County Clerk David Orr Chicago’s 163 TIF districts grabbed $454 million in 2011. This is down from the $510 million TIF districts grabbed in 2010. County-wide there are a total of...

The annual reports f0r Chicago Tax increment Finance Districts are out.In order to find out how much they cost the taxpayers, one would have download all the PDF reports, open them up one...

According to an excellent article in Austin Talks, Coca-Cola got $3.22 million to build a distribution facility in Austin and only 20 of the facility’s 325 employees are from Austin. Austin activist Dwayne...

Tell the Chicago TIF Task Force what you think about TIFs at a new online forum set up at http://bit.ly/iZuhP1. Tom’s replies are  the first in all forums except #3. Tweet

Learnapalooza is a free learning extravaganza where over 100 classes and workshops will be offered in the Wicker Park area on Saturday, June 25. I’ll be offering two 45 minute sessions… Chicago is...