Is “The 78” Dead? Or even more alive? Fire announce plans for SSS

[77 Hitmen]

2 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

And also to be fair he's written the contract so that in all probability he will no longer be with us when the sale does go through. I think that's the reason it is worded the way it is.

I've consistently said and written that he will not sell as long as he is alive due to the tax hit.

Unless something happens in my opinion that still holds true, the sale will take place after he has departed.

But time will tell. 

 

The timeframe of the Ishbia purchase deal is very telling.  JR's option to sell doesn't kick in until the year the current ballpark lease ends (2029) and then Ishbia's option to buy kicks in 2034 when Jerry is 98.   This does suggest to me that Reinsdorf still plans to own the team until he dies but with the possibility of ownership transfer sooner to coincide with the Ishbias perhaps privately financing a new stadium.  

I also noted that they made the Reinsdorf-Ishbia ownership transfer announcement within a very short time after the Fire announced their new stadium plans at the 78.  Was that just a coincidence or did the Fire announcing they're breaking ground this fall push JR and Ishbia to go public with their ownership deal now?

[Lip Man 1]

Bears say it's Arlington Heights but need the state to approve some things (even though the Bears were valued recently in an article at 8.8 BILLION dollars) LOL

https://chicago.suntimes.com/bears/2025/08/08/bears-president-arlington-heights-the-teams-sole-focus-in-stadium-push

 

[Kyyle23]

So, probably Euclid/Nw Highway/Wilke expansion, probably an entirely rebuilt Euclid/53 ramp, and train stops expansion.

if the bears truly aren’t asking for state money for the stadium then this should probably get passed pretty quickly 

[soxrwhite]

5 hours ago, nrockway said:

The other side of the Dodgers move is even worse in my opinion. 1,800 or so Mexican-American families were forcibly removed from Chavez Ravine to build the stadium. The City used eminent domain and claimed they would be building public housing on the site before deciding public housing was something communists do (FDR is history's most famous communist I guess, but this was the height of the Red Scare), and gave it to a rich guy instead.

In an era of 'housing covenants', Chavez Ravine was one of the few places where non-whites were actually allowed to live in Los Angeles. City of LA was legally able to eminent domain the land for well below market value because it was deemed 'blighted' (nonsense term but initially well-intended) and the municipality received federal funds to purchase the land for the purpose of public housing. The plan was pretty ambitious and would have added 3,600 units of housing

Obviously that didn't happen. Public housing in LA never happened. Part of the reason it's such an expensive place to live and the poor are now being relegated to San Bernandino or Texas. Poulson was elected mayor with some rigorous campaigning from the "Citizens Against Socialist Housing" and canceled the 'Elysian Park Heights' housing project. The federal government told them that the land must still be used for "public use" and that's how they got the Dodgers, by being subsidized by a federal program designed to house the poor, in this case poor people of color. Everything the Dodgers baseball team was doing to improve the sport by signing Jackie and Campy, in my view, is unfortunately contradicted by the  Dodger Stadium saga. 

Anyway, the conservatives of the time decided that baseball was of "public use", I think it is of "public use", so why do we let billionaires administer it instead of the citizens in a democracy?

well done.

[77 Hitmen]

2 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

Bears say it's Arlington Heights but need the state to approve some things (even though the Bears were valued recently in an article at 8.8 BILLION dollars) LOL

https://chicago.suntimes.com/bears/2025/08/08/bears-president-arlington-heights-the-teams-sole-focus-in-stadium-push

 

 

2 hours ago, Kyyle23 said:

So, probably Euclid/Nw Highway/Wilke expansion, probably an entirely rebuilt Euclid/53 ramp, and train stops expansion.

if the bears truly aren’t asking for state money for the stadium then this should probably get passed pretty quickly 

The article only mentions that the Bears are waiting for a "megadevelopment" bill to pass in the fall legislative session that would freeze property tax assessments for big projects like this and would allow them to negotiate payments with local taxing bodies.  I don't see any mention of them asking for money for the stadium itself. 

And yes, @Kyyle23, I'd imagine that there would be a need for road and transit improvements for such a huge project and I don't see the infrastructure costs as being a roadblock to getting this project approved.  

[Lip Man 1]

2 hours ago, 77 Hitmen said:

 

The article only mentions that the Bears are waiting for a "megadevelopment" bill to pass in the fall legislative session that would freeze property tax assessments for big projects like this and would allow them to negotiate payments with local taxing bodies.  I don't see any mention of them asking for money for the stadium itself. 

