By Ben Joravsky
The history of buying and financing homes in Chicago has not always been pretty. In the 1950s and ’60s many real estate companies, banks, and mortgage lenders were responsible for bottling black residents into segregated slums, which were starved for investment because of redlining lending policies. As the surge in southern migration made it impossible to contain black residents in the same old neighborhoods, the industry mastered an equally repulsive practice. They became peddlers of panic, relentlessly scaring white home owners into selling fast before–to use an infamous phrase–it was too late.
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Camacho knows this history–even if he feels that lenders are often unfairly maligned for demographic and economic forces they don’t control–having lived though it and studied it. He was born in Wicker Park in 1954 and raised in Lincoln Park when it was a predominantly working-class Puerto Rican community. He graduated from Lane Tech High School and worked his way through college and grad school, earning a BA at Northeastern Illinois University and a master’s in social work from the University of Chicago. I first met him almost 20 years ago when he was a young researcher for the Community Renewal Society, a not-for-profit social service organization that, among other things, publishes the Chicago Reporter. Throughout the 80s, Camacho teamed up with various writers from the Reporter (myself included) to write studies on race relations, politics, Hispanic issues, and other urban matters.
For a few years, Guzman, his mother, and his older sister lived in a small apartment in Uptown; then they moved to another in Humboldt Park. He boxed at the Park District field house (“I was a bantamweight–115 pounds”) and attended Clemente High School. In 1986, two years after graduating from Clemente, he was 20 years old, married, the father of a baby girl, and a bagger at a local grocery store. “I guess there’s no formula for success,” he says. “I didn’t start out wanting to get into banking. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. A friend of my mother-in-law saw how miserable I was at the grocery store and suggested that they were hiring tellers at Northwest Savings over at Western and Fullerton. So I went down and applied.”
The world he hopes to market, however, is the bungalow belt beyond Western Avenue. “It’s Hermosa and Belmont Cragin and Avondale and all the other neighborhoods that most people from Lincoln Park or Wicker Park or Bucktown haven’t even heard of. They’re not trendy. They’re not being written up. This is where the people who wash the dishes or cook the food or mow the lawn or take care of the kids–this is where they will look to live when they buy. If it’s affordable–you can get a house up there for, I don’t know, $125,000. It’s because it’s still a little raw.”
“Look at that house across the street,” he says. “They don’t have air-conditioning or screens. They have to keep the windows open just to get a little breeze. In America today, not being able to buy screens is poverty. I mean, this is still a very rough neighborhood. Not far from here there was a drive-by shooting. And yet they’re selling two-bedroom condos, not even a house, for $250,000. On this block 25 years ago you could have bought a house for $15,000. I don’t understand this phenomenon. I can’t explain it. I do assume that the person who buys that condo does not do so because he wants to live next to poverty. They see the neighborhood as it will be–or as they want it to be–not as it is.”
