After 37 years of teaching legal ethics and representing residential tenants in rental disputes with their landlords, Ann Juergens has now found herself pivoting toward courting commercial property investors, even those without particularly deep pockets.

Juergens, the board chair of the fledgling Taproot Investment Cooperative, is working with a growing number of St. Paul-area residents interested in becoming shareholders — investor-owners, if you will — in storied St. Paul buildings as they change hands.

Their first order of business: raising $200,000 to $300,000 from co-op members toward preservation-oriented improvements at a century-old red brick school house — the Baker Court office building off Raymond Avenue and Territorial Road, which was recently purchased by two co-op members.

Taproot, a member-driven commercial real estate cooperative, formed about a year ago out of a real estate committee associated with the Creative Enterprise Zone, the community-led investment district surrounding Raymond and University avenues.

Baker Court opportunity

An effort to position Taproot as community investors in the PriorWorks/American Can Company building on Prior Avenue fell through last year, but a new opportunity has presented itself. The cooperative recently learned that three-story Baker Court was up for sale by its longstanding owners, who were aging out of the property after 40 years. To some chagrin, real estate brochures had been hawking the site as a prime location for a residential high-rise.

“They had marketed it with a 133-unit building on the site,” said Renee Spillum, a Taproot member and commercial real estate broker on the Baker Court sale, which drew serious inquiry from several different corners. “I think it was definitely possible that the building would have been torn down.”

The prospect of losing what had been the oldest school building in the city’s St. Anthony Park neighborhood concerned Juergens and like-minded community members. They noted that the building, which dates to 1909, is home to at least 35 small businesses, many of them dedicated to family counseling, psychotherapy and homeopathic medicine, as well as some architects and legal offices.

A sizable adjoining parking lot could yet be converted into housing down the line without demolition, Juergens said.

“We believe in more density. We believe in more housing. But we also believe in some historic preservation, though the building has no historic protections,” said Juergens on Tuesday. “It has a very good use right now. There are lots of therapists in there right now. They’re leading people to new approaches to family conflict. It’s a good incubator to mental health.”

A $4 million purchase

In October, Mark Simonson and Pat Thompson, who live near Baker Court, formed Red Stone Corner LLC, which purchased the Baker Court building on Feb. 22 for $4 million. Their goal is to preserve Baker Court, largely as is.

“It’s obviously such a long-time, beloved building in the neighborhood,” said Thompson on Tuesday, noting the previous owners completed a major renovation in the 1980s. “It’s just been an asset since the whole time they did that. It’s not declared historic, but obviously it is historic. I’ve been working for years on the idea of local investing in your community. It just made sense to put my money where my mouth was.”

Thompson, who is also a member of the Taproot cooperative, said the building needs a new roof and cooling tower, and may be a candidate for solar panels and bathroom updates. Those improvements could be supported by a major loan from Taproot that would function as a second mortgage of sorts. Juergens said the initial goal was to raise about $200,000 from Taproot’s members, under the expectation they’ll earn back some 3% to 4% on their investment shares.

That’s at least a full percentage point below the expected return on investment for market-driven commercial lending, but response has been swift nonetheless. With about that much already raised from 21 members since the building sale went through, Taproot has increased the goal to $300,000.

“There’s so many people with IRAs and retirement accounts, and they don’t necessarily want to invest in pharmaceutical drugs or oil,” Juergens said. “So invest in your community. If Baker Court was torn down, that would affect you. … We have a good board with local residents.”

‘Who is going to buy it?’

It costs $1,000 to become a member of the cooperative, and each member is entitled to one vote on electing board officers and other major decisions, regardless of the numbers of shares they buy in commercial investment opportunities like Baker Court as they become available. A investment share costs $1,000, as well.

That’s a bit of a departure from other investing models, and it’s by design. The cooperative’s annual meeting is scheduled for April, and only Minnesotans are allowed at the table, also by design.

“My generation is aging out,” Juergens said. “People are divesting (from their commercial properties). As we’re divesting, who is going to buy it — California capital? Out-of-state pension funds? … Taproot is preserving a sense of place and local control.”