And yes, @Kyyle23, I'd imagine that there would be a need for road and transit improvements for such a huge project and I don't see the infrastructure costs as being a roadblock to getting this project approved.  

That's a technicality. Bottom line a team worth over eight billion dollars which has been an NFL joke for decades is going to ask the state/city for infrastructure support for their project.

I'd tell them to go f#$% themselves.

[nrockway]

6 hours ago, southsider2k5 said:

This was a really interesting piece of history I had never heard before.  It definitely goes along with all of the redlining and carving up of historic minority neighborhoods for interstates and other "public" projects back in that era.

It's really tragic and a lot of that interstate/redlining stuff was pioneered right here in Chicago! Redlining is obviously a Northern innovation because the South just had, you know, legal segregation, they didn't need to be all that clever about it, and it was largely the private sector up here doing this dirty business. I think the government's role in it is more complex (good and bad) and I probably won't dive into that here. Well, maybe a little bit...I'm making it a smaller font because the reader could probably just skip over my opinions...plus it ended up being more than "a little bit".

I think there were a lot of 'well-intentioned' policies that totally failed for a variety of reasons (like the housing projects, right?). I think we could try them again though and do a better job with hindsight and within a democratic society that is a lot more enfranchised than it was in the 1950s. Manhattan does a pretty good job of it. You might still find working class people living there who maintain reasonable commutes to their jobs; you can barely say the same thing about, say, San Francisco or LA, where regular people cannot afford the rent or home prices on their salaries and are forced to move out of the city, yet still must commute to where the jobs are. Unlike Chicago, if you commute to San Francisco via BART, you pay a higher fare the further you travel. In part, that makes sense, but it makes less sense when you consider a general trend of 'land is more expensive the closer you get to the urban core' so we're basically charging the poor more in taxes than the wealthy just to show up to work. The same logic is true of California's state gas tax. Wealthy people in Santa Monica are paying less in taxes to drive their cars than regular people in Riverside...their professional job on Wilshire Blvd or in DTLA is close to home or they might even work from home. I don't think you can really telecommute to a construction or restaurant job. The people in Santa Monica probably drive newer, more fuel efficient cars too. A well-intentioned environmental policy, right, that the poor bear the brunt of. This might be an OK policy if there was coinciding social policy that helped lift people out of poverty, offer a reasonably-priced home close to their job, provide childcare, college education, etc. New Deal kinds of policies. There were government subsidies for electric cars ((will be again in 3 years I assume), but you're still paying, I dunno, $25k for a car instead of $32k. It's a lot of money either way when the 1990 Honda Civic drives just fine. I digress, but while 'well-intentioned' policies are nice, the old adage about "the road to Hell" strikes me as very true in this context.

The Robert Moses comment piqued my interest because the guy is best-known for carving up New York with freeways and is less well-known for producing its still-functional system of public housing, against a lot of backlash. We talk about public housing in America like it's a dirty word, but it works well in much poorer countries (I like Croatia as an example) and it works in NYC. We can do a better job of it in Chicago than we did before. Part of its failure here is the 'white flight' to the suburbs which eroded the City's tax base. Tax revenue that was meant to fund the maintenance and upkeep of these projects. Taxpayers didn't really 'flee' New York City though, so I think that's part of why their system has been successful. I think younger, high tax bracket people prefer to live in the city these days rather than in the suburbs, so that could be beneficial in terms of funding various projects. I also think we could be more creative with creating new sources of local revenue...why couldn't a government-run business 'compete' with the private sector and set a certain standard? Again, a New Deal idea, nothing new for America; the Public Works Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, etc. did a lot of good to bring us out the Depression, set high standards that private businesses had to best if they wanted to make a profit, and arguably helped turn America into the most economically-developed country on Earth. It isn't socialism, in fact it's probably the reason why communism never took off here during the 1930s. It's just liberalism. 

To the topic of redlining/segregation, federal civil rights policy actually sought to address the issues of the South and totally ignored the North, so redlining continued up here for some time and nowadays we just have de facto segregation. Last I checked, Milwaukee and Chicago were the two most racially-segregated cities in the country. Well...it depends how you calculate it, here's some list that UC Berkeley produced with 2020 census data where Milwaukee is 5th, Chicago is 4th and Detroit is 1st.

