April 17, 2019

Experimental Station is Hiring: Help Build Independent Cultural Infrastructure on the South Side We are seeking a part-time Development Associate to add to our team!

As a growing organization, we have an increased need for development support, including managing our donor database, coordinating fundraising events, and helping to plan a capital campaign.

For full job description and to apply, visit exp.st/jobs

Blackstone Bicycle Works

Weekly Bike Sale Every Saturday at 12pm Wide selection of refurbished bikes! (most bikes are between $120 & $250)

follow us at @blackstonebikes blackstonebikes.org

Blackstone Bicycle Works is a bustling community bike shop that each year empowers over 200 boys and girls from Chicago’s south side—teaching them mechanical skills, job skills, business literacy and how to become responsible community members. In our year-round ‘earn and learn’ youth program, participants earn bicycles and accessories for their work in the shop. In addition, our youths receive after-school tutoring, mentoring, internships and externships, college and career advising, and scholarships.

Hours Tuesday - Friday 1pm - 6pm 12pm - 5pm Saturday

773 241 5458 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

A PROGRAM OF

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Volume 6, Issue 24 Editor-in-Chief Adam Przybyl Managing Editors Emeline Posner, Sam Stecklow Deputy Editor Jasmine Mithani Senior Editors Julia Aizuss, Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen, Bridget Newsham, Olivia Stovicek Chief of Staff

Manisha AR

Education Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor Food & Land Editor

Rachel Kim Christopher Good Nicole Bond Rod Sawyer Emeline Posner

Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan, Joshua Falk, Carly Graf, Ian Hodgson, Maple Joy, Sam Joyce, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Rachel Schastok Amy Qin, Jocelyn Vega Staff Writer Kyle Oleksiuk

Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Exec. Producer Erisa Apantaku Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Director of Fact Checking: Sam Joyce Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Elizabeth Winkler, Tammy Xu Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editors Ireashia Bennett, Siena Fite, Lizzie Smith Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Siena Fite, Natalie Gonzalez, Katherine Hill Interim Layout Editor J. Michael Eugenio Deputy Layout Editor Haley Tweedell Webmaster Operations Manager

Pat Sier Jason Schumer

The Weekly is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover art by Siena Fite

THE HOUSING ISSUE

IN THIS ISSUE home histories: american system-built homes

The master architect was trying to tackle a more pervasive issue: affordable housing. taylor moore....................................4 life in the doughnut

“And I think that’s what a village was about.” as told to quinn myers...................5 filed away

A little over two weeks ago, a group of tenants and activists gathered outside the Germano Millgate Housing Complex, at the corner of 89th and Burley, to protest the living conditions inside. A union organizer brought along Scabby, the inflatable sevenfoot rat with beady red eyes used to shame workers who cross the picket line during a strike. That day, Scabby was doing double-duty as stand-in for Anthony Fusco, owner of Germano Millgate and object of the tenants’ ire. They said Fusco had failed to maintain basic standards of living. Black mold was growing in the bathrooms. Tenants would buy new clothes to replace the ones rats and mice chewed through and strip the beds every morning to stop the same thing from happening to their sheets.

The russet buildings of Germano Millgate look nice enough, though—that’s because, tenant organizers say, the last round of federal funding went to renovating the brick and mortar. There’s more money, but the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) hasn’t released it. One of the tenants there was from Barbara Jean Wright, another of Fusco’s buildings right next to UIC. They’ve also been fighting for money from HUD, which would go toward much-needed rehabs.

The tenants there were looking for the same thing as everybody else: a place to live peaceably, without their kids developing asthma, or the maintenance guy taking a couple of weeks to come fix a routine problem. That they haven’t found it is normal, at least on the South Side. There are homes in Chatham where the basements routinely overflow with wastewater, and blocks in Chicago Lawn where speculators keep their cupidous grip on empty houses and vacant lots, happy to wait for the market to make their investment worthwhile. The Chicago Housing Authority, long after tearing down the high-rises, will limp past the finish line of its Plan for Transformation, fudging the numbers until they become, as our article on the agency notes, “almost meaningless.” In part, this special issue focused on housing is an incomplete record of the continued abandonment of a side of Chicago the size of Philadelphia.