Spillum, the commercial broker, said she remains involved in the property as an asset manager while the building owners explore developing part of an underused parking lot on the site into housing in scale with the existing structure, as opposed to a 133-unit high rise.

“This was a very smooth process overall,” Spillum said. “They have had a long-time property manager who has been at the building for over 20 years, and he’s staying.”

More information is online at taprootinvestment.com.

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On Wednesday, a day before he delivered a rousing State of the Union address, Joe Biden issued an invitation to the roughly 30% of Republican primary voters who had voted for Nikki Haley in the GOP presidential primaries before she dropped out. The message was simple: Donald Trump doesn’t want you, but we do. After all, Trump said on Truth Social that anyone who made a “contribution” to Haley would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.” Biden, by contrast, acknowledged differences of opinion with Haley voters but argued that agreement on democracy, decency, the rule of law and support for NATO should unite Haley voters against Trump.

Is Biden correct? Is there an argument that could persuade a meaningful number of Haley conservatives to vote for Biden?

In ordinary times the answer would be no. It still may be no. Negative polarization is the dominant fact of American political life. Asking a person to change political teams is like asking him or her to disrupt friendships and family relationships, to move from the beloved “us” to the hated “them.”

They’re going to do it only as a last resort, when they truly understand and feel the same way about the Republican Party that Ronald Reagan felt when he departed the Democratic Party: He didn’t leave the party. The party left him.

Now, however, it’s the GOP that is sprinting away from Reagan — and from Haley Republicans — as fast as MAGA can carry it. The right is not just mad at Republican dissenters for defying Trump; it has such profound policy disagreements with Reagan and Haley Republicans that it’s hard to imagine the two factions coexisting for much longer. Given the power imbalance in a Trump GOP, that means that for the foreseeable future traditional conservatives will face a choice: conform or leave.

It’s likely that most people will conform. But they ought to leave. If a political party is a shared enterprise for advancing policies and ideas with the hope of achieving concrete outcomes, then there are key ways in which a second Biden term would be a better fit for Reagan Republicans than Round 2 of Trump.

Take national security. Even apart from his self-evident disregard for democracy, Trump’s weakness in the Ukraine conflict and his hostility to American alliances may represent the most dangerous aspects of a second term, with potential world-historic consequences similar to those of American isolationism before World War II.

Biden’s continuing support for NATO, by contrast, has made the United States stronger. The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has added their potent militaries to the Western alliance. The strategic Baltic Sea is now a “NATO lake.” Biden was smart to start his State of the Union address by contrasting Reagan’s demand to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall with Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries who “don’t pay.”

There is no fiscal conservative in the race.

Trump had a higher deficit each successive year he was in office, for example. But Biden’s economic stewardship has been sound. Inflation is easing, the stock market has reached record highs, unemployment is below 4%, and the median net worth of the American family increased by 37% between 2019 and 2022, even controlling for inflation.

The record is even better in a global context. To the extent the United States has struggled, we’ve struggled less than our peer competitors. Last year, The Economist published a comprehensive economic analysis demonstrating that “on a whole range of measures American dominance remains striking. And relative to its rich-world peers its lead is increasing.”

Let’s also look at the rule of law.

Trump took office promising to end “American carnage,” but it skyrocketed on his watch. Between 2019 and 2020, America experienced the “largest single-year increase” in the murder rate in “more than a century.” Under Biden, by contrast, in 2023, “The number of murders in U.S. cities fell by more than 12%,” a number that would represent “the biggest national decline on record,” as my colleague German Lopez reported earlier this year. Violent crime “is near its lowest level in 50 years.”

Moreover, the Biden administration didn’t defund the police, but MAGA might. On Wednesday, the House speaker Mike Johnson promised to “cut 3% from DOJ, 7% from the ATF, 6% from the FBI, and 10% from the EPA,” and, he said, “that’s just a start.” He claims that these cuts are due to federal “overreach,” but that’s also the justification for left-wing defunding efforts. MAGA likewise believes that law enforcement has abused its authority.

