A harebrained scheme for the North Shore
Adding another portfolio piece to the online record. I took Rachel Havrelock’s Freshwater Lab in the Fall 2017 semester and fell in love with it. The humanities-focused look at nature and infrastructure is pretty unique for a classroom consisting of undergrads and professional-track grad students.
I used the class to look at ways to fund a new suburban downtown. I focused on Winnetka because it’s a very wealthy North Shore suburb that has a bit of a failing downtown. They are currently considering enacting a TIF district to bring more money in and revitalize their downtown.
I first looked at how TIF districts affect commute patterns in the Chicago area, using census commute data to show that they do not have much of an effect at all:
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I then examined Winnetka’s water rates in the Chicago context. Leaning on a fantastic Chicago Tribune report on unequal water rates, I mapped the work of the Tribune’s reporting team and showed who pays how much in the area.
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I then mapped these water rates on income, showing what proportion of the household median income for a municipiality was spent on water. This was normalized where the city of Chicago’s proportion of income spent on water equaled “1.”
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As you can see, some south suburban municipalities pay obscene amounts for their water. As the Tribune discovered, municipalities with low property values raise income by raising water rates in a predatory manner, similar to predatory policing.
Winnetka does not have this problem — its citizens pay the lowest proportion of their (very high) incomes in the whole Chicago area. I took this as a revenue gap problem: is Winnetkans were charged proportionally, they would have revenues that would obviate the need for a TIF district.
The next bit was a bit more theoretical. Raising $60 million from peoples’ use of Lake Michigan water, instead of from struggling businesses, brought in new questions of what Winnetka could possibly want from its downtown.
I argued that blight discourse limited Winnetka’s options, and that even in a wealthy area the emphasis was on blight and removal. I wanted to look at renovation a different way. The money came, essentially, from Lake Michigan. Therefore, it should be used to bring more people into the high-quality Winnetka lifestyle by emphasizing transit, building higher and creating more public space.
I called this a “Business-to-Beach” plan:
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It isn’t precisely a workable plan: charging Winnetkans more, and using that money to convert garages to start-up space, buy up private beaches, and flood their schools with Chicagoans…is not a politically viable scenario. The idea, rather, was to use water in order to emphasize the connectivity between Chicago and its suburbs — emphasizing that the community of infrastructure is divided politically along inequitable lines.