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As it happens, Chicago is the nation's leader in municipal privatization efforts. That's right: The city that conservatives portray as the citadel of the power-grabbing, government-growing left has been selling itself off in pieces for years. It signed a 99-year lease for the Chicago Skyway, a toll road in the city's South Side, back in 2005.

Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened.

In the days and months I spent walking through the various communities of this city, I found that Chicago did not work for everyone, however.

Proponents of privatization argued that cities and states needed private capital to fund all the upgrades that our decaying infrastructure so desperately needed.

I originally wanted to stay in Chicago as long as I could. I love Chicago. I don't love L.A. I don't want to leave Chicago.

Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.

Chicago seems to follow New York, and coming from New York and being in real estate, I worry about things happening in Chicago that have happened in New York. I've seen a great city like New York go downhill. It has a wonderful financial downtown, but the rest of the city is not very nice.

We have not really advertised Chicago internationally.

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.