The most fraught issue for many conservatives considering crossing the aisle is abortion. That’s certainly the most difficult issue for me.

But while Trump nominated the justices who helped reverse Roe v. Wade, he also failed on the most important metric of all: the number of abortions performed in America.

Although Barack Obama was very much a pro-choice president, the abortion rate decreased by a remarkable 28% during his two terms, with 338,270 fewer abortions performed in 2016 than in 2008.

By contrast, there were 56,080 more abortions by the end of Trump’s presidency in 2020 than there had been in 2016, and the abortion rate rose for three consecutive years, in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Compounding the problem for anti-abortion conservatives, the MAGA-dominated GOP has been an electoral disaster. The anti-abortion position is failing even in red states. The MAGA ethos of corruption and cruelty is a poor fit for a movement that’s supposed to be dedicated to loving the most vulnerable among us.

I raise these issues not to argue that Reagan Republicans have a true home in a Biden-led Democratic Party. Of course profound differences remain, and the far left may prove implacably hostile to any conservatives in the Democratic tent.

But Reagan (and Haley) Republicans also have such profound differences with MAGA that it is genuinely debatable which party now better advances their preferred policies.

But here’s what’s not debatable: While the ideological alignments of the two parties are in a state of flux, only one party is nominating a man who’s been impeached twice, indicted in four criminal cases, found liable for systemic financial fraud, and found liable for sexual abuse and for defaming his victim. He is a man who inspired and gave at least tacit support to a violent assault on the Capitol in an effort to overturn an American election.

It’s plain, however, that the corruption argument alone isn’t pulling sufficient numbers from Trump. Reagan conservatives don’t just need reasons to vote against Trump. They also plainly need reasons to vote for Joe Biden. In 2024, we have two presidential records to compare. And this time it’s the Democrat who can say that he’s tougher on Russia and better on crime, and overseeing an economy that’s the envy of the world. That’s a case for conservatives. The question is whether it’s a case they’re willing to hear.

David French writes a column for the New York Times.

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The Chicago Bears and local schools are $100 million apart on the property tax valuations of the former Arlington International Racecourse, where the team wants to build an enclosed stadium.

The huge gap means that the two sides are likely to have difficulty reaching a compromise on the value and further complicates the team’s plan to move to Arlington Heights.

The ongoing issue came up Tuesday during a meeting of the Cook County Board of (Tax) Review.

The Bears presented two appraisals of the 326-acre property, for $60 million and $71 million, board of review officials said. The key to the Bears’ appraisal was categorizing the property as vacant residential land, which gets taxed at 10% of market value.

The local school districts have had the land valued at $160 million.

The Palatine Community Consolidated School District 15 appraisal classified the land for commercial use, which puts it into a 25% tax bracket.

In a tri-yearly assessment in 2023, Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi raised the appraised value from $33 million to almost equal to the $197 million the Bears paid for the land last year.

District 15, Arlington Heights-based Township High School District 214, and Palatine-based Township High School District 211, reached an agreement last year with the former owner, Churchill Downs Inc., to value the site at $8 million.

But Churchill Downs, which closed the racetrack to concentrate more on casinos, was eager to be rid of the property, and had to negotiate just one year’s valuation. The Bears are looking at a process that could set a baseline for the tax value for the property for years to come.

To lower the value of the site, the Bears demolished the racetrack last year to turn it into vacant land. But Kaegi then significantly increased the value of the land, which typically stays fairly stable.

“There’s no documentation or justification for such a substantial increase,” Cook County Board of (Tax) Review Chairwoman Samantha Steele said. “My concern is not that it’s the Bears or Arlington Park, it’s that each taxpayer needs to be treated fairly and make a prediction of what the tax bill will look like.

“They both have compelling arguments,” Steele said. “It’s in both parties best interests to come together. It’s like two children arguing, you want to figure it out before you go to Mom and she takes (the decision) away.”

Board Commissioner Larry Rogers, Jr. also was critical of the assessor’s valuation, forming a potential vote in the Bears’ favor.

