I knew the city had turned some kind of corner when I realized we would actually make money on our house. For years I thought this was about as likely as my wife, Mary, cashing in on one of the lottery tickets she was always buying. It tells you something about our economic situation that Mary, a bank vice president, thought lottery tickets needed to be a major part of our financial plan. We had poured a truly frightening amount of money into our place, a sagging wreck when we bought it, and at an early stage we’d pretty much abandoned any hope of getting it back. I remember one morning–we must have had one of our lugubrious financial discussions the night before–Mary said to me, “Did you ever think you would live in a $600,000 house?” “Babe,” I said, “we don’t live in a $600,000 house. We live in a $500,000 house that cost $600,000.” But now, although we’ve sunk even more money into it, this Vietnam of home improvement projects has become a profitable investment, thanks to the rising market.
But maybe not. Real estate people once upon a time used to talk about neighborhoods reaching a crisis point at a certain age–the threshold I recall seeing mentioned was 40 years. The buildings and their initial occupants grew old together, and either everybody bailed or died off and the neighborhood went to seed, or new people invested and the neighborhood was renewed. Cities, it now seems obvious, go through the same sort of stages on a larger scale. In Chicago renewal has been complicated by race and the automobile, but in the end–well, I was going to say it happened, but that’s a little premature. Let’s say it’s happening.
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The population of Chicago, which fell by 837,000 between 1950 and 1990, may be headed back up: between 1990 and 1998, it inched from 2.78 million to 2.8 million. In the same period, the city issued building permits for 54,000 dwellings and authorized 24,000 demolitions, for a net gain of 30,000 units. Compare this to the 70s and 80s, when Chicago suffered a net loss of 76,000 dwellings. And home values in Chicago are increasing at a faster rate than in the suburbs. According to the Chicago Association of Realtors, the median condo sale price in Chicago has increased 45 percent since 1995, compared to 13 percent in suburban Cook County–condos now account for 55 percent of single-family home sales in the city. Prices for houses and two- to four-flats are also rising more rapidly in the city.
Not to knock my little neighborhood in West Lakeview, but nobody’s going to mistake it for Lake Forest. Behind us is a big courtyard apartment building that the local cops refer to as “the hacienda,” which I realize is not a shining example of cultural sensitivity. On warm nights when everyone’s got their windows open, the residents play ranchera music. Sometimes it’s merely at dentist-office level, and sometimes it’s loud enough to loosen your fillings. I go out and holler “turn it down” once in a while. Usually this has the desired result, but my guess is that most people living in $600,000 houses have the butler do it.
And what do we get out of this deal? The city isn’t boring. Right? In my heart of hearts I know this is not the world’s most rational argument. When a friend who was trying to justify living in New York ran it past me a few years ago, I replied, “Neither was World War II.” I’m well past the point where I need someplace to take a date every Saturday night, it’s been ten years since I heard a rock concert, and our selection of feasible restaurants is pretty much limited to places where our kids can draw with crayons on the place mats.
Yet I think I know how it could, based on my experience with my house. There is a kind of perverted puritan ethic at work in the soul of every city dweller–a little devil that whispers seductively in his ear: So what if things suck right now? It will be really cool when it’s done. Of course by the time it’s done the sun may have grown cold, but this is the sort of practical detail the city dweller conveniently overlooks. I suppose anybody who buys a home has to be an optimist. But a suburbanite merely needs to believe his somewhat ratty-looking house will get fixed up someday. The city dweller has to think that about the whole neighborhood. Cities are built on hope.
Not those Megiddoites, boy. They rebuilt the whole thing, probably thinking, this time for sure. Then blammo, the Assyrians (or the Egyptians, or God knows who else) would descend like the wolf on the fold and there they’d be, flattened again.
