dougthonus wrote:Why would a team that is currently averaging 21,000 fans a game that is also experiencing radical growth, build a 22,000 seat stadium that will debut in 3 years? Man does that seem incredibly short sighted.
-- edit nevermind, it's because the numbers are fake(ish) --
They had like 60k fans for the Messi game which boosted the overall numbers by 3k+ and do the general thing where they give away a crapload of tickets to charities and count those as tickets sold (same as other places, including our Chicago Bulls), actual buts in seats on a median game are still well below 22k.
this is just the trend in stadium design since the 90s (JR missed the memo). You reserve that extra space for luxury boxes; and with fewer seats and reasonably high demand (those Fire numbers surprise me, I guess 22k * 17 home games still isn't that many fans), you can charge more per ticket. The developer and team will call it a more "intimate and nostalgic" experience, but it's about maximizing the profitability of the site. Probably looks good for the brand too when the stadium is full and not half empty.
Really "Fire FC", because it looks like some dumbass rendering that will never materially exist (I'm looking at you, Michael Reese hospital...and every other megaproyecto rendering). It looks like a propaganda poster. Look how "homey" and "hand drawn" this computer-assisted design looks, Chicago! It's in black n white, just like the good ol days. It evokes a feeling of nostalgia, the facade's City Beautiful/Neo-Classical elements hearken to a time when Chicago wasn't a violent, privatized, expensive, corrupt shithole, but instead an epicenter of urban design, art, commerce, tolerance. It might make ya think of all those Chicago Fire games your grandpa caught in the 40s and all the wonderful memories he must have produced (wait what) -- and thus all the memories you're going to produce thinking about a bygone era that never actually existed except in the minds of contemporary marketers. Clearly that version of Chicago never existed, or maybe it did with some caveats. You definitely see this with the gentrification of the so-called "Bronzeville", the gentrifiers hearken to a storied history of...segregation, poverty, no city services...and how we need to get back to that by opening up Whole Foods and Ethiopian restaurants owned by Lettuce Entertain You serving $40 dishes. Totally non-sensical.
The nostalgia economy (the 10th little mermaid movie, the 500th comic book movie, the 'cozy' ballpark for instance), much like nationalism, hearkens to a past that never really existed in order to, ironically, produce a future that is completely disconnected from its historical, cultural or its spatial context. One can definitely read that much into this image. It's propaganda, and poorly-produced to boot. Check it out for any megaproyecto: they release this image, people on twitter say "wow, looks really cool" and they turn around and show that to our elected representatives who are too stupid to realize their constituents are wrong and elected them specifically to have a brain about such things and do things in the public interest.
Nothing is ever happening at "the 78", it's been 50 years. just plant some trees there. A 60-acre forest adjacent to downtown would be wonderful for countless reasons (I alluded to some in a different post on a different forum that I don't feel like re-writing), including economic ones. Soldier Field and Sox Park are both perfectly fine arenas and the City and State would be contradicting its environmental goals, which they've spent billions of taxpayer dollars pursuing, by replacing them with brand new arenas. Simultaneously, they contradict their ostensible 'social justice' goals by destroying a major South Side cultural institution (the Sox, not the Fire), employer and tax revenue generator and replacing it with...70 to 100 acres of vacant lots with even less investment potential than The 78.
It's just stupid policy, even dumber when you consider that Lightfoot's administration committed $2bil of city funds to "invest" in the South and West Sides only for the next administration to say "let's forget all about that money we spent and the policy directives we spoke about that got us elected". I thought Lightfoot's "Invest South/West" program was stupid, ineffectual and a waste of money; so maybe it's reasonable to put a stop to it. The thing is, they haven't stopped it, the City is just working itself in two opposite directions at the taxpayer's expense. They do whatever the developer wants because some **** up logic has determined that being a "YIMBY", rubber-stamping literally every single development project, is forward-thinking and helpful. "The million dollar condos will trickle down to the common man just like they did in California (to new Arizona residents), I promise, also I really hate Ronald Reagan despite holding his exact same (pre-senility) values!" is the new progressive logic.
On the YIMBY/NIMBY dynamic, I've been to various meetings where residents are pretty opposed to, for instance, opening up something like a mental health halfway house for non-violent people...or an old folk's home...This "NIMBY" sometimes has reasonable concerns (are these people violent?) that are often assuaged through discussion, but it's always about a topic designed to help vulnerable people, ie the elderly or people trying to re-integrate themselves into society. These people can be racist **** or whatever else, or they can be wonderful and thoughtful. The "YIMBY" has decided that anyone concerned about the character of their community, how this 30 story skyscraper might impact their day-to-day life, is a "NIMBY" and a fascist and an opponent of progress (also ironic), and that it's not really about helping people, they just fetishize building and seem to think the more tall buildings there are, the better off the people will be. Seeing countless cranes hundreds of feet in the air evidently means progress, doesn't matter what they're building.