If the two sides can’t agree, the three-member board of review will make its own determination by the end of February.

rmccoppin@chicagotribune.com

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When the Chicago White Sox unveiled a sparkling new stadium on 35th Street in 1991, owner Jerry Reinsdorf declared he was “awestruck” at its beauty and predicted it wouldn’t “take a back seat” to any stadium in Major League Baseball for years to come.

But since that April day after the Sox had shuttered the original Comiskey Park across the street, the South Siders’ current home stadium has been a consistent source of criticism, tension and angst, with fans clamoring for a change even as major improvements have been made.

This week, a new twist developed in that long-running saga when it was revealed that Reinsdorf and the White Sox were in discussions about building a baseball-only Sox stadium about 3 miles to the northeast at Roosevelt Road and Clark Street as part of a massive development at a property in the South Loop called “The 78.″

Ald. Pat Dowell, whose 3rd Ward includes The 78, confirmed Related Midwest, the developer that owns the parcel, wants to discuss a White Sox relocation to that site.

“I will meet soon with the developers of The 78 to discuss the possibility of a stadium being built for the Chicago White Sox,” Dowell said in a statement Thursday afternoon.

Ald. Nicole Lee, who represents the area that includes Guaranteed Rate Field, where the team plays now, said she will also meet with Related Midwest and the Sox on the proposal.

“The White Sox have proudly called Chicago and Bridgeport home for over a century,” Lee said. “As a lifelong fan and now alderperson of the 11th Ward, I am wholeheartedly committed to keeping the Sox on the South Side.”

While serious questions remain about how real the talks are, whether such a plan will get off the ground and how it would be paid for, the news the Sox might leave their longtime home in the Bridgeport-Armour Square neighborhood spurred dreams that a modern ballpark ringed by skyscrapers and closer to downtown could breathe new life into the team and its fan base.

“The ballpark is right now not really in a neighborhood, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and a not very attractive nowhere,” said Allen Sanderson, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago who studies the economics of sports. “And getting to the ballpark, there is nothing wonderful about that experience.”

Related Midwest declined to comment through Tricia Van Horn, vice president of marketing and communications. The Illinois Sports Facilities Authority — which owns Guaranteed Rate Field — has not been involved in the talks, the organization’s CEO, Frank Bilecki, told the Tribune.

“I’m not part of the discussion, at least as of yet,” Bilecki said. “I truly know nothing. I’m a landlord and they’re a tenant, and they’re looking at options as tenants do everywhere.”

The Chicago Sun-Times reported Thursday that “serious” negotiations have taken place between the Sox and Related Midwest about the potential move to The 78.

The Sox and Mayor Brandon Johnson released a joint statement Thursday that did not address the possibility of a new stadium being built on the site.

“Mayor Brandon Johnson and Chicago White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf met to discuss the historic partnership between the team and Chicago and the team’s ideas for remaining competitive in Chicago in perpetuity,” the statement reads. “The partnership between the city and the team goes back more than a century and the Johnson administration is committed to continuing this dialogue moving forward.”

Sanderson, a Sox fan who often attends games, and who is also a longtime critic of using public funds to finance stadiums, said a new ballpark may not do much to boost attendance.

“The bigger problem might be it’s a really bad baseball team, coupled with the fact that senior ownership hasn’t exactly endeared itself to the public,” he said.

But a new White Sox stadium could act as an anchor for the South Loop, much like Google will be a north anchor when it occupies the James R. Thompson Center, said Robert Sevim, a Chicago-based president of Savills, a commercial real estate firm.

“This would be transformative if it occurs,” he said. “You will be able to create an entire community around the ballpark. Wrigley Field has an entire community around it, and that’s what makes it special, and in some ways, a White Sox park might even do better because you have a clean slate.”

Sevim was a consultant on The 78 project several years ago, but was not involved in any potential deal with the White Sox.

A major league ballpark would likely help kick off other on-site development, perhaps including residences, offices, restaurants and retail, he added, all accessible to downtown residents and workers, he said.

Less clear is what losing the team would mean for the Bridgeport area that has been its home for over a century.

