A fight broke out late one Saturday night, or, more accurately, early Sunday morning, at a bar on Chicago’s South Side. Someone called the police just after 4:30 AM. But the police didn’t come. The fight soon moved outside; one man issued a threat, got into his car, and then plowed it into the crowd, just before five o’clock. Three people were killed. Still no police. An officer wasn’t dispatched until 5:20 and didn’t arrive until more than an hour after the original call.
Chicago faces a dire police shortage. (See “Can We Get Back to Tougher Policing?,”) Over half of high-priority 911 calls had no cops available to respond. One important reason is that the city is now allocating almost half of its budget to debt and pensions, leaving ever less for essential services, including public safety. The municipal government is acting more like a conduit channeling money from residents to check-collectors than a protector of its citizens’ rights and liberties.
Chicago has dominated America’s heartland since the late nineteenth century. As the City of the Big Shoulders, it has been a place whose self-reliance and drive allowed it to compete with coastal metros boasting more obvious advantages. Chicago’s landscape and weather may leave something to be desired, but the city’s combination of cosmopolitanism and localism, embodied in its diverse neighborhoods, has helped give it a distinctive American personality. Yet bad services, corrupt politics, and elevated crime have made life in Chicago increasingly unpleasant, all worsened by the city’s parlous finances.
An ever-mounting debt burden is the greatest threat to the city’s survival. As that problem worsens, more residents will question whether they want to stay in a windswept city paying down someone else’s pension—or decamp for places that don’t place such a millstone around their citizens’ necks.
According to the group Truth in Accounting, Chicago continues to live up to its moniker “Second City” in at least one respect: it has the second-worst debt load of any big city in America—about $43,000 per taxpayer, or almost $40 billion in total. The first is New York City, but Chicago residents also have to deal with Illinois’ debts, which total $42,000 per taxpayer, third worst in the nation. Thus, a family moving to Chicago suddenly becomes the inheritor of almost $85,000 in liabilities. By this metric, Chicago is no longer second but has by far the worst debt burden of any major city.
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www.city-journal.org/article/how-debt-ate-chicago