This is a very boring document (The Chicago Area Transportation Study [CATS], 1962) that we were required to read in school, but it sure was eye-opening and gave me a better understanding of how the spatial arrangement of our 'liberal' city and its highways reproduces poverty and segregation (and traffic. so much traffic). I don't think we are even trying to address it 60 years later and unfortunately still basically follow the approach outlined in this document that proved to be...frankly wrong and pseudoscientific. To me it's interesting because I think the people who worked for CATS (Katz? Getz?) were intelligent, mostly thoughtful and well-intentioned, but treating human beings like a chemistry experiment or a population of honey bees just doesn't make much sense. There are no laboratory conditions for building a 10 lane highway through your town.

I think the document gets interesting at the bottom of pg 49 when they are deciding ideal locations to site expressways within Chicago and how it might impact "the community". It's worth reading the couple of pages IMO, but some key highlights are "there are no communities in the city, only in suburbs like Oak Park", "farmland produces identity", "projects like Lake Meadows (at King & 32nd) make an area safer and more attractive (not a community though)". They conclude that the only thing expressways should not divide are "trade areas". Which is a pretty ambiguous term, so when it came time to implement CATS and other similar plans across the country, guess where they built em...so I don't think these plans are explicitly racist, but were thoughtless and didn't consult the public enough and had, really, no social viewpoint at all at a time in American history when Civil Rights was front of mind. It was 'rational' and scientific, only they were wrong and science doesn't work like that. Even beyond the segregation aspect, it's just a pretty awful thing for cities and all people who live in them. Have to appreciate the 'NIMBYs' in SF who opposed this 'modern, progressive transportation system'. 

Sorry for the (probably incoherent) wall of text, I'm pretty fascinated by this topic and I think it relates to all this ballpark stuff. A ballpark could be a potential opportunity to do something good for the public, or at least not make a place worse. It bothers me that city officials, bureaucrats, aldermen, non-profit consultants, for-profit consultants, my neighbor, etc seemingly just want to rubber stamp this project without doing any kind of analysis or considering potential negative side effects. Or to consider the project at all. People still think professional sport is a non-serious industry despite the fact that it is one of the highest performing investments there is, it prints money, and is showing no sign of slowing down. 

Why doesn't the alderman stand up for a massive cultural institution and development opportunity in her ward? Why should any South Side alderman want a potential development opportunity to leave here and move to the Loop? Forgetting the economics, don't they have pride in their South Side team? Couldn't they be imagining options to improve the current site rather than to lose it and the team for nothing?  The parking lots are a huge opportunity I think, and perhaps there are upgrades to be made to the park rather than to raze a perfectly good structure. Could pony up a big project like...reorient the park so that the skyline is in view. Some guy on Reddit made this up, suddenly you have one of the best looking parks in MLB. Build some 'fun' places on the parking lots, bars, batting cages, whatever. Consider the L stop, the freeway access (I know I just spent 1000 words shitting on it), the rising incomes in the neighborhood and I think you just have a really great site for a 'ballpark village'/entertainment district kind of thing. Also, check this out, there's already a baseball park there.

 

[caulfield12]

1 hour ago, nrockway said:

It's really tragic and a lot of that interstate/redlining stuff was pioneered right here in Chicago! Redlining is obviously a Northern innovation because the South just had, you know, legal segregation, they didn't need to be all that clever about it, and it was largely the private sector up here doing this dirty business. I think the government's role in it is more complex (good and bad) and I probably won't dive into that here. Well, maybe a little bit...I'm making it a smaller font because the reader could probably just skip over my opinions...plus it ended up being more than "a little bit".

