By Nadia Oehlsen
Then last summer everyone moved out. The building stood empty, the windows and doors blocked by metal security covers, until a month ago, when rehab workers started showing up.
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Neither side disputes that Chicago has lost affordable rental housing to the demolition of CHA high-rises and the skyrocketing cost of housing brought on by the real estate boom of the past few years. But the Beacon building squabble highlights the lack of clear definitions in the long-running Uptown/Sheridan Park housing debate: What housing counts as affordable? What incomes count as low?
Representatives of the Organization of the NorthEast didn’t offer a definition of what they considered affordable when they made a statement to the IHDA board in March supporting the loan to CMHDC. But they indicated that they saw the Beacon building plan as affordable. “This is exactly the type of development we need in Uptown: safe, decent, mixed-income affordable housing owned and operated by an experienced and proven housing development corporation,” the statement said. “4700 N. Beacon has the potential to catalyze further mixed-income development in an area that sorely needs quality rental housing–not because every other building is run down, but because, in fact, 100 percent of all the housing developed in our community over the last three years has converted once-affordable rental buildings into high-priced homes and condominiums.”
Alderman Helen Shiller, a staunch proponent of affordable housing in the 46th Ward, insists that there’s a lot less of it than the SPNA figures show. In March 1999 she did a survey that counted housing units in roughly the same census tract (she counted 3,447 total housing units; SPNA counted 4,267). “Out of frustration at misinformation being passed on–especially by Sheridan Park Neighbors–on the numbers of subsidized units in this particular census tract, I did formally what informally I knew,” she says. “I drove slowly down every street, identifying every building and writing down on a piece of paper exactly how many units were in that building and characterizing it.”
ONE has been preparing to conduct its own study of the housing stock in Uptown and Edgewater, where many of its 67 member organizations are based, a venture that will take several months. And they’re planning to discuss what housing they’ll classify as affordable, along with what they might recommend as the ideal mix of incomes for the neighborhoods. “We’re in the process of defining that for ourselves and the community as a whole,” says Tom Walsh, cochair of ONE’s land-use and housing-strategy team. “But we do know without a question of a doubt that this is becoming an unaffordable neighborhood for working-class people. Over the last three years there has been nothing but unbalanced development in the community, where developments happen that are strictly for upper-income folks.”
SPNA members say the community would benefit more from fostering economic diversity among home owners. Rowe says his group would gladly have supported the Beacon building project if it had been subsidized condos, because even though the residents would have been low income, they would have had a higher stake in the community. And he argues that such a project would have empowered low-income people more, by giving them a real opportunity to own homes. “In areas like Woodlawn and South Shore they have affordable home ownership programs, and people are praising them, saying that’s great that people can get out of the cycle of just renting if they don’t make a lot of money. It’s shunned in our area. I don’t understand it. Why in the 46th Ward is affordable home ownership not promoted?”
