First you sell the car, then the garage, then the house, then the wife (or husband), then the kids. It’s how you stay afloat.

The city’s reliance on one-time revenues, rather than recurring revenue streams like taxes, exploded, with such funding growing to 17.6% of revenues in the city’s main operating fund in fiscal 2011, up from 5.6% just four years earlier.

That’s Chicago’s financing genius, as explained (not as clearly) by the Civic Fed.

This near-suburbanite would like to know what problem is more urgent for the city.