Living outside Chicago -the Sanctuary city ......people leaving means higher taxes...

[creaker]

Seattle and Portland don't seem to have suffered--job growth in Seattle is average but it's about double that in Portland, unemployment is under 5%, and--perhaps unfortunately--the real estate market is exploding.
3017 11th Ave W, Seattle, WA 98119 - 3 beds/1.75 baths

Boston is booming - huge amount of high end development in the city, including a huge amount of residential. The real estate market has gone crazy here as well. There's a just large amount of money moving into the city, I'm not sure what the impact is elsewhere.

[LDAHL]

Chance the Rapper donated one million dollars to Chicago Public Schools. He set a great example because local city bakeries are chipping in with fundraising to help out.Yea its a drop in the bucket but it put the governor to shame.

You have to feel for Bruce Rauner, or any Illinois Governor. How do you manage a State suffering from generations of financial idiocy? How do you deal with ludicrously unfunded pension liabilities, entrenched public service unions with massive clout, vicious legislative infighting, a fleeing middle class and junk credit?

Why anyone would want that job is beyond me.

[Chicken lady]

So, today I discovered there is a poster at the food bank. We served about 1,000 fewer individuals in 2016 than in 2015. This is an indication of need, not capacity. It reflects a reduction in demand of about 7%. However, there is no indication of how many of those individuals came once and how many came every month, which makes the poster significantly less helpful as an economic indicator. (A family with two adults and six kids that came once in an emergency would count exactly the same as 8 single adults who came every month.)

[saguaro]

We live in northern Lake county. I work in Lake, DH works in McHenry. Sales taxes are lower but property still inordinately high for the size house we are in. We don't plan on staying here for retirement but haven't yet decided where we will end up.

[sylvia]

I live outside of Chicago in a cook county suburb,and from my experience it is imploding. There are rows of empty stores, people moving out houses for sale. Taxes are going up some ridiculous fees like $101.00 to renew car registration in the state.If you live in Chicago your city sticker is $110 or something like that.I grew up as an immigrant in the city. But we never had handouts or welfare. Sanctuary cities pretty much are becoming immigrant communities with first generation problems and now the ICE problems. Inner cities lack resources , our state is without a budget for the second year, so money is not going for proper resources. I call it imploding pretty much here city wise and state wise. Our property taxes for a 1964 built 1000 square foot home almost $7000.00. Almost at 10 percent sales tax on food and goods and the popular 2.75% sweet tax.

[Teacher Terry]

That's terrible Sylwia and not sustainable. I have family in WIs and am shocked at their property taxes also.

[Chicken lady]

Cincinnati is a sanctuary city. I don't see the challenges in Cincinnati being immigrant or "1st generation" based. I think many Cincinnati issues are issues of multigenerational poverty, racial division, and white flight. Now not really being solved by infill projects and gentrification.

my property taxes aren't too bad. Most of them are school taxes, which keep increasing primarily because people keep turning farms into subdivisions and then we have to build new schools. I think we need a really big subdivision tax.

[jp1]

I live outside of Chicago in a cook county suburb,and from my experience it is imploding. There are rows of empty stores, people moving out houses for sale. Taxes are going up some ridiculous fees like $101.00 to renew car registration in the state.If you live in Chicago your city sticker is $110 or something like that.I grew up as an immigrant in the city. But we never had handouts or welfare. Sanctuary cities pretty much are becoming immigrant communities with first generation problems and now the ICE problems. Inner cities lack resources , our state is without a budget for the second year, so money is not going for proper resources. I call it imploding pretty much here city wise and state wise. Our property taxes for a 1964 built 1000 square foot home almost $7000.00. Almost at 10 percent sales tax on food and goods and the popular 2.75% sweet tax.

It does indeed sound like your city is struggling. But honestly I wonder if it really has anything to do with the sanctuary city factor. Or even with the immigrant factor. People have studied Miami and what happened after the Mariel Boatlift happened and basically things reached equilibrium fairly quickly and the economy grew. Because when new people come to a city with nothing they need to buy things. Stuff as small as a toothbrush or as big as a car to get to work and everything in between. Your city's problems sound like the more general problem of just a struggling city that doesn't have enough business happening to bring in the revenue necessary to keep things afloat. Blaming it on being a sanctuary city is easy, and everyone likes to have someone to blame for problems, but that doesn't mean that those people really are to blame.

[sylvia]

Yesterday I traveled to the local zoo (having mixed feelings about zoos but another story for another day.) I bought flip flops good price great selection ......but I paid 10% tax to buy the flip flops. Brookfield Illinois where the zoo is located, is an upscale suburb of Chicago a couple miles north of us but still in cook county plus their own local taxes on top of that. Oh my goodness.....

[sweetana3]

What areas of Indiana or Illinois have zero sales tax? So really you are only paying the difference in what it would cost for sales tax at home and sales tax in Chicago. Here the sales tax is 7% but restaurant meals and such have an additional amount added.