Mayor Brandon Johnson’s choice to lead the Chicago Department of Planning and Development vowed Tuesday to get “more shovels in the ground and more ribbons cut,” even though “interest rates are high, capital is constrained and development is hard.”
Testifying at her City Council confirmation hearing, Ciere Boatright said she is determined to use tax increment financing, the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund and what she called the “entire financial toolbox” to remove roadblocks she encountered as a real estate executive known for her work on community revival.
“When you see challenges that you haven’t seen in a very long time, you’ve got to implement tools and strategies that maybe haven’t been explored before. ... We’ve got to move development faster. Development is hard right now. Time is money with development. Deals that penciled six months ago — they don’t pencil now,” Boatright said.
“I’ve experienced … frustrations working with” the Department of Planning and Development, so “I’m uniquely positioned to remove some of those barriers,” Boatright added. “We can’t have a disconnect with what’s happening with the affordable housing market, industrial market, neighborhood retail and our big-box retail because it’s all very different.”
Spurning the top-down, design-dominated approach favored by her predecessor Maurice Cox, Boatright described her new job as “very much a partnership and collaboration” with City Council members. She’s already met with 30 of the 50, and promised to spend more time in the neighborhoods. She says she will require her regional planners to do the same.
“A lot of our neighborhoods lack retail — amenities that other neighborhoods take for granted,” Boatright said. “And as a real estate developer, I know that retail follows rooftops. And so, in addition to thinking about how you bring retail to the neighborhoods, we also have to think holistically about how we can repopulate our neighborhoods and how that repopulation then supports the retail and all the other amenities.”
Pressed to identify the department’s “biggest challenge,” Boatright talked instead about the “opportunity” presented by the huge inventory of vacant city land.
“We’ve got retail leakage,” Boatright said. “That’s money leaving our neighborhoods because we don’t have the goods and services in our community. We’ve got to capture that leakage. But we need the households. We need the rooftops to ensure that our neighborhood retail can thrive.”
There also are new challenges downtown.
“We’ve got vacancies. We’ve got office buildings that have been vacant for some time. That requires us to use strategies that we’ve never used before and think creatively and leverage every tool in the toolbox.”
Boatright’s promise to work “in partnership and collaboration” with Council members was music to the ears of alderpersons who chafed at Cox’s top-down approach.
Boatright has been acting planning commissioner since mid-November. The Committee on Economic, Capital and Technology Development Tuesday sent her nomination to the Council, which is expected to vote on her confirmation later this month.
Ald. Anthony Beale (9th) worked with Boatright on the 2,000-job, $2 billion Pullman renaissance she helped spearhead at Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives.
Her “energy, knowledge and get-things-done attitude took that organization to another level,” Beale said, praising the mayor he routinely criticizes for the “wonderful appointment.”
“It’s breathtaking to hear that we’re working with the aldermen and listening to the aldermen vs. what we had in the past,” Beale said. “The first meeting I had with the former commissioner, he was telling me what he wanted to bring to the community. And everything that I said my community needs — he dismissed it.”
A former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, Cox was lured to Chicago from Detroit by then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot to spearhead her Invest South/West initiative.
He quickly butted heads with Council members and ran into trouble with developers for creating a Committee on Design with the potential to slow down projects and increase costs.
“It’s taken a long time to get deals done,” Economic Development Chair Gilbert Villegas (36th) said Tuesday. “We’ve got to change that narrative.”
