tfl: The Flatiron Life

If the PRChi is going to host the Olympics then all those Olympians are going to need to live somewhere. Don’t worry; Ben Joravsky reports The Mayor has a plan: Buy and old hospital, raze it, sell the land to a developer who will be required to let Olympians live there before selling the units to the public.

That alone scares me but lets look at some details.

City officials haven’t released all the specifics, but here’s what they’ve revealed: The city will agree to borrow $85 million to buy the Michael Reese Hospital campus, near 31st and King Drive, from its current owner, Medline Industries. But Medline will only get $65 million, because the company has agreed to make a $20 million “charitable contribution” back to the city.

Wait, huh, why doesn’t the city just spend $65 million and skip the contribution part?

“You see a lot of it in the sub-prime mort­gage loan business,” [a source in the mortgage lending industry] says. “You’ll get a situation where a house is worth, say, $100,000, but the buyer has no money for a down payment, so the buyer says to the seller, ‘I’ll tell you what—you’re only asking $100,000. I’ll give you $105,000. And then you give me back $5,000 so I can pay a down payment.’”

Brilliant! Sub-Prime loans seem to be a smart deal, right? Smart deal for the leaner in this case because unlike a lot of people who got No-Income-No-Asset loans, the city, with its powers tax and eminent domain, is more like Your-Income-Your Assets and Chicagoans are on the line when the deal heads south.

That will not happen though, right? The city has a track record of sound real estate deals, yeah?

This is starting to remind me of the debacle at Block 37. In the late 1980s and early ’90s the city spent about $40 million to buy and demolish the block bounded by Washington, Randolph, State, and Dearborn, then sold it for $12.6 million to a consortium of developers. They never got a project off the ground, and a few years ago the city ended up buying the property back for about $32.5 million. Even as real estate prices were skyrocketing, the city managed to lose millions of dollars on each transaction.

Crap! 2016 looks more and more like when Jos and I move back to Indiana.

15 min after the Supreme Court interpreted the 2nd Amendment to protect our individual right to own guns for our self defense, the Illinois State Rifle Association filed a lawsuit challenging the PRChi’s 26-year old ban on handguns. This will likely lead to Chicagoans once again being able to secure their homes.

Da Mayor finds this ruling “a very frightening decision.” And he also said, “I just don’t understand how they came to this thinking.” I would suggest Hishonor (and you) read Justice Scalia’s majority opinion. I have not read the whole thing, but what I have is very readable for the common man and you understand exactly how the majority interpreted the law.