I think there were a lot of 'well-intentioned' policies that totally failed for a variety of reasons (like the housing projects, right?). I think we could try them again though and do a better job with hindsight and within a democratic society that is a lot more enfranchised than it was in the 1950s. Manhattan does a pretty good job of it. You might still find working class people living there who maintain reasonable commutes to their jobs; you can barely say the same thing about, say, San Francisco or LA, where regular people cannot afford the rent or home prices on their salaries and are forced to move out of the city, yet still must commute to where the jobs are. Unlike Chicago, if you commute to San Francisco via BART, you pay a higher fare the further you travel. In part, that makes sense, but it makes less sense when you consider a general trend of 'land is more expensive the closer you get to the urban core' so we're basically charging the poor more in taxes than the wealthy just to show up to work. The same logic is true of California's state gas tax. Wealthy people in Santa Monica are paying less in taxes to drive their cars than regular people in Riverside...their professional job on Wilshire Blvd or in DTLA is close to home or they might even work from home. I don't think you can really telecommute to a construction or restaurant job. The people in Santa Monica probably drive newer, more fuel efficient cars too. A well-intentioned environmental policy, right, that the poor bear the brunt of. This might be an OK policy if there was coinciding social policy that helped lift people out of poverty, offer a reasonably-priced home close to their job, provide childcare, college education, etc. New Deal kinds of policies. There were government subsidies for electric cars ((will be again in 3 years I assume), but you're still paying, I dunno, $25k for a car instead of $32k. It's a lot of money either way when the 1990 Honda Civic drives just fine. I digress, but while 'well-intentioned' policies are nice, the old adage about "the road to Hell" strikes me as very true in this context.

The Robert Moses comment piqued my interest because the guy is best-known for carving up New York with freeways and is less well-known for producing its still-functional system of public housing, against a lot of backlash. We talk about public housing in America like it's a dirty word, but it works well in much poorer countries (I like Croatia as an example) and it works in NYC. We can do a better job of it in Chicago than we did before. Part of its failure here is the 'white flight' to the suburbs which eroded the City's tax base. Tax revenue that was meant to fund the maintenance and upkeep of these projects. Taxpayers didn't really 'flee' New York City though, so I think that's part of why their system has been successful. I think younger, high tax bracket people prefer to live in the city these days rather than in the suburbs, so that could be beneficial in terms of funding various projects. I also think we could be more creative with creating new sources of local revenue...why couldn't a government-run business 'compete' with the private sector and set a certain standard? Again, a New Deal idea, nothing new for America; the Public Works Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, etc. did a lot of good to bring us out the Depression, set high standards that private businesses had to best if they wanted to make a profit, and arguably helped turn America into the most economically-developed country on Earth. It isn't socialism, in fact it's probably the reason why communism never took off here during the 1930s. It's just liberalism. 

To the topic of redlining/segregation, federal civil rights policy actually sought to address the issues of the South and totally ignored the North, so redlining continued up here for some time and nowadays we just have de facto segregation. Last I checked, Milwaukee and Chicago were the two most racially-segregated cities in the country. Well...it depends how you calculate it, here's some list that UC Berkeley produced with 2020 census data where Milwaukee is 5th, Chicago is 4th and Detroit is 1st.

This is a very boring document (The Chicago Area Transportation Study [CATS], 1962) that we were required to read in school, but it sure was eye-opening and gave me a better understanding of how the spatial arrangement of our 'liberal' city and its highways reproduces poverty and segregation (and traffic. so much traffic). I don't think we are even trying to address it 60 years later and unfortunately still basically follow the approach outlined in this document that proved to be...frankly wrong and pseudoscientific. To me it's interesting because I think the people who worked for CATS (Katz? Getz?) were intelligent, mostly thoughtful and well-intentioned, but treating human beings like a chemistry experiment or a population of honey bees just doesn't make much sense. There are no laboratory conditions for building a 10 lane highway through your town.

I think the document gets interesting at the bottom of pg 49 when they are deciding ideal locations to site expressways within Chicago and how it might impact "the community". It's worth reading the couple of pages IMO, but some key highlights are "there are no communities in the city, only in suburbs like Oak Park", "farmland produces identity", "projects like Lake Meadows (at King & 32nd) make an area safer and more attractive (not a community though)". They conclude that the only thing expressways should not divide are "trade areas". Which is a pretty ambiguous term, so when it came time to implement CATS and other similar plans across the country, guess where they built em...so I don't think these plans are explicitly racist, but were thoughtless and didn't consult the public enough and had, really, no social viewpoint at all at a time in American history when Civil Rights was front of mind. It was 'rational' and scientific, only they were wrong and science doesn't work like that. Even beyond the segregation aspect, it's just a pretty awful thing for cities and all people who live in them. Have to appreciate the 'NIMBYs' in SF who opposed this 'modern, progressive transportation system'. 

Sorry for the (probably incoherent) wall of text, I'm pretty fascinated by this topic and I think it relates to all this ballpark stuff. A ballpark could be a potential opportunity to do something good for the public, or at least not make a place worse. It bothers me that city officials, bureaucrats, aldermen, non-profit consultants, for-profit consultants, my neighbor, etc seemingly just want to rubber stamp this project without doing any kind of analysis or considering potential negative side effects. Or to consider the project at all. People still think professional sport is a non-serious industry despite the fact that it is one of the highest performing investments there is, it prints money, and is showing no sign of slowing down. 