"Let the private developer do whatever he wants, it's his money" is not the perspective a city controlled by Democrats should be taking. That's Ronald Reagan logic. Politicians in Alabama get elected on that logic. It's worse than that though, because they claim their policies are helpful to the common man. Republicans tell you, "I don't give a ****, it's not my problem, it's a matter of personal responsibility", the Illinois Democrat will say, "I care about you, it is definitely my problem, this is why we're going to pursue the exact same policies as the Alabama Republican, and if you disagree, you must just be a Trump supporter". There's probably another point to be made here about how our "liberal hero" in Illinois, JB Pritzker, is a billionaire nepo baby (didn't even make the money) that is only the governor because he could fund his own campaign. Rahm Emmanuel said as much and it's just obviously true; political campaigns are expensive particularly in a big state like Illinois. He does the 'noblesse oblige' thing well enough, but I wonder why Democrats specifically are gungho about transforming democracy back into feudalism where you can only be a political representative based on your father's wealth. Read some of his policies (CEJA for instance is one I look at a lot) and you see that they're basically just handouts to the private sector to consult on "environmental" or "social" things which amount to nothing except a large bill at the taxpayer expense.
One Illinois project I was semi-involved with paid a consulting group something like $5mil from the CEJA fund to do an 'exploratory' analysis of a geothermal energy system in a specific South Side neighborhood. The federal and state governments, this decade, both allocated funds toward community-level "pilot programs" aimed toward developing renewable energy systems so that might serve as models or experiments that could be followed across the country. A potentially nice idea, we need to experiment to come up with proper, economically-feasible solutions, but it's a matter of how the money is allocated and who does the work, and if it isn't just a total waste of time and money. It's the same logic as what corporations do nowadays: no more research and development, simply buy a 'startup' with a profitable idea and bring it to market. Most pharmaceutical companies nowadays just do marketing and manufacturing and will pay for all the trials, FDA regulation etc because they're much better capitalized/knowledgable on the process than the startup is, and now they don't have to waste money on egghead scientists who might fail 90 times out of 100 to develop a useful drug. It's a small cost to manufacture a drug and do all the trials when you know it works and people need it. Now the question is, why would anyone pursue a PhD in chemistry going forward when the only job option that exists to you is "a startup" that will almost certainly fail when once upon a time, the job awarded you a nice wage and a pension. TikTok influencer is perhaps a more logical career path than doctorate of chemistry.
This wasn't a bad idea on the surface level (or 300ft into the crust) despite better options, but one wonders how the equipment and salaries could have added up to such an extreme number. Northwestern and U of I have done similar projects with none of the budget. The physical work is pretty straightforward and is generally done by low-paid manual workers. Analyzing the results is also straightforward but requires some amount of education/expertise. The group determined "maybe there's some potential here, but there are probably better options". We find that this region of the city received this governmental investment for this 'exploratory study", compared to clearly more obvious sites within the city (ie Little Village) because this community area has a very active, Nation of Islam-affiliated (anti-Semitic) community organization that lobbied the government and has been awarded an outsized number of grants within the city aimed at addressing social/environmental ills (they're calling it 'environmental justice') -- that they do absolutely nothing with. Their grant-writing team is top notch it seems, but I might assume misappropriation of funds. The worst part about it is that no money was ever allocated to build the system even if it was proven to be viable. $5mil for a report that was never going to be acted on. These systems are expensive to install but will pay for themselves eventually and can be sustained in perpetuity, there was just no federal or state funding for it. Part of that is a federal issue, where Joey B and Obama were also indistinguishable from Reagan, Goldwater-era Republicans, except they talked a little bit more gently in their speeches. And I guess it's a question of democratic oversight: are the communities that 'need' the most help necessarily the ones that have the most active NGO's and UChicago educated employees? Because those are the ones that write the grants and get the money. What if the democratically-elected local government determined such things rather than aloof grant awarders in Washington and Springfield simply giving money to a private entity and refusing to oversee/manage the work? The only governmental "pushback" to such a project, regardless of how the perturbations might be felt throughout the region, is that "we ain't gonna pay for it". That's laissez-faire logic. The government is elected by citizens in part to regulate these sorts of abuse in favor of the common interest, but Democrats have outsourced their democratic duties to consultants and contractors because, I think, they're lazy and stupid; not because they're evil, they just think the 23-year-old Harvard-educated 'consultant' is smarter than them and that their cookie cutter, market-dogmatic ideas they transplant into every community they work is objectively correct despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
This post was way longer than anticipated, poorly-edited (one draft), has little to do with Jerry Reinsdorf or the teams he owns, and I had like 10 more points to make on tangential topics that seem to me to relate to this topic of urban development (like about Cook County's privatized computer system they tried to implement a decade ago, continue to fail at implementing at massive cost overruns, and still keep throwing millions at a useless, Texas-based corporation that never had any IT knowledge[but have made political contributions to Illinois politicians and to all the politicians in jurisdictions where they work, it probably isn't connected though]). But this "The 78" project is such a bad idea for some of those reasons I outlined and plenty more. It was a bad idea before I was even born. And my larger point is that it speaks to issues in government where, thankfully, liberals are still happy to "throw money" at a problem, they just give the money away to profit-seeking interests and refuse to hold them accountable for their work. The work is worthless and corrupt, but it isn't quite an illegal "kickback" because they're non-governmental employees, it's a free country, and there seemingly isn't a law to go after governmental employees who quit their jobs and go on to work for private entities they abused their power in a public position to help. Need to stop outsourcing governmental work, the private sector is genuinely worse at it and requires a profit. It's the same price to park on the South Side than it is in Midtown Manhattan, it's double the cost to park in the Loop. That's a pretty obvious example, but this logic infects every aspect of our government. New York still has a system of public housing that works pretty well, San Francisco does too. Chicago destroyed ours, promised to rebuild it then never did. The 78 might be a nice site to fulfill that promise.
