By Kari Lydersen
The staff at Bickerdike don’t like Granato any better than he likes them. In December the company filed a lawsuit against the alderman, a response to charges he’d made in a July press release, which he’d issued after Bickerdike brought about 100 pajama-clad protesters to his office one night. “On July 27, 1998, Jesse Granato published the following false and defamatory statements,” the suit reads. The statements include: “The killing of 7 year old Nikia Terri was partly the result of Bickerdike’s non-caring attitude.” “Bickerdike has discriminatory hiring practices and does not hire African-Americans.” And “Bickerdike residential units are infested with gangs and drugs.”
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The pajama protest had been part of an ongoing battle over Bickerdike’s proposed Erie Cooperative project, which is at the center of the dispute between Granato and Bickerdike. For more than four years Bickerdike has been trying to build the co-op, which would include 30 units of low-income housing, on what are now Bickerdike- and city-owned lots within a few blocks of Chicago and Noble in West Town–and for almost as long Granato has been stridently opposing it. Some low-income residents beg for the co-op as a refuge against displacement in the rapidly gentrifying area–it would house working families making between $15,000 and $30,000 a year–while other residents echo Granato’s complaints that there’s already too much low-income housing in the ward and that Bickerdike’s buildings are crime ridden.
But then the city decided not to give the co-op as big a loan as the steering committee wanted. In 1995 the city asked Bickerdike to change the ownership structure to a limited partnership so that the project could qualify for the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which is administered by the city with the goal of creating public-private partnerships. Only tax-paying corporations can take advantage of the LIHTC, so the co-op would have to find a private investor who wanted the credits to lend the money for construction, though the project would still get city, state, and other private loans. Residents would manage the co-op from the start, but they wouldn’t own a piece of it for 15 years.
Later that spring Contreraz started seeing flyers accusing Bickerdike of a bait and switch and of “duping” the co-op steering committee. She insists the committee was fully informed and eager for the project to succeed. “They were saying all this stuff about deceiving ‘the people,’” she says. “We were ‘the people,’ and we just wanted to be able to stay in the community that we built with our own sweat over all these years.”
Aruguete says there are some problems in Bickerdike buildings, but adds, “Anyone who manages 750 units will have problem tenants. We do screenings and require landlord references. Our buildings are well maintained. We don’t have any deferred maintenance.” Moreover, she points out, in 1997 Bickerdike was named not-for-profit development group of the year by the Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards, which are sponsored by banks and the state Housing Development Authority, among others, and in 1998 it received an “exemplary” rating for maintenance from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The First Ward has the highest number of scattered-site subsidized buildings of any ward in the city, and Granato and the representatives of the home owners’ associations that agree with him–including the Old Wicker Park Committee, the Eckhart Park Community Council, and the East Village Association–say they shouldn’t be forced to absorb any more. “When you continue to dump low-income housing in one area you create a new ghetto,” says Dave Stumm, president of the Old Wicker Park Committee and a vocal opponent of the co-op. “You have to put yourselves in the shoes of someone who would be living across from it–it could be another potential Cabrini Green.”