Why doesn't the alderman stand up for a massive cultural institution and development opportunity in her ward? Why should any South Side alderman want a potential development opportunity to leave here and move to the Loop? Forgetting the economics, don't they have pride in their South Side team? Couldn't they be imagining options to improve the current site rather than to lose it and the team for nothing?  The parking lots are a huge opportunity I think, and perhaps there are upgrades to be made to the park rather than to raze a perfectly good structure. Could pony up a big project like...reorient the park so that the skyline is in view. Some guy on Reddit made this up, suddenly you have one of the best looking parks in MLB. Build some 'fun' places on the parking lots, bars, batting cages, whatever. Consider the L stop, the freeway access (I know I just spent 1000 words shitting on it), the rising incomes in the neighborhood and I think you just have a really great site for a 'ballpark village'/entertainment district kind of thing. Also, check this out, there's already a baseball park there.

 

Hard to have current pride in the White Sox after three years of historic losses and the much-ballyhooed rebuild totally imploding...meanwhile, Cubs for most of the season had one of the most exciting teams in baseball.

There's a lot of historic pride and historicity...but certainly not with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

Look at the attrition rate for Millenials that made up the majority of the board from let's say 2016 through today.

 

You're asking politicians to feel pride when they feel like the equivalent of abandoned Minnesota Twins' fans.

[Kyyle23]

7 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

That's a technicality. Bottom line a team worth over eight billion dollars which has been an NFL joke for decades is going to ask the state/city for infrastructure support for their project.

I'd tell them to go f#$% themselves.

I don’t think it is common for a team to foot the bill for infrastructure projects that aren’t even their property like adjacent streets and train property.  I know you are jaded by pretty much every owner in this state but this is ridiculous, their net worth has nothing to do with expanding roads and trains to accommodate and fascilitate more business into Arlington Heights 

[77 Hitmen]

13 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

That's a technicality. Bottom line a team worth over eight billion dollars which has been an NFL joke for decades is going to ask the state/city for infrastructure support for their project.

I'd tell them to go f#$% themselves.

So, if the Bears are serious about committing something like $2-3B in private funding to the development of a stadium and the rest of the Arlington Park property, you'll tell them to go f$#@ themselves when it comes to infrastructure improvements to the area?  What about the Fire building a privately-financed soccer stadium at the 78, should the city and state tell them to the same thing when it comes to infrastructure improvements to the site, which won't be cheap?  Same if Ishbia says he'd commit $1B in private money to a new Sox stadium there. 

In that case, what should be done with the Arlington Park land, just turn all that land it into a bunch of ugly suburban strip malls, Costcos, warehouses, and townhouses?  What about the 78, just let it sit vacant for another 50 years?

And I'm certainly no fan of the McCaskeys, but owning a team that is worth $8B doesn't mean they have $8B sitting around in the bank or some other liquid investments.

My biggest problem with the Bears deal is that the taxpayers are still on the hook for over $500M for the botched 2002 Soldier Field rebuild.  All that money for a stadium that quickly became functionally obsolete.  

Edited August 9 by 77 Hitmen

[Lip Man 1]

6 hours ago, Kyyle23 said:

I don’t think it is common for a team to foot the bill for infrastructure projects that aren’t even their property like adjacent streets and train property.  I know you are jaded by pretty much every owner in this state but this is ridiculous, their net worth has nothing to do with expanding roads and trains to accommodate and fascilitate more business into Arlington Heights 

I agree it's common for other teams to get help.

My attitude is completely shaped by the fact that the owners of Chicago's sports teams are basically incompetent and concerned more about profit than winning. being jaded is very well founded based on the won/loss records over an extended period of time for the Sox, Bears, Bulls and Hawks.

Until that changes they'd not get a single solitary dime from me representing tax payers in the city/state.

Regarding the Fire, I'm not a soccer fan, couldn't care one iota what they do or don't do. 

[Lip Man 1]

36 minutes ago, 77 Hitmen said:

So, if the Bears are serious about committing something like $2-3B in private funding to the development of a stadium and the rest of the Arlington Park property, you'll tell them to go f$#@ themselves when it comes to infrastructure improvements to the area?  What about the Fire building a privately-financed soccer stadium at the 78, should the city and state tell them to the same thing when it comes to infrastructure improvements to the site, which won't be cheap?  Same if Ishbia says he'd commit $1B in private money to a new Sox stadium there. 

