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RSSFebruary 15, 2011
Economic Club Of Chicago Speech
Mayor's Press Office 312.744.3334
REMARKS BY MAYOR RICHARD M. DALEY
ECONOMIC CLUB OF CHICAGO
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Good evening.
It’s always a pleasure to appear at the Economic Club of Chicago.
I come before you at a time when the struggling world, national, state and local economies present a great challenge for cities everywhere.
But that kind of challenge is nothing new to Chicago. Let me read something to you from the Chicago Tribune in 1981. The series was called “City on the Brink”.
The first story in the series began:
“The City of Chicago has become an economic invalid. The condition may be permanent—unless the people responsible for its economic future can reverse the long, steady, and seemingly endless slide. Chicago is losing the industry that was its original reason for existing and has found nothing to replace it. Often, cities stricken in this way become irrelevant. Business moves away. So do the best young people. The population ages. The city becomes a backwater.”[1]
That’s not what happened.
Metropolitan areas around the world are more important than ever before.
It is simply not possible to survive, let alone thrive, in the 21st Century without being closely linked—physically linked—to all the complex pieces of a modern economy.
Metropolitan areas bring together the ingredients for economic success: ideas, infrastructure, culture, capital, educational opportunities, and a diverse pool of talented people.
Ford, for example, will use those ingredients differently than Groupon. Our job as civic leaders is to make the ingredients available and let firms build their own successful recipes.
The Chicago region is alive and thriving. And the city of Chicago is the heart of that region.
We have become a successful, 21st Century global city.
Of course, our capacity to reinvent ourselves is nothing new. Through almost 200 years of history, the characteristic that I believe has come to define our city has been its ability to rebound, to adapt, to evolve.
Here’s what Mark Twain wrote about Chicago in 1883:
“It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago -- she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”
Chicago is a great city today because we’ve had leaders of vision. But vision alone is not enough.
In Chicago, we don’t just dream, we do.
- Rebuilding our city after the Great Fire of 1871.
- Becoming the nation’s railroad center and then its aviation center.
- Creating from nothing the magical world of the Columbian Exposition in 1893.
- Inventing the skyscraper.
- Surviving the Great Depression, and coming out stronger than before.
- Evolving from one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the world to one that’s also a center of innovation, technology and international commerce in both manufactured goods and services.
Chicago has made great progress because we’ve addressed our problems head-on in a way that is pretty basic: if something doesn’t work, try something new. We see problems and we fix them.
I come before you tonight to share four basic thoughts about where Chicago is today, and where we need to go.
The first point is arguably the most important: I want to thank the people in this room for providing our city’s business and civic backbone.
I strongly believe that much of the progress we have made in Chicago over the years has been made possible by a business community that is fully engaged in our goal of improving the quality of life for every resident of our City.
Other cities have public-private collaborations, but none has anything as broad and deep as the partnerships we have developed here.
The perfect example of that is the Civic Consulting Alliance, which has given many years of service to the City of Chicago and other units of local government in the Chicago area.
The residents of the area may not realize it, but their local governments are more effective as a result of the work of the Civic Consulting Alliance, which has worked with us to help us make city government more streamlined and more efficient.
And I want to thank them for their commitment and their hard work.
That kind of relationship doesn’t develop automatically. It has to be nurtured by a spirit of trust and collaboration.
What business needs is a government that’s willing to work with business for the good of all the people of the city.
Government doesn’t control the economy directly. There is no knob that I can turn to create jobs and prosperity—or if there is, I haven’t found it yet.
What government can do is provide an environment in which the private sector thrives.
That is what will create jobs and prosperity for the next generation of citizens in our region.
You need only look at our successes recently in gaining business investment and expansion to appreciate that we are on the right track with our strategy.
In the past two years, major national and international companies chose Chicago for their corporate headquarters or expanded their presence, including Willis, Ford, MillerCoors, United, Whirlpool, Crate and Barrel, Infinium Capital Management and Veolia Environment – which is the world’s largest environmental services company.
Overall, World Business Chicago has identified 232 major commercial and industrial expansions that were announced, under development or completed in our region in 2010.
World Business Chicago has been crucial to spreading the word that our city is a great place to live and do business.
We have forged relationships with the great global businesses of our region –Boeing and Caterpillar, for example – because what benefits the region benefits us.