Against it all, residents continue to display an unbending obstinacy: they still want a place to live peaceably. This issue is also about that: the Woodlawn residents forming land trusts to prevent displacement, or the Pilsen parishioners fighting to keep their church and community intact. As Cheryl Johnson, the environmental organizer, says about her own “village” of Altgeld Gardens, “What I love about this community, everybody had a plan.”

You have to, when nobody else will draw ones up that involve you. And then you have to go out and share it, as shrewdly as you can. As the tenants were wrapping up outside Germano Millgate, a boy walked home from Thorp Elementary with his two kid sisters in tow. One of the tenants gave him their flyer—chartreuse, with cramped type—and told him to take it home to his mother. Next time, she could join them.

Landlords kill eviction-sealing bill. ian hodgson.......................................8 more than a church

St. Adalbert Church, a beacon of Pilsen’s Catholic heritage, goes up for sale (again). amy qin............................................10 what is the cha doing?

A 900-unit mixed-income development on the site of the former Harold Ickes homes will include multiple retail stores and a dog spa. jake bittle.......................................12 back to the land trust

An affordable housing policy tool that, for all its benefits, fails to truly empower Black and brown communities. christian belanger........................14 a case for the adu

New City, Bridgeport, West Pullman, and South Chicago are no slackers, with 359 potential coach houses. steven vance...................................17 urban flooding by the numbers

The problem will only keep getting worse. sam joyce..........................................19

APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

HISTORY

Home Histories: American System-Built Homes Beverly residents enjoy the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright’s affordable housing designs

BY TAYLOR MOORE LILY COZZENS

I

n the middle of a beautiful—if unassuming—neighborhood in Beverly sit two relics from one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most important projects. Before the Guggenheim, before Fallingwater, the master architect was trying to tackle a more pervasive issue: affordable housing. “I would rather solve the small house problem than build anything else I can think of,” Wright commented in the January 1938 issue of Architectural Forum.

This project, known as the American System-Built Homes, started in 1916 when Milwaukee-based housing developer Arthur L. Richards approached Wright with a golden idea: to bring his designs to the masses. At the time, prefabricated housing, known as “prefab,” was common. Sears, Roebuck & Company sold approximately 70,000 kit homes from its mail-order catalog between 1908 and 1940. However, these homes followed conventional tastes; one ad for the American System-Built Homes called the country’s housing stock “not equal to the peasant’s cottages in Europe.”

As a craftsman who valued novelty but also believed in the power of industry—he once stated, “in the machine lies the only future of art and craft”—Wright knew he could do 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 17, 2019

better.

The challenge for Wright was multifold: creating designs that were appealing to a large swath of consumers, versatile enough to be built on a number of site conditions, and affordable for the middle-class family. They also had to be true to his style. According to Wright, in a lecture given in 1916, the idea of the American System-Built Homes had been “in my head for some years. I have guarded it carefully, I wanted time to think in quiet of how the idea might be brought to the public without injury to the integrity of my own art.”

As such, Wright and his team of architects spent a lot of time on these concepts, producing hundreds of ideas— one such project file contained 923 drawings created by Wright’s firm. Like the Sears kit homes, prospective customers would choose from a catalog of single-family dwellings and small apartment buildings, which would use pre-cut lumber from factories but would be built primarily on-site by certified contractors. Compared to prefab housing, which often involved constructing and shipping entire building sections to be assembled by DIY homeowners, these differences brought a measure of quality

control to the process and gave Wright peace of mind.

Wright’s designs contained characteristics of his signature Prairie style, such as cantilevered roofs, horizontal lines, and natural colors that interfaced with the environment and recalled the American grasslands. There were also elements of compromise Wright made to adapt his work for the life of the modern family. Wright was no fan of garages or basements, but to make his homes more broadly appealing, he allowed such concessions.

Capitalizing on Wright’s Prairie style, regarded as the first truly American style of architecture, the houses—of which there were seven to choose from—were promoted as the quintessential American home. Sherwood Anderson, the nationally acclaimed novelist who at the time was an unknown copywriter, wrote in 1917 for a Tribune ad, “We want you to understand how the genius of this man has made it possible for every home builder to build beautifully without spending more to achieve beauty than he now spends on senseless ugliness.”