In that case, what should be done with the Arlington Park land, just turn all that land it into a bunch of ugly suburban strip malls, Costcos, warehouses, and townhouses?  What about the 78, just let it sit vacant for another 50 years?

And I'm certainly no fan of the McCaskeys, but owning a team that is worth $8B doesn't mean they have $8B sitting around in the bank or some other liquid investments.

My biggest problem with the Bears deal is that the taxpayers are still on the hook for over $500M for the botched 2002 Soldier Field rebuild.  All that money for a stadium that quickly became functionally obsolete.  

We'll see if they are serious or not and if "cost over runs" which happen say "only" 95% of the time are picked up by them or they ask the state/city to 'help' them out.

Sorry I don't trust the McCaskey's as far as I can throw them. 

[Y2Jimmy0]

20 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

Bears say it's Arlington Heights but need the state to approve some things (even though the Bears were valued recently in an article at 8.8 BILLION dollars) LOL

https://chicago.suntimes.com/bears/2025/08/08/bears-president-arlington-heights-the-teams-sole-focus-in-stadium-push

 

$8.8 billion is a valuation. You can make that argument that they should sell a chunk of the team at that valuation to get capital but how much money do you actually think the family has on hand? It's not $8 billion. 

17 hours ago, 77 Hitmen said:

 

The article only mentions that the Bears are waiting for a "megadevelopment" bill to pass in the fall legislative session that would freeze property tax assessments for big projects like this and would allow them to negotiate payments with local taxing bodies.  I don't see any mention of them asking for money for the stadium itself. 

And yes, @Kyyle23, I'd imagine that there would be a need for road and transit improvements for such a huge project and I don't see the infrastructure costs as being a roadblock to getting this project approved.  

Yeah the Bears aren't asking for any money for the actual stadium apparently. 

[southsider2k5]

4 minutes ago, Y2Jimmy0 said:

$8.8 billion is a valuation. You can make that argument that they should sell a chunk of the team at that valuation to get capital but how much money do you actually think the family has on hand? It's not $8 billion. 

Yeah the Bears aren't asking for any money for the actual stadium apparently. 

Do people not understand that?  I mean think of your house.  You can own a $300,000 house free and clear and have no cash at all.  It's an illiquid asset.  A baseball team is similar.   

[Kyyle23]

1 hour ago, Lip Man 1 said:

I agree it's common for other teams to get help.

My attitude is completely shaped by the fact that the owners of Chicago's sports teams are basically incompetent and concerned more about profit than winning. being jaded is very well founded based on the won/loss records over an extended period of time for the Sox, Bears, Bulls and Hawks.

Until that changes they'd not get a single solitary dime from me representing tax payers in the city/state.

Regarding the Fire, I'm not a soccer fan, couldn't care one iota what they do or don't do. 

Ok well if you want to be obtuse about it, that’s entirely up to you

[WBWSF]

2 hours ago, 77 Hitmen said:

So, if the Bears are serious about committing something like $2-3B in private funding to the development of a stadium and the rest of the Arlington Park property, you'll tell them to go f$#@ themselves when it comes to infrastructure improvements to the area?  What about the Fire building a privately-financed soccer stadium at the 78, should the city and state tell them to the same thing when it comes to infrastructure improvements to the site, which won't be cheap?  Same if Ishbia says he'd commit $1B in private money to a new Sox stadium there. 

In that case, what should be done with the Arlington Park land, just turn all that land it into a bunch of ugly suburban strip malls, Costcos, warehouses, and townhouses?  What about the 78, just let it sit vacant for another 50 years?

And I'm certainly no fan of the McCaskeys, but owning a team that is worth $8B doesn't mean they have $8B sitting around in the bank or some other liquid investments.

My biggest problem with the Bears deal is that the taxpayers are still on the hook for over $500M for the botched 2002 Soldier Field rebuild.  All that money for a stadium that quickly became functionally obsolete.  

The last I read is that it would take $900 million of Tif money for the infrastructure at the  78. I don't think that type of money makes sense for 20 soccer games a year. It needs a baseball stadium at that site also to justify that type of expense.