Businesses succeed in our region because we can provide them with a strong and vibrant talent pool from world class universities, a central location with easy access to the world, and an outstanding quality of life.
And that brings me to my second issue: What makes a city work in the 21st Century? What should we be striving to do as a modern metropolitan region?
The answer is that we must create and attract the ingredients for economic success.
Many of those ingredients—global capital, talented professionals, aspiring entrepreneurs—can go anywhere.
We must do things that make them want to be here.
Of course, the single most important issue we deal with is education.
That is how we make every resident of Chicago more productive in the long run.
And that is how we attract and retain the kind of talented professionals who will only live in a place with great educational choices.
Soon after becoming Mayor, I was faced with a Chicago Public Schools system that was broken, and I was the first mayor in the country to ask the state government to give me the responsibility for fixing it. Believe me, they were only too happy to give it to me!
We’ve abandoned the one-size-fits-all model and created targeted schools that focus on specific academic areas, like world languages and math and science.
For example, we offer World Language Programs in 11 languages with 100,000 students participating at 336 schools around the city.
Those programs include Chinese, Russian and Arabic—languages spoken by billions of people.
You can debate what our next steps should be, but no one can ignore that we've put our schools on the right track.
And I want to thank our business and philanthropic community for their support of the charter school option in our City.
The choice that charter schools provide elevates educational standards and accountability in every neighborhood of Chicago.
But a successful city is also a place where people want to live, work and visit.
We have undertaken hundreds of initiatives aimed at making Chicago the most environmentally friendly city in the nation. At every point, we have used government to lead by example. The first green roof was on City Hall!
And at every point, we have advanced our environmental strategy in partnership with the private sector.
The result is a collaboration that makes good business sense, not a set of rigid regulations raining down from above.
Let me give you just a few examples of things we have done here over the years to improve the natural environment and make people’s lives better:
- Working with leaders from business and the not-for- profit sectors, state and local government officials and residents, we created the Chicago Climate Action Plan, a comprehensive and detailed strategy to help lower greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change.
- Our Green Homes program is for builders and developers who are constructing new residential units in Chicago or renovating existing units. It gives points to builders for every sustainable technique and material used in the construction of a new home or residential building and can qualify the projects for expedited permitting.
- Even now, in the middle of this economic downturn, Chicago is using every available tool to improve the environment. For example, we used the funds from the federal stimulus program to create approximately 650 green jobs for formerly-incarcerated persons to do such things as:
- Deconstructing City-owned buildings and preparing the deconstructed materials for re-use.
- Planting trees and landscaping.
- Offering green job training and work experience in the growing fields of locally grown organic agriculture, hand-made sustainable products and recycling services, and more.
We continue to monitor our policies and gather feedback from businesses so that we stay at the cutting edge of what it means to be a modern green city.
And our business community is stepping up in the environmental area, as well.
For example, A. Finkl and Sons, the mid-sized steel company that has been in business on the North Side since 1902, is deeply committed to tree-planting and re-forestation. It has created the “Forging a Fresher America” program to plant 6 million trees in protected forests in Wisconsin and Illinois.
Finkl is also building a new state-of-the art and environmentally-friendly manufacturing plant on the South Side that will create new opportunity for residents in the Burnside, Calumet Heights and Pullman communities.
The bottom line is this:
Environmentalism makes economic sense. When a city exists in harmony with its environment, it looks better and feels better. And it’s a place where talented people who can go anywhere will choose to live.
That said, the 21st Century is not different from the 20th Century in one important respect. We still must build and maintain infrastructure that works.
One hundred years ago that meant ensuring that coal barges could arrive at steel plants. Today it means making sure that a 787 Dreamliner can get from Chicago to Shanghai without delay.
But it’s the same basic idea. We have to move people. We have to move goods. We have to move information.
There is another way to think about all this. Suppose five years ago I had convened a meeting of the 50 smartest people in this room—you know who you are.
And suppose I had asked this group to come up with a strategy for making sure that Groupon was founded in Chicago—that’s 3,000 jobs, and probably a lot more to come.
Of course, that would have been an impossible assignment, since no one had ever heard of Groupon five years ago. How can you attract something that you can’t even imagine?
