Springfield Mayor Misty Buscher wants to promote the city’s operations coordinator for state and federal grants to head the Office of Planning and Economic Development. Buscher told Illinois Times on Dec. 10 that she will ask the City Council to approve Amy Rasing to succeed the retiring Val Yazell as director of the office. The […]
economic development
Posted inOpinion
The case for a new open door policy
In “Three strikes and you’re in,” I endorsed the idea that what Springfield needs to make its economy perk is the entrepreneurial energy and enterprise that immigrants supply. Catherine Rampell of the new York Times has more from a 2012 report commissioned by the Small Business Administration. According to Robert W. Fairlie, an economics professor at the University of California, […]
Posted inOpinion
New Beijings
I have often lamented here the continuing decline in the population of Illinois’ rural parts. (See “Devoid of life,” July 14, 2011.) Like a great many readers, I have roots in central Illinois that go deep. My interest in the central question – if the present population cannot support itself on the countryside, how might […]
Posted inOpinion
Living too high off the hog
Springfield has become to sick people what Decatur is to soybeans, a major regional processing center in which raw materials are processed by the latest in high-tech machinery into novel products such as tennis-playing octogenarians and bankers with a 60-year-old’s bank account and a 30-year-old’s heart. According to published reports, this year the local medico-insurance […]
Posted inOpinion
Cheap house on the prairie
Each year for nearly 20 years now, the National Association of Home Builders and the Wells Fargo Bank have boiled down national real estate data into an easy-to-digest housing affordability index. Local housing markets are judged “affordable” according to how many families earning the national median income of $64,400 can buy an average-priced house. By […]
Posted inNews
Plan calls for 100 new affordable homes
The City of Springfield plans to build and rehabilitate hundreds of homes as part of a strategy to end homelessness within two years. The city’s 2010-2014 Consolidated Plan, created by the city’s Department of Opportunity, Planning and Economic Development (OPED), lays out plans to improve affordable housing, economic development, infrastructure and public services using millions […]