[nrockway]

11 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

Hard to have current pride in the White Sox after three years of historic losses and the much-ballyhooed rebuild totally imploding...meanwhile, Cubs for most of the season had one of the most exciting teams in baseball.

There's a lot of historic pride and historicity...but certainly not with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

Look at the attrition rate for Millenials that made up the majority of the board from let's say 2016 through today.

 

You're asking politicians to feel pride when they feel like the equivalent of abandoned Minnesota Twins' fans.

You're right, but whether or not people even like baseball, there's pride in the region and the team is a powerful symbol to represents it. There is no point in there being two teams in Chicago if it's "downtown" and "north side". Send the Sox packing at that point. Live in Illinois and root for the Dodgers and Yankees and Real Madrid.

I am asking/expecting the elected officials to have pride in themselves at the very least even if their constituents don't specifically care. We elect people because they're supposed to be thinking about this more than the regular joe, we have a republican government, we don't pass every policy by referendum. 

I don't expect everyone to have that same perspective as me on this, but everyone can see how stupid of a policy this was if the whole idea was to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the region only to remove a major revenue generator and move it north. We don't have any money, but elected officials all seem happy to just burn the little taxpayer money we have left for literally no gain.

[greg775]

12 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

Hard to have current pride in the White Sox after three years of historic losses and the much-ballyhooed rebuild totally imploding...meanwhile, Cubs for most of the season had one of the most exciting teams in baseball.

There's a lot of historic pride and historicity...but certainly not with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

Look at the attrition rate for Millenials that made up the majority of the board from let's say 2016 through today.

 

You're asking politicians to feel pride when they feel like the equivalent of abandoned Minnesota Twins' fans.

Also hard to have pride in Chicago itself. I won't get political but living out of state, trust me, the nation's opinion of Chicago's financial situation and mayor's plan to increase taxes on businesses and crime stats dominate what we're told about Chicago. If it's fake news, fine, but nobody is proving it's fake news. To the average out of state joe, Chicago is a mess and it'd be insane to not move to suburbia if you were a sports owner of any team but the Cubs and their museum (park).

[Lip Man 1]

3 hours ago, Kyyle23 said:

Ok well if you want to be obtuse about it, that’s entirely up to you

I think there needs to be a partnership between a franchise and a geographical area ESPECIALLY if that area is giving a LOT of money to millionaires and billionaires. 

These teams aren't just a business but a public trust (Eddie Einhorn himself wrote that in the prologue of Rich Lindberg's White Sox encyclopedia).

In return it's not unreasonable to expect the franchises to do the very best they can to put together a good organization and win.

Now that doesn't mean getting to the World Series or the Super Bowl and win it every year, it doesn't mean making the playoffs every year but it DAMN well means better than:

The White Sox having five winning seasons in the soon to be 19 years

or

The Bears having nine winning seasons in the last 33 years

Or is that too obtuse for you?

As far as the McCaskey's not having the money, fine, the team is valued at 8.8 billion, sell 50% for four billion there's your money friends and neighbors.

Someone would happily pay that to own half of an iconic franchise. 

 

 

[Kyyle23]

53 minutes ago, Lip Man 1 said:

I think there needs to be a partnership between a franchise and a geographical area ESPECIALLY if that area is giving a LOT of money to millionaires and billionaires. 

These teams aren't just a business but a public trust (Eddie Einhorn himself wrote that in the prologue of Rich Lindberg's White Sox encyclopedia).

In return it's not unreasonable to expect the franchises to do the very best they can to put together a good organization and win.

Now that doesn't mean getting to the World Series or the Super Bowl and win it every year, it doesn't mean making the playoffs every year but it DAMN well means better than:

The White Sox having five winning seasons in the soon to be 19 years

or

The Bears having nine winning seasons in the last 33 years

Or is that too obtuse for you?

As far as the McCaskey's not having the money, fine, the team is valued at 8.8 billion, sell 50% for four billion there's your money friends and neighbors.

Someone would happily pay that to own half of an iconic franchise. 

 

 

Yes, it is absolutely obtuse for you to be like “wow the bears want the city and state to upgrade the surrounding streets and trainstops for the increased business and traffic,  that is totally laughable because they haven’t won a lot of games but also are worth 8.8 billion dollars hahahaa they can f*** themselves they should pay for it themselves” 

it’s amazing that you interview all these people and write all these books and still can manage to not understand the process here.