But I’ve just told you the answer: Build a city where something like Groupon can happen: great universities, safe streets, good schools, state-of-the-art digital infrastructure, and a quality of life that will attract people who can do things that the rest of us can’t even imagine--not even the 50 smartest people in this room.
Once that idea was imagined, then the city supported it. And I’m proud of that.
World Business Chicago assisted Groupon in receiving a state tax credit that helped the company expand.
And the City invested $28 million in tax increment financing funding to help redevelop the former Montgomery Ward catalogue house at 600 West Chicago Avenue into a mixed-use development.
That building has been a great success and Groupon is one of its many visionary tenants who are identifying opportunities and taking risks to develop new processes, design new products and open new markets.
It is a thriving example of how government can support the technology industry in a way that improves the quality of life for every resident of Chicago.
Chicago has become more than just the “city that works”, which brings me to the third thing I want to discuss this evening: Chicago’s role as a global city.
The people in this room recognize that the economic future of our cities depends on our willingness and ability to seek opportunities in the Americas, in Asia, in Europe, in Africa and around the world.
I suspect that some of you will be up late tonight making phone calls to other continents.
Right now it’s just after 7:00 a.m. in India, as many of you have probably come to know.
Since I became Mayor, Chicago has evolved from a regional and national economic center into a city that has taken a prominent place as a leader in the global economy.
Standard & Poor’s now ranks Chicago among the world’s Top 10 Economic Centers.
Last summer, Foreign Policy Magazine ranked Chicago Number Six among global cities worldwide, behind only New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong.
That ranking was based on how much influence a city can have beyond its own borders and its ability to manage the global recession.
We no longer compete just with other cities in the United States. We compete with cities all over the world for jobs, for business, for tourism, and for residents.
We also collaborate with firms, governments, and universities around the world.
We send our children to study in Europe and Asia and South America, and we attract students from those same places.
Chicago businesses depend on inputs from China, India and Brazil.
That’s where we sell our products, too.
The future well-being of cities like Chicago depends to a large degree on how we plan for and deal with that global interconnection.
For example, I support the long-delayed free trade agreement with Colombia and the trade agreement with South Korea that the President will soon submit to Congress.
Of course, the point is not to become a global city for the sake of becoming a global city – as if it were some kind of award that you win, or a t-shirt that you get when the rankings come out.
The point is to use our growing global prominence to continuously create new jobs and opportunities for our businesses and residents.
Ironically, Chicago has earned its place on the global stage because we work so effectively as a region, rather than by pitting the city against the suburbs, or by allowing politics to divide us.
In 1997 I organized the Metropolitan Mayors’ Caucus here in the Chicago area—a partnership of 273 municipalities that now serves as a model for other regions.
Chicago has also gained economic status by operating as the capital of the American Midwest.
Along those lines, I recently met with officials of American and United airlines in an attempt to come to an agreement about moving ahead with the O’Hare Modernization Program.
O’Hare is our connection to the rest of the world.
Its efficient operation is essential to our ability to compete in the global economy and to make Chicago the kind of place where people want to live, work and raise a family.
We need to complete that project, and we also need greater support from the federal and state governments for public transportation.
Think about the transportation evolution that I described at the beginning of this speech: ships, then trains, then planes.
Chicago has prospered for 200 years by anticipating the nation’s transportation needs and then getting their first.
Of course, our waterways still matter enormously. Lake Michigan is one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world.
The 20th Century may have been about oil; the 21st Century is going to be about water.
I organized the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative to bring local leaders in the U.S. and Canada together to work toward protecting those environmentally and economically valuable waterways.
Do you remember that “City on the Brink” story from 1981 that I mentioned at the outset?
The story quoted a professor of urban sciences who said, “I see very little hope for locating economic activities here again.”
The story also quoted the British magazine The Economist, which had called the Loop “a façade of downtown prosperity”.
They said we were done. Chicago’s obituary was written. It was just a matter of waiting for the last gasp.
Well we’re not done. Our city didn’t die.
To the contrary, The Economist magazine came back in 2006—exactly 25 years after those dire stories were written—to do a special report on Chicago that pronounced us very much alive.
That story began, “Appearances often deceive, but, in one respect at least, the visitor's first impression of Chicago is likely to be correct: this is a city buzzing with life, humming with prosperity, sparkling with new buildings, new sculptures, new parks, and generally exuding (eck-ZOOD-ing) vitality.”[2]
We took those scary stories 30 years ago and literally rewrote the ending.
