Adam Doster has a piece in The American Prospect lamenting the undeniable fact that Rahm Emanuel’s legal troubles have distracted Chicago from pressing problems. Doster observes that the city’s fabled success has been limited in scope:

The second Daley administration gave new energy to Chicago’s business district and adjacent neighborhoods, but wide chunks of the city missed out on that wave of growth. With a budget deep in the red despite several controversial asset sales, the city’s recycling program in shambles, and major investments still needed in transit and other infrastructure, the time is ripe for a visionary leader to make his or her mark.

And he ends with the following:

Under Daley’s dictatorial watch, big businesses have sucked up expensive taxpayer subsidies, Chicago’s budget was blown to smithereens, and city officials largely failed to ignite sustainable growth or protect the most vulnerable in struggling neighborhoods. Progressives dying for a spirited debate about how to shape the future of their city, however, are left with a flawed field unwilling to grapple honestly with these pressing concerns. It’s a giant missed opportunity, and one that may not present itself again for a long while.

As a veteran of Progress Illinois, a highly informative labor-backed website that used to be run by the talented Josh Kalven, I know that Doster is aware of another pressing problem facing Chicago, which Steven Malanga, drawing on a study by by finance professors Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School and Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester, described in vivid detail last fall:

The city with the highest per household unfunded liability in the nation is Chicago, $41,966 per household, or $45 billion in total obligations. Illinois, meanwhile, is the state with among the most troubled pension systems, with about $285 billion in unfunded liabilities. “Even if all other spending was shut down, the city of Chicago would need to allocate about eight years of dedicated tax revenues to cover pension promises it has already made,” the study by Rauh and Novy-Marx estimates. Meanwhile, Illinois’ pension obligations amount to seven times annual state tax collections.

I fear that no amount of visionary progressive leadership will make these pension obligations vanish. Big businesses did indeed collect lots of subsidies under Mayor Daley, but it’s not clear to me that big businesses are responsible for the fact that Chicago’s budget was blown to smithereens. As a non-expert, my guess is that Mayor Daley did what big-city mayors have done across the country: he focused excessively on the urban core rather than on improving intraregional mobility, school quality, and the cost-effectiveness of public services, and he secured political near-invulnerability by pacifying an expanding public workforce with generous fringe benefits, including large defined benefit pensions.

Fortunately, Chicago has an advantage that many other U.S. cities don’t: Mayor Daley did facilitate a building boom in the city, which has made it somewhat easier for property-owning middle and upper-middle-class families to remain within the city limits, though the public schools have remained a deterrent. The city has strong fundamentals.