Chicago TIF Districts: Cash Flows

What will you find here?

Tax Increment Financing (TIF) projects are often large and span multiple years. A TIF district is an area of Chicago in which a portion of property taxes from the district are reserved for redevelopment projects within the district. This dashboard shows how the cash flows of TIF funds have changed over time. Important definitions include the following:

Fund balance is defined as the sum of the end-of-year amount of debt obligations, surplus, and project costs.
Surplus is defined as excess money in the fund that must be redistributed to residents in taxing districts.
Net transfers are defined as the amount transferred in from other TIF funds minus the amount transferred out to other TIF funds.
Total revenue is defined as the actual amounts received into TIF funds.

Some questions that can be answered using data in the dashboard include:

How much money was spent on TIF public works projects in 2021?
How do the cash flow on fund balances compare between Jefferson Park and Portage Park?
How has the fund balance changed for all TIF districts since 2017?

Data sources

This dashboard pulls data from the Chicago Data Portal. The Data Portal provides a dataset covering all TIF districts from 2017 and later. Details about how this dataset is used in the dashboard can be found here. Data for earlier years can be found in Annual Reports for individual TIF districts, but not in a compiled dataset. Only data from the compiled dataset covering 2017 and later are displayed here. Data on TIF districts is reported and updated on an annual basis. When a TIF district has no data for a year, it means the TIF district either ended before or began after that year. Information about individual TIF districts includes their designation years and expiration years.