Bill Jackson, executive director at the University of Illinois’ Discovery Partners Institute, said a new home for the White Sox won’t interfere with his group’s plans to construct a $250 million headquarters at the 78.

DPI still plans to break ground this year on the eight-story, glass-and-steel dome, and complete it by December 2026.

Jackson added that he was shown drawings of the proposed stadium this week and believes having an on-site ballpark will help attract more scientists and startup firms to DPI’s future lab, research and office spaces.

He also expects the new infrastructure needed for the ballpark, including additional parking and transportation upgrades, will be useful to DPI as it expands.

A Sox stadium on The 78 site would be a huge positive development for the team and the city — but that doesn’t mean it will happen, said SportsCorp Ltd. President and consultant Marc Ganis, who is not involved with the proposal.

There are many roadblocks, Ganis said, the first being money. Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf is not known as a big spender, and Johnson has other priorities eating up resources, such as schools, pensions, public safety, and now, the migrant crisis.

“This site could be a great one for the Sox for generations to come,” Ganis said. “But a lot of things that make sense around here don’t happen.”

The question about how any new ballpark would be funded is significant. Guaranteed Rate Field — where the Sox lease runs through 2029 — was paid for using money raised through an increase in Chicago hotel room taxes in a last-minute deal in Springfield in 1988. The city and state also each kick in $5 million per year.

The ISFA still owes about $50 million toward the construction of the stadium, which opened near 35th Street and Shields Avenue in 1991.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has indicated he’s generally not supportive of state money going toward private, professional sports teams. He expressed this sentiment in the last year over rumblings about whether the Sox would move and in the Chicago Bears’ quest to find a new stadium in the city or suburbs.

As for the reports of the latest talks involving a possible new stadium for the Sox, Pritzker suggested he’d be open to listening to any proposals.

“Nobody’s made an ask yet, so having said that, I think you know my views about privately owned teams and whether the public should be paying for private facilities that will be used by private businesses,” the governor said during an unrelated event at an elementary school outside of Springfield. “Having said that, I mean, there are things that government does to support business all across the state, investing in infrastructure, making sure that we’re supporting the success of business in Illinois.

“So, as with all of the other (things), whether it’s sports teams or other private businesses, we’ll be looking at whatever they may be suggesting or asking.”

Where the Sox will be playing in the future has been a topic of conversation for several months.

In August, Crain’s Chicago Business reported the team was considering a move when its lease at Guaranteed Rate Field expires.

At that time, the Sox said in a statement: “We have not had any conversations about our lease situation, but with six years remaining, it is naturally nearing a time where discussions should begin to take place. The conversations would be with the city, ISFA and the state and most likely would be about vision, opportunities and the future.”

The Sox confirmed a meeting between Reinsdorf and Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell took place during the MLB winter meetings in December. But they did not disclose the topics discussed.

Nashville has long been mentioned in speculation as a city to consider if MLB decides to expand.

A Sox move could add a wrinkle to the Bears’ efforts to build a new enclosed stadium. The Bears spent $197 million to buy the former Arlington Park racetrack almost a year ago but have made little progress since then to get tax subsidies or resolve a dispute over property taxes with local school districts.

The Bears have also had discussions with Johnson about staying in the city and with officials about potential sites in Naperville, Waukegan and elsewhere.

Arlington Heights Mayor Tom Hayes said he couldn’t speculate about how the Sox talks might affect the Bears’ options, saying he was still trying to arrange face-to-face meetings between the team and the schools.

“I don’t anticipate that this would negatively impact the momentum we’ve been trying to gain,” he said. “We’re very hopeful things are moving in the right direction, and we’re continuing to work on it.”

A Sox relocation to The 78 might be modeled on the Atlanta Braves’ Truist Park, which opened in 2017 as an anchor to The Battery, a surrounding area of restaurants, housing and entertainment.

Such a mixed-use development is what the Bears have proposed for Arlington Heights. But at 62 acres, the Chicago site is much smaller than the 326 acres at the former Arlington horse track.

Chicago Tribune’s Jeremy Gorner, reporting from Rochester, Ill., and Jake Sheridan contributed.