Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts are created under state law and ginned up and administered by municipalities. They are off the book methods of extracting and sequestering property taxes in secretive slush funds controlled by mayors. This money is doled out to clouted (mostly White) developers for private projects that have little or no public merit. These districts steal property taxes, in effect, from local units of government that then must either raise their own rates or cut services. In Chicago in 2019 some 140 TIF districts extracted over $684 million in 2019! This secretive practice is jealously guarded by our mayor (and all mayors who lord over TIFs) as it is a HUGE source of patronage and power distribution.

We need some public interest lawyer or firm to take the CivicLab on as a pro bono client and allow us to brief them on our findings. We think that together we can secure national funding from organizations who stand for or benefit from a robust public sector. We would like to craft a local attack on TIFs and use that to fashion a national campaign to educate around TIFs and to eliminate them completely.

We need to litigate against TIFs in Chicago as a test case on how this program is corrupting, racist, and unconstitutional. We know this program is used in 49 states and thousands of municipalities under various names. We believe this program to be part and parcel of a long series of racist public programs that have decimated our communities of color - in line with segregation, red lining, contact home buying, disinvestment, and over policing. We need a public interest team to take this issue into Federal Court and have TIFs struck from the books completely.