The Cost of Our Cars: Are Private Autos the Nation's Major Welfare Recipients?

Those who are not living at the bottom of a well may have noticed that oil is now quickly approaching $150 a barrel, and some prognosticators and oil geologists are predicting $200 per barrel by next year. Events are moving more quickly than even I expected, for even I had not expected the $100 threshold to be breached before next year, earliest.

The galloping fuel prices are deeply frightening in their implications and their effect on every cost of day to day life, as anyone shopping for a family of three or four can attest.

Yet, while there has been some 'demand destruction', Americans have not begun to alter their habits, and, most ominous of all, our political and business leaders haven't altered our disastrous public policies that are so slanted toward the support and promotion of private automobiles, to the funding of the public transit and intercontinental railways we will desperately need when 70% or more of our population will no longer be able to afford to run an auto, and will be hard put to it just to keep the house tolerably warm and put food on the table, as the costs of food and utilities are driven remorselessly northward by the escalation of fuel prices.

So, this is a good time to consider just what our cars are costing the public. The linked essay puts to rest whatever notions some people out here have considering the cost of transit to the public, and who is really subsidizing what.

The bald truth of the matter is that if all the costs of procuring and securing our oil supplies, and the costs of maintaining our massive network of roads and highways to the standard required by heavy auto use were passed directly to the user, gasoline would have cost $9 a gallon by 2005. The fact is that car ownership is much more extensively subsidized than public transit, and airlines are subsidized at the expense of over-regulated and over-taxed railroads.

As a libertarian, I believe that if the citizens were, jointly and severally, to make their choices regarding their modes of transportation strictly on economics, and if these choices were not massively subsidized for the past 80 years, that most people would have given up car ownership as impractical and unaffordable even before the interstate highway system was built in order to wreck our cities and decant our populations into auto suburbs.

Public transit would prosper on its own were we not forced to subsidize it's competition as we have been doing for the past 85 years. Let's pull the massive subsidies from private autos, and bureaucratic, government-controlled, inefficient public transit, and see who wins.

My bet is, that within seven years, we would have profitable, efficient public transit, owned wholly by private entities, available to the rapidly growing population of dispossessed former car owners, and that we would be able to reduce our energy consumption by at least 40%.

Village Theater Restoration: Our TIF Dollars at Work

A community meeting on the proposed restoration of the Village Theater at 6740 N. Sheridan Road will take place at:

MERTZ HALL-LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
BREMNER LOUNGE
1125 W. LOYOLA AVE.
TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 2008 AT 7:00 PM

The building's new owner, Anthony Fox, of ADF Capital, will be on hand to share his plans to restore the terra cotta exterior of the building, which houses a number of businesses. The current operator of the Village Theatre will be evicted, and Fox states that he hopes to operate the theater after restoration.

The proposal asks for $200,000 in TIF district funding. The property is part of the Loyola TIF district.

Personally, I love the Village Theater building, and I'm ecstatic that the new ownership intends to restore this beloved building. The Village is the last film house left in Rogers Park, and one of the last on the north lakefront. and the building with its broad brick plaza pretty much makes the corner of Columbia and Sheridan.

And $200,000 is not so much money, is it?

It's certainly not the worst use possible of funds made available to private entities by the devices of a program that should not even exist to begin with. What's $200K compared to the $2,000,000 grants to rental property owners and developers of overpriced condos along Sheridan Road,or, most of all, the tens of millions that are being used to fund the restoration and construction of the Mundelein College and other Loyola University buildings? At least the money earmarked for the Village Theater Bldg.will be used to restore a lovely old building that is a landmark of sorts, and for the benefit of businesses that make the neighborhood more attractive and livable.

It is just that the TIF should not exist to begin with. Chicago's 160 or so TIF districts constitute a massive diversion of present and future tax monies from urgent, unmet needs, notably our decrepit water and sewer infrastructure, and underfunded police and fire departments, as well as our public schools and transit.