Unfortunately, the project came to an end in less than a year. With the United States’ entry into World War I in 1917,

material shortages and the ensuing housing crisis put a stop to Wright’s and Richards's expansion plans. There was also personal contention: that same year, Wright sued Richards over issues with royalties and fees and won a settlement in 1918, putting an end to their business relationship.

Fewer than twenty American SystemBuilt Homes remain in the Midwest, mostly in Milwaukee. But this experience proved foundational for Wright’s later work. For example, the Usonian Homes, while built custom for homeowners instead of standardized, was a series of houses also intended for middle-income buyers and used the inexpensive construction methods he’d learned in earlier years.

In Chicago, there are two known American System-Built Homes in Beverly, landmarked by the city in 1993. Originally intended to be a whole subdivision of Wright-designed residences—known as the Ridge Homes—the housing stock was reflective of the upper-middle-class sensibilities of the neighborhood and were on the larger, expensive end of the Wright model houses, priced at roughly $6,000 each.

“I never in a million years thought we would own a Frank Lloyd Wright house,”

INTERVIEW

"I would rather solve the small house problem than build anything else I can think of.” said Mike Wilk. A thirty-year-old engineer, Wilk lives at the H. Howard Hyde House on 10541 S. Hoyne Avenue with his wife, Katie, 31, who works in science research strategy at the University of Chicago.

The Wilks previously lived in the southwest suburb of Berwyn and were only casually in the market when their realtor found the house in 2017, which at that point had been listed for a couple years and was below their price expectations for a house with such “architectural and historical significance.” The location was also meaningful for the couple, as Mike’s grandparents had previously lived on that block and a surrounding block up until Mike was about five years old. “I was old enough that I remembered everything, and it was very much a homecoming feeling for me,” Wilk said.

Given the restoration work done by previous owners, the house was surprisingly modern to the Wilks, though it did come with some quirks, like a hard-to-find front door and a bathroom balcony (“We use it as a greenhouse”). Since moving in nearly two years ago, they’ve been fascinated with learning more about the home, using Ancestry.com to trace its ownership and taking trips to Milwaukee to tour other American System-Built Homes.

This fascination with architecture and history is the same reason why their neighbors, Debbie and Dave Nemeth, have lived in the other American SystemBuilt house for more than twenty-six years.

Debbie is a graphic designer at a marketing agency and also works with her husband, semi-retired, at their real estate investing company. They live at 10410 S. Hoyne Avenue at the Guy C. Smith House, which was named for the original owner and built as a model home for the planned subdivision.

The couple are long-time Wright admirers. Debbie said that at age seventeen, she received her first book about Wright as a gift from her then-boyfriend, now-husband Dave. Since then, she’s hosted periodic tours of her home through the Beverly Area Planning Association and the Chicago Architecture Center’s walking tours and has previously served a nine-year tenure on the board of the Frank Lloyd Wright

Building Conservancy, which works with homeowners to preserve the aesthetics of Wright houses while also updating them for modern life.

In June 2017, the Nemeths hosted a onehundred-year birthday party for their house and invited the other American SystemBuilt homeowners in the Chicagoland area, including the Wilks and the residents of the Oscar A. Johnson House in Evanston. She found an immediate connection with the other architecture enthusiasts. “I realized at the party that I had spent so much time with [them] that I had neglected all my other guests,” Debbie Nemeth said, detailing how they would roam from room to room, comparing aspects of their houses, from fireplace design and sink placement—even down to the trim.

“I realized I didn’t want this to be the only time that we would see each other,” she said. So she and the other homeowners— about eight of them altogether—have since organized their own fan club-slashsupport group. Every few months, they meet at each other’s homes to talk about the projects they’re working on and compare observations on how Wright’s vision for the houses have been interpreted differently from builder to builder. They’re in the middle of planning their next meetup at the Delbert W. Meier House in Monona, Iowa, which is owned by former Chicago residents.

