I’ve never been inside a Nordstrom department store, not even the one that opened a few months ago at the suburban shopping mall less than two miles from my house.
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Truth be told, my idea of high-fashion shopping is catching a clearance on “irregulars” at Marshalls or T.J. Maxx. Some might say I have bad taste. I’m no fashion plate, that’s for sure.
But there’s another reason, besides frugality, that I don’t like to shop at the fancy stores in that big mall: It’s not located in the municipality where I live.
Most people don’t give a hoot about whether a store is on this or that side of the town line. People shop based on convenience and value. Does the discount house have a big enough parking lot? Will they have what I want in stock? What’s their policy on returns?
Those things are important, to be sure. But there’s one other factor folks might want to think about before firing up the mini-van and driving off to the distant mall or big-box electronics outlet.
Under the revenue code of this great State of Illinois, one penny of every dollar spent at retail is rebated back to the municipality in which that dollar was spent.
So every time my wife drops $100 at Marshall Fields at Old Orchard (which is not often, she is sure to remind me) the McCarron family of Evanston makes a $1 contribution to the Village of Skokie. That’s why suburbs with regional malls, or thickets of car dealerships or Wal-Mart-sized discounters, also tend to have excellent public services and low property taxes. They get out-of-towners to pick up part of the tab. Conversely, the sales tax drain is one reason property taxes in mall-less towns like Evanston are relatively high. So high, in fact, we’re having trouble attracting new businesses.
This beggar-thy-neighbor system is not particularly fair (Schaumburg gets Woodfield Mall, Hoffman Estates gets the traffic); and it has helped produce one of the most unrelievedly crass metropolitan landscapes in North America, as municipalities brush off aesthetics in the chase for tax cows.
But those are the rules, and even the City of Chicago must play by them.
Which brings us back to Nordstrom, a tax cow if ever there was one.
Last week, Chicago’s historic landmarks commission, on the advice of the city’s Department of Planning, recommended that the 66-year-old office building at 520 N. Michigan Ave. be preserved forever as an official city landmark. If the recommendation is upheld by the City Council, a developer named John Buck will not be able to demolish the building, which he controls, to make way for a downtown mall that would feature the area’s largest Nordstrom.
And what a store it would be, pumping out nearly $5 million annually just in city sales taxes, more than half collected from out-of-towners. Add in property taxes and various levies flowing to the state, the county, the schools, the convention authority and other districts, and this guernsey could end up putting out about $25 million a year to various governments. And that doesn’t include $211 million in one-time construction spending or the ripple effect of the 1,475 permanent jobs to be created.
Any city would do cartwheels to land this project. Any city, that is, except Chicago.
Here we have good taste. And although the city is getting clobbered in the above-mentioned race for taxable development (be it retail, commercial or manufacturing), and although our property tax base is declining and our tax rate climbing in comparison to newer suburbs, we are not about to compromise that taste in return for filthy lucre.
Which speaks well of us, I guess, although this admittedly taste-deficient writer has difficulty appreciating the splendor of 520 N. Michigan Ave., also known as the McGraw-Hill Building. The Tribune’s architecture critic informs us that it is an “A-minus” example of the Art Deco commercial style popular here between the World Wars. To my eyes, 520 is a dreary gray mass, punctuated only by barely-discernible stone carvings of zodiac figures–carvings that might be displayed to better effect in some other setting. (In the new mall?)
But that just shows how bad taste affects a person.
An unschooled admirer of quirky old buildings, I’m a lot more alarmed at what’s happening to the nearby Medinah Temple, whose owners are dismantling those wonderful onion-shaped towers that gave the River North district a touch of Araby. Or the imminent destruction of the old Lexington Hotel, the brick masterwork at South Michigan Avenue and Cermak Road from which Al Capone ran his speak-easy empire. Chicago’s tasteful landmarks commission is not protecting either of those. Nor did it prevent the architectural mish-mash that was recently made of historic Navy Pier.
For all my rotten taste, though, I do profess a love for this city and a concern that she not go the way of a Detroit or a Newark. Once the spiral of disinvestment takes hold, it matters not whether a city’s landmarks rate an A-plus or an A-minus. If nobody can be found to pay the rent, much less the taxes, they all will fall into disrepair, and sooner or later, abandonment.
Then the suburbs will end up with all the big department stores, leaving Chicago with its good taste.