Our politicians may not have noticed, but Chicago is nearly bankrupt, a circumstance most of its citizens couldn't have imagined 20 years ago, at the beginning of King Richard's reign. Chicago was an extremely well-run city with reasonable taxes, excellent police and fire protection, superior public transit, decent infrastructure,solid finances,and old neighborhoods that were steadily improving by means of private investment unaided by massive public grants to private developers, and far less at the mercy of the whims of politicians armed with TIF legislation and eminent domain rights.

Worse, there is no longer any rhyme or reason to the allocation of public money. All claims on our funds seem to have equal weight; the demand for, say, $20,000 to provide jugglers for a children's event is given weight equal to a public school's need for new textbooks, and a few million clams to renovate a fugly apartment building for the profit of its ownership, is given equal consideration with the need to replace a water main under a major artery before the street collapses and swallows a few automobiles, or provide our police with the manpower and tools they need to compete with the gangs for control of our streets.

Most of all, taxpayers are forced to subsidize strictly private projects whose benefits do not accrue to them, at the expense of necessary public services and public amenities available to everyone. The funds allocated to Loyola U. for campus buildings will benefit only those rich enough to pay nearly $35,000 a year in tuition and housing, to the detriment of public schools available to all citizens. The citizens are paying to subsidize big barn stores in which they might or might not shop, to the detriment of the business who are forced to subsidize their better-heeled competition through their taxes.

We can no longer pretend that we can afford this type of waste. We have too many unmet and really critical needs to fund, and very little time to meet them, before energy prices reach levels that will make it impossible to make basic repairs necessary to keep Chicago's massive street, water, and sewer networks minimally functional, let alone put into place the more efficient systems and vastly expanded public transportation we'll need for the city to be minimally safe and livable in another twenty years.

Instead of frantic, late campaigns to block this TIF or that, or efforts to funnel the money to useful purposes, we need to repeal the 1952 legislation that authorizes TIF districts, and start the process of rolling back most diversions of public money to strictly private purposes, beginning with the massive subsidies to large businesses that destroy true competition and foster the destruction of local business and retail networks; to the countless claims of public funds that drive property and sales taxes and impoverish the population as a whole while making life impossible for most of our small, locally-owned businesses, while starving our public services.

Construction To Begin on Dominick's in Lakeview

Construction on the new Dominick's store, on the site of the old store that burned down a few years ago, is tentatively scheduled to begin in August, according to sources at the Lakeview East Chamber of Commerce. They could not say for sure whether the store would be built to include four stories of condominiums as originally planned, but they also said that they had not been told of any change in plans. Construction was originally to begin in January of this year.

The new store will occupy the entire lot formerly occupied by the old store and its parking lot. Underground parking will be available for shoppers, and the store will front on Broadway, and have, according to the plans, four stories of condominiums above it.

The rendering of the new building is available to view in PDF format, by clicking on the title link, above, or go to the Lakeview East Chamber site.

Save This Building

This is an exceptionally pretty 1920s-vintage courtyard located at 1422-32 W. Farwell Ave in Rogers Park. It is managed by the notorious Bil Mar management company, but until a couple of years ago, was reasonably well-maintained, and inhabited by nice people.

Information:

WCM Farwell Apt. LLC

1422-1432 W Farwell Chicago, IL 60626
Address PIN Structure ID
1422-1432 W FARWELL PIN: 11-32-116-015 01132116015000

Now, the place is looking less well, and seems to be harboring undesirable people and activities. I am getting informal reports of drug dealing in and around the building, and see a lot of unsavory-looking young men milling about the property. The maintenance has also slipped, as evidenced by extremely dry-rotted windows.

This is one of Rogers Park's huge supply of really beautiful courtyard buildings. Notice the exceptional terracotta ornamentation and tile roof. The floorplans of the apartments are standard for the era in which the building went up, with spacious, well-proportioned rooms, high ceilings, large windows, and beautiful millwork. Buildings like this are irreplaceable, and when they are deteriorated enough to need a complete gut, their beauty is completely lost when some greed-monger developer guts the place, re-arranges the original floorplan, and makes the place look like a cheap "villa" townhouse in Antioch.