 They just said they aren’t asking the state for money for the stadium, THAT WAS THE BIG DEAL FOR THE LAST YEAR,  THEY WANTED STATE MONEY FOR THE STADIUM.

 

[nrockway]

2 hours ago, greg775 said:

Also hard to have pride in Chicago itself. I won't get political but living out of state, trust me, the nation's opinion of Chicago's financial situation and mayor's plan to increase taxes on businesses and crime stats dominate what we're told about Chicago. If it's fake news, fine, but nobody is proving it's fake news. To the average out of state joe, Chicago is a mess and it'd be insane to not move to suburbia if you were a sports owner of any team but the Cubs and their museum (park).

It isn't fake news and your perspective is fair. I think people here hand-wave away the crime simply because 'murders' are down; well murders aren't the only crime. The CTA is a mess since COVID. You don't really want to be in the Loop after dark anymore. The schools are somehow getting worse. Cops are playing pranks on regular people and don't bother to follow the rules of the road. There's no accountability for anyone in a position of power, public or private. I'm skeptical about raising a family here...where would the kids go to school, I can't afford private school, and could they play outside after dark? If my kid is anything like me, he'll be too dumb for a magnet school. This is to say, I think we're at our worst period since I've been alive -- which is all the more reason to think about how the locals can improve this place. The North Side is in pretty good shape, development in the Loop is booming, but we need to improve the rest of the city. The only thing the City can think to do is open up a grocery story or a fast food joint and say they've "created jobs". They're minimum wage jobs that you can't support a family on. I'd probably sell drugs too if the only other option was to work at Chipotle. 

[southsider2k5]

1 minute ago, Kyyle23 said:

Yes, it is absolutely obtuse for you to be like “wow the bears want the city and state to upgrade the surrounding streets and trainstops for the increased business and traffic,  that is totally laughable because they haven’t won a lot of games but also are worth 8.8 billion dollars hahahaa they can f*** themselves they should pay for it themselves” 

it’s amazing that you interview all these people and write all these books and still can manage to not understand the process here.

 They just said they aren’t asking the state for money for the stadium, THAT WAS THE BIG DEAL FOR THE LAST YEAR,  THEY WANTED STATE MONEY FOR THE STADIUM.

 

There is A LOT of that happening.   I don't think people understand that so much economic development money is out there specifically for attracting and maintaining businesses.  Literally in any town of an OK size, there are redevelopment and economic growth boards which use these tax dollars as direct subsidies for business retention and recruitment.   There were companies lining up to pay Amazon to move.  NYC put a $3.5 BILLION dollar package to get the HQ2, in just TIF money.  That company is worth over a TRILLION in market cap.  

[Lip Man 1]

45 minutes ago, Kyyle23 said:

Yes, it is absolutely obtuse for you to be like “wow the bears want the city and state to upgrade the surrounding streets and trainstops for the increased business and traffic,  that is totally laughable because they haven’t won a lot of games but also are worth 8.8 billion dollars hahahaa they can f*** themselves they should pay for it themselves” 

it’s amazing that you interview all these people and write all these books and still can manage to not understand the process here.

 They just said they aren’t asking the state for money for the stadium, THAT WAS THE BIG DEAL FOR THE LAST YEAR,  THEY WANTED STATE MONEY FOR THE STADIUM.

 

It's just another way for the Bears to get something for nothing by asking the state/county/city to pay for all the upgrades and surrounding infrastructure isn't it? Great they aren't paying for the stadium construction per say but everyone else will pay for the roads, the sewers, the water, gas, electric that has to go around it. 

Sorry I'm being obtuse but they can pay for every single dime involving the stadium and surrounding upgrades if they want it completed. 

If not well, that's just to damn bad.

Like others have posted they already got a deal on a stadium upgrade that still hasn't been paid off. Now they want more (like JR) it never ends does it? 

[soxfan18]

22 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

That's a technicality. Bottom line a team worth over eight billion dollars which has been an NFL joke for decades is going to ask the state/city for infrastructure support for their project.

I'd tell them to go f#$% themselves.

You think it's the Bears job to widen 53?

You can't be this stupid. 

Edited August 10 by soxfan18

[Lip Man 1]

1 hour ago, soxfan18 said:

You think it's the Bears job to widen 53?

You can't be this stupid. 

I'm not. 

I think its criminally stupid for state/county/city to bail out and help billionaires.

The Bears and the Sox already got one stadium built on someone else's dime.

I ask again when does the BS stop?