Though Wright never got to see this particular vision become a reality, his work not only influenced generations of architects, it also fostered a love of craft among enthusiasts, which was really his goal all along in designing an alternative to the cookie-cutter houses of the early 1900s.

Katie Wilk, who lives in the H. Howard Hyde House, agreed with this sentiment.

“There’s something meaningful about being part of the history of a home and trying to help keep it alive.” Taylor Moore is a freelance writer covering culture and urban development in Chicago.

She last wrote about equitable zoning and aldermanic prerogative for the Weekly. She can be found on Twitter at @taylormundo.

Life in the Doughnut Cheryl Johnson talks about growing up in Altgeld Gardens and the future of environmental justice AS TOLD TO QUINN MYERS

A

ltgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes sit about as far south as you can go in Chicago. Wedged between Lake Calumet, West Pullman, and South Deering, the almost 1,600-unit CHA-owned development is notably isolated, removed from business districts and most public transportation options. Altgeld also lies in what has become known as the “toxic doughnut”; emissions and lingering waste from former refineries and steel mills in the area have been linked to widespread public health issues in the community, including, historically, some of the highest cancer rates in Chicago.

Many of those health risks were brought to light by Hazel Johnson, a community activist who has become known as the “mother of environmental justice.” Before passing away in 2011, Johnson spent decades advocating for stricter environmental regulations and area cleanups through her nonprofit People for Community Recovery (PCR). Her advocacy and organizing took her all over the country and to Washington, D.C., where she met several sitting presidents and testified before Congress.

Like her mother, Cheryl Johnson organizes against polluters and advocates for stricter environmental regulations through PCR, where she now serves as executive director.

Speaking in a converted Altgeld unit that serves as PCR’s office, Cheryl talked passionately about the decades of injustice and neglect her community continues to battle. She also spoke

tenderly about her family and vibrant social network in Altgeld—a “village” she’s dedicated her life to making a healthier and happier place.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How long has your family been at Altgeld?

This community was built in the forties... [it was] one of the first four public housing [projects] built in the city of Chicago. It was for the returning veterans [from] WWII, particularly African Americans, they didn’t have a place to live once they came back from the war. So, we moved out here March 18, 1962, because my uncle [was a veteran.].

It didn’t matter as long as someone in the family had some veteran status [that] made you eligible to move in. And then I think, right there, at the time that we moved in, that’s when it turned over to be public housing, they opened the door for anyone, you didn’t have to be a veteran.

This is federal property. And it was annexed too. Because it used to be in Riverdale, we used to be in Riverdale, and then the city acquired this land, built Altgeld.

What was it like growing up here?

It was the best place. I’m fifty-eight years old. I’ve been living out here for fifty-seven APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

INTERVIEW

years. Because it’s a good community. When I was growing up, it was the best place to raise a kid. It was self-contained, but we had our own grocery stores, we had our own business strip that was operated and owned by residents from the community. People from the community worked in the school system. I remember when we had truant officers. If you didn’t come to school, they’d knock on your door. If you was outside, they was snatching you, taking you to school. So we had a whole lot of cohesiveness. And the social equity in the community is still high to me today. I raised my two kids, my kids is thirty-one and thirty-three, and I never had to pay for a babysitter, you know.

Because I’ve been doing this work for thirty-two years. So it was sometimes I’m at community meetings, that I won’t make it home in time when my kids get out of school. But my kids knew where to go. They didn’t have one house they could go to, they had several houses they could go to, and I could trust that they going to let my kids stay there, feed my kids until I get home. All I had to do was call them and say look, go pick up my kids from school and keep them for me, I’ll be home. We don’t give value to that though. The only value we give is that we paying today, 300-some dollars for one kid a week, for childcare. That’s a lot.

Do you think that social equity you talked about gets forgotten when we think about communities or neighborhoods?

QUINN MYERS

“If I’m hungry and I don’t have any food because my money is short, I could go to one of my neighbors, or call one of my friends, and say look, I need a meal to feed my babies.”

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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We don’t place value [on it]. I don’t think it’s forgotten, [but] people don’t look at it as a value. If I’m hungry and I don’t have any food because my money is short, I could go to one of my neighbors, or call one of my friends, and say look, I need a meal to feed my babies. Many times I do that, we all do that. We’d feed ya right up in here, right now.