Here's hoping that the ownership of this fine building decides to unload the place and free itself of the burden of properly screening tenants and maintaining the property decently, either by doing a "soft" conversion to condos (a conversion with no rehab) or co-op, or by selling to a more caring and responsible owner who operates on longer time horizons and is committed to the area.

However, there are so many government-sponsored inducements to greed and mismanagement, such as the poorly-run Section 8 voucher program in combination with minimal HUD and City of Chicago oversight of landlords who benefit from this and other socialized housing programs, that, at this time, there exist more incentives to exploit the property to the maximum advantage while giving nothing back to it, until the property is so trashed that a gut rehab and conversion (with government-guaranteed loans, of course) are the only ways to salvage it.

Thank You Joe Moore

Many thanks to 49th Ward Alderman Joe Moore for going on record as opposing the land grab that is the proposed children's museum in Grant Park.

I urge other North Coast aldermen who are undecided to please oppose this encroachment on public land, and destruction of Grant Park. The "undecideds" include Mary Ann Smith (48th), Helen Schiller (46th), Eugene Schluter (47th) and Pat O'Connor.

Sign the petition to save Grant Park.

Thanks to Toni Duncan, at 24/7North of Howard Watchers.

Urban Agriculture in Chicago

Pictured above is a community garden located at Kenmore and Ainslie in Uptown. This garden isn't listed on Green Net Chicago's site (title link), so I don't know who operates it, but it is one of dozens of urban agricultural projects being operated in the city. Some of these have been functioning for decades, such as Resource Center's City Farm, at 1200 N. Clybourn, which can be seen from the Brown and Purple line el tracks, and which supplies upscale restaurants; and Howard Area Community Gardens, directed by Sister Cecilia Fandel, and located in the North of Howard neighborhood. This garden supplies produce to the Howard Area soup kitchen, and has 40 plots tended by area residents. These are only two of dozens of functioning community gardens and urban agricultural centers operating in the city and supplying local restaurants and farmer's markets.

Urban agricultural centers and gardens not only provide valuable agricultural training and jobs to area residents and locally grown food to area residents who make the effort to seek out their products, but will become increasingly indispensable as energy prices, and the associated costs of shipping, transportation, and arable farmland continue to escalate steeply in response to fuel prices and the diversion of land to biofuel and ethanol production.Within couple of decades, local agriculture may be the only way to feed a major percentage of Chicago's 2.9 million denizens, especially if fuel becomes scarce and expensive enough to render current farming methods, that are heavily mechanized and totally dependent upon chemical fertilizers, obsolete. Under such circumstances, much more of Chicago's thousands of vacant acres would need to be rehabilitated into farm land, which is even now probably the best use to which the vast tracts of completely uninhabited land on the city's south side could be put.

Most importantly, more citizens will gain the knowledge needed to produce food, and together contribute to a pool of knowledge that has been kept alive in front of the advance of mechanized agribusiness, only with great effort- the knowledge of agriculture, the management of land for maximum sustainability and output.

Pedestrian Deathtrap in Lakeview

This 6-cornered mega-pedestrian- deathtrap at the intersection of Clark, Halstead, and Barry is familiar to everyone who lives or shops in Lakeview. This intersection has been very dangerous for many years and calls to city officials have produced no results.

I timed the traffic signals here on my watch and pretty well determined that there's no way someone elderly or mobility-impaired can make it across either Clark or Halstead on the time allocated. Because you're crossing the street diagonally, the walk is longer. Most people can barely make it across on the WALK light even when trotting briskly.

Additionally, traffic on Clark turning right onto Halstead, from either direction, tends to be driving much too fast, and worse, it's easy not to notice pedestrians crossing on the green at the same time you're turning because the obtuse angle of the intersection eases you into the turn without requiring you to slow down to make the turn safely. Motorists tend to turn right without braking at all.

There are so many built-in flaws here that the only way to assure pedestrian safety is to have a WALK only signal for all directions simultaneously, as is done at Clark, Diversey, and Broadway, with simultaneous red lights that permit no turning in either direction, so that pedestrians have an opportunity to cross without encountering vehicles turning corners at top speed.