About Advertise Archive Contact Search Subscribe
Serving the Loop and Near North neighborhoods of downtown Chicago
Facebook X Vimeo RSS

(Above) Rendering by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Sterling Bay’s Lincoln Yards development along the Chicago River north of the Loop.

5-Oct-19 – $170 million in property taxes each year and tens of thousands of jobs will go a long way toward keeping 2nd Ward Alderman Brian Hopkins’ support of the $6 billion, 55-acre Lincoln Yards megadevelopment.

Speaking to a City Club of Chicago luncheon on September 26, Hopkins said he was not necessarily going to support the project until “it was clear the community was going to get at least as much as the developer.”

Located on the west side of Lincoln Park, the project will create 12 million square feet of residential, retail, hotel, and office space. One building will be 595 feet tall, another 575 feet. As many as 12,000 people could be living there someday.

Hopkins said he had been working with the project and Chicago’s Sterling Bay for two or three years, getting the developer to agree to build a new transit hub at the Clybourn Metra station, build new bridges over the Chicago River, and to expand the 606 Trail, with the city reimbursing Sterling Bay for infrastructure improvements.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP

He also got Sterling Bay to drop plans for a soccer stadium and entertainment venue.

(Left) The Clybourn Metra station would be relocated to Lincoln Yards Station, depicted in this rendering by SOM.

“Any residents living near a river can usually use another bridge, but the only way we were going to get the money for the things the residents wanted was through Sterling Bay,” said Hopkins.

He says the project will create 28,000 permanent jobs, 10,000 temporary construction jobs, and offer 600 affordable housing units.

“If I had said no to Lincoln Yards, we wouldn’t be looking at that $170 million a year if Sterling Bay keeps the project on track over the next ten years.” Supporting the project, he says, “was just the right thing to do.”

Taxes not the answer to city’s growing deficit

Hopkins also said he is urging his fellow aldermen to avoid trying to solve the city’s financial problems by raising taxes and not looking at alternatives.

He does not like an idea to impose a special tax on Chicago’s stock and commodities markets.

“The day we pass any LaSalle Street taxes is the day they’ll move to Indiana,” says Hopkins (right). “They’ve already told us that. So we have to look elsewhere. We can’t afford to take that risk. We need them here.”

He says city revenue is going up. “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. We have a management problem.”

Brian Hopkins