And that’s important. When I grew up out here, there wasn’t a thing of cussing in the street, for example, around grown people.

And grown people, if [I was] misbehaving, [they’d] have the right to snatch me up, whoop me, send me home, take me to my ma, and then I get another whooping, and then if my daddy around I get another. You know. And I think that’s what a village was about.

What I love about this community, everybody had a plan. That it wasn’t just to finish high school, you either finish high school or work in an industry like the steel mill, like my brothers did, or you go to college. I think today, Altgeld, still out of all

the public housing, [is] one of the highest areas that have sent kids to college. And the most important thing that I give a lot of social value to is that my friends, [who] I was friends with at one years old, they still my friends today. My friends still come out, even though a majority of my friends doesn’t live out here. But we still be around, and their kids.

When did your mother start getting involved in environmental justice work?

The day my mother moved out here, my mother been a community activist. She was heavily engaged, I always remember my mother being active in the community, doing stuff for the kids particularly. Taking us on trips, Riverview, Adventureland, all those different types of amusement parks, she used to organize and take maybe ten buses.

She had other parents being chaperones and stuff like that. And she always was engaged in the community. She advocated to us that we needed a community center. She fought to get repairs that needed to be done. And one of the most important things that she did for public housing, she eradicated leadbased paint and asbestos from all public housing in the city of Chicago.

My mother founded this organization in 1979, June of 1979. She doesn’t remember the exact date, but we’ll be forty years old, dealing with community related issues. But I think we became incorporated October 25, 1982, and our primary focus of what we do is around the lens of environmental justice.

Because it tends to bring more solutions to some of the issues we’ve been addressing, particularly some of the industrial pollution that happens in this area. She labeled our community the toxic doughnut, because we are in the center of the doughnut, outside the perimeters of polluting entities—fifty documented landfills [and] one of the largest sewage treatment facilities in the area. So, she felt that we had a right to know about what these industries have [and their] impact on public health.

And when she started doing the research, and talking to the U.S. EPA, about our community being exposed to these environmental hazards, they didn’t have the jurisdiction to work with communities. [So] she started lobbying with elected officials, and talking to people within Region 5 here about why there’s no resources for community, but they tell us that they were just mandated to work with academic institutions and to regulate industry. [Ed.

INTERVIEW

note: The EPA breaks up the United States into regions consisting of several states for administrative purposes; Illinois, along with Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, belongs in Region 5.] But if industry is harming communities, where’s our protection? So she starts speaking, she starts going on a national front, she starts working with other groups around the country, and they lobby the Clinton Administration.

That’s when Clinton came up with the Common Sense Initiative, and they worked on a lot of policy around paper mills and emissions from industrial processes. [Ed. note: the Common Sense Initiative was a four-year program aimed at developing costeffective ways to cut down on pollution and standardize environmental regulations across six major industries.] [Clinton also] created Executive Order 12898, the environmental justice executive order. That order opened up the EPA to provide resources, technical assistance, and to work with communities, and gave us, the community, the right to know about the operation of facilities in our community.

What would you consider the biggest accomplishment of your and your mother’s advocacy work?

Well, seeing environmental justice be part of the conversations today. My mother took a big hit, I seen her cry many times, I used to tell her [it’s] not even worth it. When you go down to your state legislator and they tell you, “Well, the garbage got to go somewhere, why not your neighborhood,” or [get] called a big mouth, or “she don’t know what she talking about” because the perception of people in public housing [is that] we’re less educated and we’re dependent on government assistance. “You already live on government so why not let government dump on you,” that type of abuse. So, it’s interesting that in her speeches, she testified at Congressional hearings about the impact of what we doing with the chemicals, is that it’s depleting the ozone, changing our weather pattern...today we call it climate change.

It’s to see stuff that my mother talked about thirty-five years ago, to see that we’re addressing those issues today because she called it out. And nobody is talking about it in the eighties about this. And that we know how to dirty up this society but we have no plans or work for us to clean it up. We don’t have people trained to clean it up. And now we’re training people to clean it up.

