Affordable Housing: Reclaim! Remain! Rebuild!

City Gardens is a new mixed-income rental community located on the former site of the Maplewood Courts public housing complex, that recently opened in the Near West Side community. City Gardens offers 76 market rate, affordable and CHA apartments in seven, three-story buildings in a mix of one, two, three, and four-bedrooms.

David Peterson knows the benefits of affordable housing—intimately. The now 35 year old used affordable housing to help in a financial bond when he was a young college grad with dreams of getting into community work and development, like his mother who’d moved to North Pullman in the late 1980s and started buying property to help build up the neighborhood.
Peterson says he was able to watch his mother do significant work in the community, building up Pullman’s predominantly Black north side, and he had similar aspirations throughout his urban planning studies at Florida A&M University.
He did an internship with the City of Tallahassee’s planning department. And on his breaks from school, he’d work with Saving Our Seeds, an organization he says was created by public housing residents from across the city who’d come together to work toward improving conditions for low-income residents and the city’s ex-offender population, which further fueled his passion for social work.
When Peterson graduated, he was no stranger to community development. He was working — and volunteering — in planning and development, but soon found himself in financial distress. He turned to affordable housing and was able to find housing help from the Chicago Housing Authority.
“What I didn’t realize is that this [type of work] wasn’t necessarily going to be something that was going to pay my bills,” Peterson said. “I found myself in some extreme financial troubles and it put me in a very uncomfortable position, but it was a sacrifice I was willing to make while I was still young.”
Peterson was able to go back to school to get a graduate degree from DePaul University, with a focus on creating businesses in urban areas, and took over the post as executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum on a volunteer basis. He then entered CHA’s Central Advisory Council’s entrepreneurship pilot program, which trained him to get a business off the ground.
Because of his training, Peterson is currently working on building a health and wellness company, Eat II Live Restaurant Group LLC, to give healthy food access to low-income residents. He also works as the director of operations for Randolph’s Dream Community Development Corporation to build cultural economic development in the Pullman District, which the National Park Service recently designated as the Pullman National Monument.
Peterson’s first-hand experience helped him better understand the need in the city for affordable housing. He says CHA’s help was critical for his transitional period.
“It was a very humbling experience, but I’m very grateful for that experience,” Peterson said. “It really helped me pull myself up by my bootstraps during that transitional period.”
Chicago Housing Authority CEO Eugene Jones, Jr. says that the organization’s goal is to help its residents work toward this type of self-sufficiency and currently provides affordable housing to more than 62,000 families and individuals.
“Today, CHA has investment in 75 of 77 community areas of the City of Chicago and voucher holders live in every one of those community areas,” Jones said. “Affordable housing is an integral part of helping Chicago neighborhoods grow and prosper, and CHA and its development partners work to provide housing access and opportunity across the city.”
For people struggling with their finances, housing can be the crux of their economic problem — primarily for those who spend more than 30 percent of their income on it.
Housing can also be the source of tension between what a community wants and what it needs: stemming from affordable housing coming to neighborhoods not classified as low-income, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, from affordable housing as a means to protect residents in disinvested neighborhoods as new investment becomes more attractive.
 
North Side Additions
Officials on the city’s North Side have been advocating for new affordable housing for their communities, including Alderman John Arena’s (45th Ward) efforts to spearhead a seven-story, 80-unit apartment building in Jefferson Park. Out of the building’s 80 units which would be rented at below-market rate, 20 would be reserved for those with CHA vouchers.
Owen R. Brugh, Arena’s chief of staff and general counsel, said the housing project is important because his office has seen its residents struggle to pay housing costs as living expenses increase, especially veterans and the elderly.
“Incomes are stagnant while we’ve seen rents go through the roof,” he said.
Brugh said the alderman also sees affordable housing as a way to boost area economics by changing people’s living situations so they buy what they couldn’t previously afford.
“If you take someone that’s spending 50 percent of their income on rent and are able to give them back 20 percent, then that’s an extra 20 percent that they can spend on restaurants and shopping,” he said.
Although there has been opposition, Brugh said support has also increased for the project and that there is no uniform reason why people either support or oppose it.
Experts say resistance to affordable housing in middle- and high-income areas may often come from the idea that adding affordable housing will significantly lower a neighborhood’s market value. However, there is generally no significant change in home values before and after a low-income housing project is completed, according to a 10-year Trulia study.
“Surely, you see resistance; the ‘not in my backyard.’ They don’t want what they see as something that will diminish their neighborhood,” said Stacey Sutton, assistant professor of Urban Planning & Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It’s ironic and somewhat ridiculous because the concept of affordable housing doesn’t mean much unless you define what affordable means.”
Sutton says that the definition of affordable housing in each situation can be key. The threshold for what is considered affordable varies by neighborhood and could be much higher when referring to one with upper income residents because housing costs are set at what is deemed affordable for the average person in that neighborhood.
For example, the average income in the predominantly White neighborhood of Jefferson Park is $60,500, close to the citywide average of $63,000, while the average income in neighboring Humboldt Park, in which Hispanic, Black, and White populations each constitute a third of the population, is almost half that amount. What is defined as affordable housing would likely be different in each.
“Affordable housing doesn’t necessarily mean that it could have poor people moving in,” she said. “It could, and it should, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it. … It’s very rare that you see the highest neighborhoods getting affordable housing at all, but when they do, it’s not that the lowest end of the parameter can attract the poorest people in the community.”
Margaret Wooten, director of the Chicago Urban League’s Housing Department, says the term affordable housing can become problematic when it involves low- to moderate-income communities in Chicago — particularly African-American neighborhoods — because those who come to the Housing and Financial Empowerment Center for counseling often cannot find housing within their economic constraints.
“I have found that the widely accepted phenomena of ‘affordable housing’ is utilized too loosely,” Wooten said. “What the industry considers affordable is definitely not affordable for our clients. I think it’s imperative that housing professionals be more conscious of the tension that can arise when generalizing a client’s income status, especially when discussing historically vulnerable groups who have been targeted with redlining and housing segregation.”
 
