One of Chicago’s most important strengths for about as long as it’s existed has been a tight-knit business community with an uncommon commitment to civic duty and a willingness to donate time and treasure to bettering the place we call home.
That historic public-private cooperation, an asset not enjoyed to the same extent in most other U.S. cities, has given Chicago its incredible lakefront parks and beaches via the Burnham plan, Millennium Park and a host of other civic jewels that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Even business leaders who live in the suburbs have given their time and money to the city because they understood how our whole region is connected.
So it’s both heartening and unsurprising to see the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, the principal civic voice of Chicago’s business community, issue a detailed call to arms in a report it’s called “Growth for All.” The well-timed document, coming on the eve of an important mayoral election, includes a compendium of useful statistics laying out what many of us already know, at least intuitively.
For all its trials and tribulations, Chicagoland retains enviable advantages vis-a-vis other metro areas, but its growth over more than a decade seriously lags many of those peer regions.
That stagnation is at the root of many of our relentless political fights.
The Civic Committee’s latest contribution to the debate over Chicago’s future is to our minds a plea. In the face of the first mayoral administration in our memory to treat corporate Chicago as an enemy, the Civic Committee is trying to show Chicagoans that, while the business community doesn’t have all the answers to the city’s numerous challenges, the people who’ve made a success of themselves here and provided countless Chicagoans with careers to support their families do know a thing or two about problem-solving.
Indeed, as much as Chicago has looked to past mayors as larger-than-life figures, the city rarely has accomplished anything great without the active involvement of its business community.
“There’s such a strong love for the city on the part of these companies and their employees that they want (the city’s direction) to be good, they want it to be positive, but they’re looking for the path out (of this negative trajectory),” Civic Committee Chair Michael O’Grady told us in a meeting to discuss the report. “I’m not saying we have the answer by any means, but we are at least trying to step forward and say: We’ll provide the framework so we can at least get the constituencies to engage.”
O’Grady’s day job is CEO of Northern Trust, a global bank founded in Chicago in 1889 whose headquarters at LaSalle and Monroe streets is the point from which all heights in Chicago are measured. That’s how foundational — literally — Northern Trust is in this city.
With Northern Trust serving clients from locations in Asia, Europe, Australia and North America, O’Grady travels the globe all the time. So he gets a better read on Chicago’s worldwide reputation than most.
“The reputation is negative right now,” he says. “That’s tough. Because not only do you want companies that are not in Chicago to headquarter there, but you also want companies that are in New York or London to say, OK, you’re headquartered in this great city and you must be a strong company and a strong community and get the right support. … We’ve talked a lot about marketing and communications and how far does that get out in front of the substance. We’ve got to get at the substance first before we worry too much about the communication and marketing part of that.”
It doesn’t at all help the reputation of Chicago among investors and business people from elsewhere, of course, that the mayor of Chicago routinely uses the term “corporate” as a slur.
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To the Civic Committee’s credit, it’s not letting Brandon Johnson’s anti-business posture deter it from reaching out to him and to other important constituencies in Chicago like unions, philanthropic institutions, universities and others. “In any type of relationship like that, you can either be really aligned or not very aligned,” O’Grady told us. “You can then make a choice of, are you going to decide to engage or not to engage and how to do that. … We made the choice of, we’re going to engage.”
The committee has set what we think is an ambitious but achievable goal for Chicago once again to reach 3 million in population, a mark the city last achieved more than four decades ago. Chicago’s population now is at 2.7 million.
Another goal — doubling the region’s economic growth rate to 3% from the underwhelming 1.5% it’s achieved over the past decade — may be more of a reach. But faster growth clearly is key to addressing city government’s structural deficits and the fiscal woes that scare too many investors and companies away from doing business here for fear of far higher taxes in the future.
There’s a crisis of confidence in Chicago from those who don’t know this city like we do. We agree with O’Grady that this isn’t simply an issue of poor marketing at this point. There are real problems — chief among them underwater pensions and an increasing debt load — that rightfully cause concern.
They must be addressed in a hardheaded and balanced way, not as Mayor Johnson insists by simply hiking taxes on businesses and the wealthy.
We quote from “Growth for All”: “When growth is weak, leaders are forced to fight over a shrinking pie, which leads to tradeoffs among core priorities such as public safety, schools, transit, housing and infrastructure, or raise taxes simply to maintain existing services.”
Indeed. That’s the depressing movie we’ve been watching these past three years.
Thankfully, we’ve seen a majority of the City Council emerge that now understands the self-defeating nature of confiscatory politics.
It’s time to let the outside world know Chicago is resolved to face its self-made problems honestly and with courage.
That effort won’t succeed without Chicago’s business community.
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