We did that by creating a vision for what kind of city Chicago could become and then working relentlessly to get there.
Obviously we still face challenges, so let me conclude by discussing briefly the major issues that I believe future mayors will confront.
The hardest challenge, obviously, is fiscal. As all of you know, we are finally emerging from the most serious economic disruption since the Great Depression.
FUTURE MAYORS cannot tax their way back to fiscal good health, for many of the reasons that I’ve discussed tonight.
Talented people can live anywhere.
Capital can move anywhere. Businesses can move across the border, to another county, another state, or another country.
We have to have a competitive tax and regulatory environment.
The State of Illinois has just made that harder with the income tax hike.
We don’t have to have the lowest taxes, because then we can’t provide the services and quality of life that are so important in the 21st Century.
We will have to focus on something that you don’t hear associated often with government: value.
What can we deliver to taxpayers in terms of services and infrastructure relative to what they are paying?
And not just current taxpayers, but future taxpayers, too. We can’t make today’s budgets work by leaving the bills for tomorrow.
Good value for the taxpayer is what will win the day in a globally competitive environment.
To do that, we are going to have to continue thinking about government differently.
We’ll need to partner with the private sector. We’ll have to examine what services really have to be done by government.
We’ll have to look at every government service and every employee to make sure they are operating as productively as possible.
None of this should sound unfamiliar.
It’s what most private sector firms have been doing for decades in order to stay competitive.
FUTURE MAYORS must continue to focus relentlessly on the middle class.
Cities will always be places where our most disadvantaged populations try to get by, because they are the easiest places to find affordable housing, or to get around on public transportation. That’s one benefit of density.
And cities will always be a very comfortable place for those who are well off -- because cities are home to the world’s finest stores, restaurants, and culture. That’s a benefit of density, too.
But no city can be truly healthy without being an attractive place for everyone along the economic spectrum.
Are we moving our most disadvantaged residents into the middle class? And can families already in the middle class—and therefore with lots of other options—comfortably and happily call the City of Chicago home?
This has been my most important priority for our city.
FUTURE MAYORS must remember that Chicago is part of a vibrant region. A prosperous firm in Glenview or Oakbrook makes for a stronger Chicago.
At the same time, the region can’t prosper in the long run without a healthy Chicago at the core.
FUTURE MAYORS must keep the trains running on time—and the planes at O’Hare, and the cars on the Kennedy, and the CTA buses.
Even in tough fiscal times, we have to invest in the tracks on which the private sector runs, literally and figuratively.
And also, we must invest in our global economic future.
Last month, as you know, President Hu Jintao (HOO jin-TOWEL) of China visited Chicago.
One of the local papers called it a “coup” that Chicago was the only stop the President made in the United States besides Washington, D.C.
And we were honored that he came here. The question is: Why did he come here?
His visit was the result -- in part – of the very hard work we have done in recent years to build cultural and economic connections between Chicago and China.
- Chicago has enjoyed Sister City relationships with Shanghai and Shenyang for more than 25 years.
- We have hosted each other’s visitors, exchanged art and music and shared business ideas, technology and medical expertise.
- I’ve traveled to China more than once over the past six years and I’ve met with business and civic leaders as well as government officials.
In many ways, President Hu’s visit to Chicago sums up everything that I’ve discussed tonight.
We took him to Walter Payton College Prep High School, where he met some of the thousands of Chicago Public School students who are studying Chinese language and culture.
At Walter Payton globalization, innovation and technology all are important parts of the approach to teaching and learning.
President Hu came to Chicago because our city is perceived as the most China-friendly city in the nation and a crucial gateway to the robust and diverse economy of the American Midwest.
President Hu came to Chicago because of our pro-business outlook, which is something we have maintained in Chicago since I have been Mayor.
In short, President Hu came to Chicago because of all that we have achieved in the past—and because of our promising economic future.
Thank you very much for your invitation this evening.
And thank you for working with me over the last two decades to build this great city and region.
It has been an honor to serve you as the 45th Mayor of the City of Chicago.
# # #
[1] RC Longworth. “Chicago: City on the Brink,” Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1981.
[2] “A Survey of Chicago: A Success Story,” March 16, 2006.
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