Perverse Incentives
The Chicago Machine Wants Failure
I left Chicago in 2020 but was planning on leaving since 2015. I didn’t know where I would land and landed in Las Vegas. I had moved to the city from the suburbs in 2003, and I had worked down there since 1986. I noticed big changes and I knew the city budget, county budget, and state of Illinois budget were going to blow up. It doesn’t take a finance degree to see that.
I saw crime tick up before Mayor Lightfoot was in the house. It ticked up under Rahm Emanuel. Mostly, in bad neighborhoods but we would see it bleed into ours.
I lived at 1448 North Lake Shore for most of my time in the city. It’s a cooperative building full of wonderful people in a fabulous location. You could buy my apartment there for less than I initially paid for it, and I rehabbed it.
We used to go to the beach all the time.
Every May when the snow thawed, we were told by a Chicago Police Department friend to be very careful. He ran the bike patrol on the beaches so he knew what he was talking about. Every spring, the drug dealers would fight to stake out claims on the beaches. You could see who they were walking through our neighborhood to the underpass.
One year for prom, we had the police escort our kids to the beach just to be on the safe side.
I moved from 1448 to Michigan and Monroe. That was the site of last night’s riot. There have been consistent riots in Chicago for the last several years. Robbing Michigan Avenue stores were old hat by 2020. They had their system in place and Covid allowed them to scale.
My old venerable club, The University Club of Chicago, is right at ground zero where last night’s riot occurred. I have friends that live right there. My daughter was at a play in the Loop last night. She made it out of the Loop safely.
It got to where my wife was afraid to walk the dog in the last place we lived, right by the Lincoln Park Zoo. Plus, the park was filled with garbage. Every time you walked to the parking garage you wondered if you were going to be car jacked.
The wealthy have been leaving Chicago but now the trickle is a roaring river. Wealthy people will tolerate a lot of bullshit and corruption to live in a dynamic city. They can rise above a lot of it, and afford it. The culture, the pro sports teams, shopping, and easy access to lots and lots of cool things make it fun to live in a city.
But, they won’t tolerate not being safe.
Symptomatic of this wealth flight was a canceled event at the Pritzker Memorial Library. It’s a non-profit institution supported by Col. Pritzker and lots of donations. I donate. They wanted to have a grand opening at the library but it was canceled due to lack of interest in attending.
It wasn’t Covid that kept people away. It was the violence, and the fact most of the donors are probably living out of state. Why go back for one event?
That brings me back to Lightfoot. A lot of blame rests on her shoulders but the problems were brewing far before she was mayor. A friend of mine was mugged on Wabash Avenue twice while walking down the street in broad daylight. She was knocked out once. That was under Mayor Emanuel.
Lightfoot came in as a “reformer”. She took on the Machine right away. I voted for her. Friends of mine supported her. Excellent journalist John Kass supported Lightfoot. We all knew the corruption of the Machine had to be stopped. While we would have liked a Republican, we knew one couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Chicago.
The problem is that Lightfoot’s worldview is hard-leftist. She prizes and advocates for victimhood first. She has no moral compass. She is closer to Mao than she is to the Founding Fathers when it comes to organizing and running a society.
Because she took on the Machine, the Machine has no interest in helping her. As a matter of fact, the perverse incentive the Machine has is to make things so terrible, the poor citizens will turn to Machine candidates for law and order.
You see, in Chicago, people would vote for a communist over a capitalistic law and order Republican and that’s not a joke. Try being an out of the closet Republican conservative like I was and watch the party invites roll in. It also hurts your business to be an out of the closet Republican conservative in Chicago.
The media in Chicago enable the Machine. They report with shock and outrage after someone gets caught but never before. They don’t question. The media in Chicago’s worldview is not dissimilar from Lightfoot’s. Everything is framed through race and gender. Wealthy people somehow got an unfair edge and stole everything they made.
The true-believing champagne socialists that make up a lot of the upper crust in Chicago society won’t leave. They will keep their places and hire security. Or, like Governor Pritzker during Covid, they will jet off to places like Florida to spend time lamenting the state of the city. Tsk, tsk. They will mourn for those poor proletariats stuck in a violent city with no control and no way out. What can be done?
On a state and countywide level, Illinois Republicans are feckless. They don’t offer worthy competition. Instead, they prefer failure theatre. They are in cahoots with the Democrats in most cases. Even long time Republican led counties like DuPage where I grew up are in on the game.
