PARCELS FOR THE POWERFUL
Chicago real estate, specifically The 78, a playground for the wealthy
Idon’t know about you, but sometimes I feel as though there’s an entire world going on out there I know nothing about. Take Chicago and stadiums. Take Chicago real estate, in general, and what goes with it.
I mean, where is that drill-shaped Chicago Spire that was to be 116 stories tall at 400 N. DuSable Lake Shore Drive? It’s just a fenced-off hole in the ground and has been since 2008. I remember watching that hole being dug. It was kind of cool.
And where is whatever’s supposed to be at Lincoln Yards, that mammoth development we’ve heard about forever? And what or who is Sterling Bay?
And what, if anything, is going on at the site of the former Michael Reese Hospital? And that vast South Works plot, where U.S. Steel once was?
So many questions. And that’s not even including items such as the usual aldermen on the take and fellows such as Ed Burke, the former chair of the Chicago City Council Finance Committee, the distinguished man recently found guilty of racketeering, bribery and extortion.
Burke was a partner with Klafter & Burke, a law firm that specializes in property-tax appeals. So he worked out bargains for clients on their real-estate ownings, including a guy named Donald J. Trump. That fellow, by the way, bought the land where the humble SunTimes used to have its offices, and now we’ve got Trump Tower instead of a riverfront news organization there.
It’s a spiraling rabbit hole of confusion and greasy, interlocked fingers. And we, the public, are basically clueless.
New stadiums are all about real estate, tax givebacks and public funding. But without the land, they are nothing. And sometimes even having the land isn’t enough.
Head out to Arlington Heights, where the Bears bought the former Arlington International Racecourse for $197 million. Now the Bears say they can’t build there because of high property assessment. And nobody seems to mention that the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority — read: us — still owes a half-billion dollars on old Soldier Field and its renovations.
Of course, the White Sox, one of the most pathetic teams in baseball, are seeking a new stadium. And Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf would like the city and state to float bonds for around $1 billion to help out. Where would he put his stadium? In the spot called The 78 in the South Loop.
These teams come up with arcane financing mechanisms — call them ‘‘instruments’’ because that’s what they were called before they helped cause the 2008 mortgage crash that nearly destroyed the world’s economy — and we just look on with confusion. The powerful count on that.
It’s all free and wonderful — until it isn’t. I could bring up Mayor Richard M. Daley’s sale of our parking meters to a private company in 2008, in a deal so onerous it’s kind of incredible, but I won’t.
What really got me this time was the Sun-Times article Sunday by my colleagues Frank Main and Tim Novak, explaining how, for two decades, an Iraqi-British billionaire named Nadhmi Shakir Auchi, who once was barred from entering the United States, has been trying to develop The 78.
We’re talking about the 62 acres Auchi owns along the Chicago River south of the Loop. Valuable? A little. Auchi wasn’t allowed into the United States for years because of two criminal convictions, one in France and one in Iraq. The State Department cited unspecified ‘‘crimes of moral turpitude’’ for not giving him a visa.
You follow the story of The 78, and the names of people involved or circling the property through the years is stunning. Out pop former Mayors Daley, Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot and current
Mayor Brandon Johnson. And then there’s convicted former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, former Gov. Bruce Rauner, convicted Tony Rezko, convicted Burke, Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle, casino owner Neil Bluhm, even former President Barack Obama, a candidate financially supported by some of these people. All these names circle, relevant to the property.
It’s a world of power that works deals, builds things and profits from them while we watch in eye-glazed torpor. The only thing a citizen needs to remember regarding life in this universe is that power and money trump all.
The rich get richer. And stadiums? We all love sports teams, but regular people don’t own the buildings or the land they frolic upon. We just pay homage to the teams — and to the power-laden who own them.