TIF News

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch comes a story of a economic development deal gone very bad. A city showers a private company with tens of millions of dollars from the taxpayers in hopes...

Is it the Return of the Blob? Is a spreading epidemic? Is the map to secret treasure? Could it be all three? It’s the map of Chicago’s 163 Tax Increment Finance Districts. The...

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...

There are 1,220 TIFs in Illinois inside of 455 municipalities. In 2010 they extracted $1.12 BILLION in property taxes from taxpayers across the state. What do we know, collectively, about all this economic...

According to The Center Square Journal, it’s full speed ahead for a development project on Lawrence Avenue that will house a Mariano’s Fresh Market to receive $4.5 million in our property taxes. The...

A Times investigation has examined and tallied thousands of local incentives granted nationwide and has found that states, counties and cities are giving up more than $80 billion each year to companies. The...

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...

According to the Chicago Tribune, “Several hundred protesters marched along Michigan Avenue Monday morning to voice opposition to the school closings plan being put together by Chicago Public Schools. Organized by the Chicago...