Inevitable Investment
While the North Side’s battle for affordable housing lingers, a greater tension may be brewing elsewhere. This struggle, some experts say, is between current residents in disinvested neighborhoods and those looking to move there. But, affordable housing can be used as a means to protect residents if and when market value increases.
“Affordable housing really matters,” said Ruth A. Wuorenma, president of Neighborhood Capital Institute, an organization that creates development plans alongside community stakeholders, including residents and experts. “We can’t keep forcing people out. They have to live somewhere, and the reality is that there’s a whole range of incomes out there that need to be housed.”
Many neighborhoods, like Jackson Park which will soon be home to the new Barack Obama Presidential Library, will be facing an inevitable change and more and more businesses will undoubtedly look toward the area for new development and business opportunities. The balance, Wuorenma says, is planning for new investment that is embraced by the community but is also economically feasible.
“It’s a big trigger,” she said. “It’s an international asset, and if that’s used as an anchoring institution that intersects with the community and the region, and the country, it can be thoughtfully done.”
Wuorenma’s organization involves the residents of changing communities, ensuring they have a voice in the process, by utilizing pre-development tools and by spending what she says is intensive time with residents to understand their highest priorities. NCI then puts together a plan for the entire neighborhood based on those priorities, incorporating the community’s unique differences.
“It looks so simple but there are very few communities in this country that have the opportunity to say what’s special about them,” she said. “Communities have their own psychology and to honor that, give them the tools to set their future course instead of just having the market do it for them.”
When you work at scale that’s not one block at a time, then you really can plan for affordable housing, Wuorenma said.
“And when you do it in that kind of broad-scale way, you can plan for housing that’s affordable, housing that’s for seniors, and housing that’s for market rate,” she said. “It’s not all dependent on one project at a time, so that a mix of interest can all work together.”
 
Gary Comer and Greater Grand Crossing
Lands’ End founder Gary Comer grew up in Greater Grand Crossing and committed to financially helping Paul Revere Elementary where he went to school as a child. But, Comer and his family used housing and other developmental resources to build up the area.
“Children who are always moving, in unstable learning conditions, don’t learn as well,” Wuorenma said. “So, they wanted to respond by creating some stable housing choices.”
Revere Way revitalization project, the development’s housing component, included more than 60 affordable homes for individuals and families in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, which also included a home improvement program for existing homeowners and job opportunities through construction apprenticeships and other building efforts.
The project opened in 2002, setting housing costs based on what employees who worked at the University of Chicago Hospital could afford. The employees received preferential treatment and were able to live near where they worked. Located just miles away from the housing in nearby Hyde Park, the hospital later received an $80 million-plus gift from the Comer Foundation to create Comer Children’s Hospital in 2005.
“They built beautiful homes that were affordable to someone who was an employee at the University of Chicago at the tech level,” Wuorenma said. “It’s a very nice way to bring affordable housing because it provides a stabilizing aspect, not only for the households buying them, but for the community.”
The Comer Foundation says its Comer Education Campus now consists of Gary Comer Youth Center, Gary Comer College Prep, Gary Comer Middle School and its college success initiative, UtmostU.
 
Planning and Policy
For disinvested neighborhoods to remain viable and for residents to prosper, communities need to grow to survive. The difference, Wuorenma says, is that residents should be proactive and take steps to ensure their communities change in ways that are aligned with their priorities.
“People have gotten accustomed to being on the sidelines, and because of that, the people who are there haven’t had to deal with change,” Wuorenma said. “But you cannot grow as a community, as a neighborhood, as a household, unless you can find ways consistent with your values to welcome in new investment. Communities will atrophy and die, and we’ve seen that all over the place.”
Neighborhood changes, like those Chicago is experiencing, are similar across the country. But Sutton says that although the feeling of being displaced from a neighborhood you call home is the same, Chicago’s population declines may create opportunities that aren’t existent in cities with bustling growth.
Chicago’s city changes look a lot less than that of cities like New York. Chicago’s population dipped almost 7 percent between 2000 and 2010, while New York’s bumped up 2 percent.
“The process of displacement might be the same, but there’s a lot more land — Chicago has so many vacant lots and underutilized property,” Sutton said. “So, the process of gentrification is a different process. It happens more slowly.”
What also makes Chicago different is its place as the city with the fifth highest combined racial and economic segregation, according to this year’s Metropolitan Planning Council report which formally proved what many residents say they already knew.
“The way people experience segregation in Chicago is drastically different,” Sutton said. “People traverse the city very differently. So, whenever you see ‘other,’ you know something is happening. You know something is underway because it’s so untouched.”
To keep a neighborhood’s current residents, Sutton says, policies have to be built into the system so that people can feel a sense of security, knowing that as new residents enter, they won’t be pushed out.
“There’s great space to add more housing and increase density to allow more people to move here, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be gentrified,” Sutton said. “Policies have to be in place so that the people who are here can remain. … You want new people to come, but you don’t want new people to define a neighborhood’s character.”

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