I am very frustrated with your seeming unwillingness to understand that the real issue in the Pilsen TIF (tax-increment financing) debate is that the community is being left out of the planning process and that residents are not going to allow City Hall to simply shove a TIF down our throats.
Your comments regarding Pilsen in the Feb. 24 endorsements editorial, and in your Feb. 11 editorial imply that all “facts” have come out, when in truth there has been no discourse between the community and City Hall. Only outsiders and groups with financial interest in the TIF have been privileged enough to have the chance to review and critique the TIF proposal. The rest of us must have more information and time to decide with the city whether a TIF is indeed the appropriate economic vehicle for bettering our community.
I must also express my outrage at your portrayal of my neighborhood as a bombed-out ghetto (also in the Feb. 11 editorial). It seems that you are completely unaware of the public gardens, murals, busy shops and cultural institutions we enjoy here. You give your readers the impression that only the beneficence of developers and the UIC can save us from ourselves.
In fact, our local businesses, neighborhood service agencies and church networks have been forging ahead for several years with beautification programs, new and refurbished housing develop-ments and community safety projects. To dismiss our community’s concerns about displacement as “paranoid” is to ignore the evidence from Wicker Park, Little Italy and Dearborn Park, where, after years of substandard city services, working families were quickly driven out by skyrocketing property taxes that followed “development.”
Certainly, we have difficult problems in Pilsen, but the solutions must be locally driven and could possibly utilize existing city and federal resources. Any decision on a TIF for Pilsen must not be made without extensive community education and feedback. This is what the debate is really about.