When Lightfoot is finally out of the way, the Machine can be unfettered in its corrupt ways and print money for itself again. It will increase its control via regulation and law and order laws that don’t pertain to them. Believe it or not, the leaders of the Democratic Machine in Illinois are loving what is going on right now.
It might be a microcosm of what is going on in Washington DC.
I’ve lived in Chicago all my life. I’m planning my escape but the housing market has temporarily tripped me up.
Perhaps you have had to live in Chicago to appreciate how hollowed out it has become. I remember as a young guy my father taking me to Sears flagship store on south State street, and then Carson Pirie Scott with its ornate iron gate entrance designed by Louis Sullivan, it was like the entry to some kingdom, and further north was Marshall Fields, where I first tasted a Frango mint. Later, my father and I went to a car show at the Chicago Stockyards. This is before they built the latest McCormick Place. Chicago was a sprawling empire of small successes. The Loop, the core downtown area was a melting pot, black, white, latino, and nobody cared, abundant cheap eats, a juice bar at the South Shore station that sold a coconut mango drink to die for, drinking it on the way out you saw a row of shoe shines. Men still wore suits and good leather shoes. They took pride in their appearance.
On the north side, Wrigley Field on Tuesday was ladies’ day and women attended the ball game for free. My grandmother told me she used to go as often as she could, and the Andy Frain ushers weren’t too strict and if there were empty box seats after the third inning they would let people go down and sit and enjoy the great view, and in hushed tones she would tell me that someone always had a fifth of some adult beverage and they would all pass it around, laugh, watch the game, cheer for the home team. The train or “el” cost 65 cents, or 75 cents with a transfer, and on Sunday you could get a super-transfer for $1.50 that allowed you to ride the train all day.
A city made for the working class.
One of my first jobs was downtown on Wabash at a bookstore. I worked with a guy from Minnesota and a woman who moved here from West Virginia. On separate occasions, I asked them why they came all the way to Chicago. Both of their answers were basically the same.
“I knew I could find a good job, and get an affordable apartment.”
Maybe those weren’t the best days and I’m jaded, but the people who made this city work lived in and loved the city for all its flaws because the city, in its own way, loved them back. And now that is all gone.
I have spent as much time in Chicago as any city in the US. And I never lived there. I grew up in Detroit and used to go to Chicago for fun- for years. Later, in business, even while living in the Southeast as I have for 30 years now, I spent even more time in Chicago- weeks at a time, for years. It was, to me, the Greatest American City. Everything else was second to me. The architecture, the arts, the sports teams (who I grew up hating, but loved the fan base nonetheless), the different parts of town, the diversity of people from all over the world, and the neighborhoods that reflected it. Mostly though- it was always the City of Broad Shoulders. Do the young even know what the means anymore? Does Lori Lightfoot?
As someone who worked all over the US- in it's major cities- I had given up on San Francisco earlier than Chicago. And that hurt, but not the hurt I felt about 4 years ago when I knew I had to start watching where I went and when I went about Chicago. This, coming from a guy who grew up in Detroit.
I feel sadder about the state of Chicago than I do about any of our other lost or losing US cities- and there's a huge list right now. Chicago was the Capital of Middle America. It was New York, if New York was cleaner and accessible with better architecture. Not anymore. And I miss it. I quit going to Chicago when covid hit the nation and decided to leave my business and start to live. Now I just look to it to see any signs of it coming back. Instead I hear of my middle aged professional relatives, who currently live in the City, looking to move out of state. No one is coming back soon.
I miss Chicago. What it was, what it meant to so many of us- and not just native Chicagoans. And I wonder who is going to be left who gives a damn? And not for nothing, but JB Pritzker as Governor is about the worst answer for those who love the city. He could give a shit. Republicans in Illinois are about as useless as an Edsel in your driveway. That any Democrat would get any vote from the public given their track record of destroying this, and every other city in America astonishes me. Why do people care so little about their own lives as to keep voting in the people who helped destroy their very neighborhoods, their city, while they enrich themselves?
I'll have memories of this great city to stay with me, but I wonder if I'll ever again be able to talk my wife into a 'Chicago getaway'. Why bother? We can't even walk around and enjoy the place.
I miss it. It's a grave loss for this nation.