But her vision was, to create...an open environmental lab, I’ll never forget when she said that.

What would that environmental lab look like?

We just need government, university, businesses, and communities to be able to come together to solve some of the problems, for our future generations. So my goal is to really create this environmental center that [my mother] always wanted. She wanted to see where government is involved, university is playing a role, and community is coming together. Pairing community with college students probably is the best thing that I see she was talking about, because they both learning. But training other folk to be scientists, because one of the things I understand is that we need to have something in place in [the] community that will teach people, that will inspire them to go to school to become environmental engineers, environmental social workers. Or to just be environmental chemists, to change the stuff from dirty to green.

To teach people, to teach community folks, and to bring universities down, to come up with real solutions, do real handson practices in the community, for our soil remediation, emergency preparedness and response, because we seeing a whole lot of that around here. To be able to work with water reclamation district, and to have training models that reflect what their operation is, so if a kid don’t want to go to college, he can go straight to the water reclamation district. We know that, with the American Chemical Society, they need more scientists. How do I partner with the American Chemical Society and prepare our kids from a community level, to inspire them to continue their education? Because the traditional way is not working now, you see more kids dropping out.

What’s one project you’re working on now?

CHA and public housing authorities around this country really don’t talk about the reason why they tear down public housing. It’s because for one, there was a lead epidemic that they didn’t want to be responsible for, lead poisoning. The second biggest thing was utility costs. [They] could never get a handle on the utility costs in managing public housing.

This is one of the solutions that I’m working on, creating one of the first

community-drive solar farm areas. We using three megawatts, our proposal is to generate ten megawatts...so we’d have an excess of seven. So we want to help offset some of the [costs in] neighborhoods, in this area, that have high utilities. The fortunate thing that we have in public housing here, in Altgeld, is our utilities are included in our rent. So we hope that whatever we sell will come back and help develop programs, and help develop economic development, help residents start business all over again. That would be an anchor for us.

And if the Red Line Extension...I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen, but they spent too [much] taxpayer money doing the assessment, doing the environmental impact stuff…that’d be awesome for me, to take one train ride from here to Loyola University, to the end of the line, from one end of the line to the other end of the line. I mean how many kids would take that to go to Loyola University, or any other one?

Quinn Myers is an audio and print reporter based in Pilsen. He previously covered the 25th Ward aldermanic race for the Weekly.

What’s it like to live here today?

It’s different. One of the biggest challenges that I see in my community, instead of fighting for what’s right, we adjust to that issue. Instead of fighting and knowing that it’s wrong, we don’t get engaged like we used to. Due to fear, due to the epidemic of violence that’s going on. And poor leadership.

This is the poorest leadership that I’ve seen since I’ve been in this community. And it’s been going on for almost two decades, really.

CHA would have never gave us this unit if we continued to fight with them. So we learned that fighting with them is not the right course of action. It’s getting engaged with them to force them to do what’s right.

[Ed. note: In 2012, the CHA unveiled its plan to demolish Altgeld Gardens as part of its Plan for Transformation. After protests from hundreds of Altgeld residents and a campaign

by PCR to place Altgeld on the National Register of Historic Places, the CHA eventually scrapped the plan.]

[The CHA has a] better administration today than I’ve ever seen, living out here.

I’ve been engaged with my community since I was twenty-four years old, so I had to get engaged with the administrators of public housing, with the CHA...it’s been bad leadership, bad practice for many, many years. But these last four years, you’ve seen a positive change. You seen the administrators really want to help improve the life of residents in public housing, to make them self-sufficient. APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

GOVERNMENT

Filed Away

ELLEN HAO

For the second year in a row, realtor advocates hold up eviction-sealing legislation.

BY IAN HODGSON

T

he first thing to understand is that an eviction filing is not an eviction order. Think of an eviction filing like an arrest—a legal action that in no way indicates guilt. An eviction order, on the other hand, is the result of a court’s decision in favor of the landlord who filed the eviction. Thousands of evictions are filed in Cook County every year, and yet over one-third do not result in an eviction order.

This is a distinction that some landlords in Illinois either ignore or fail to grasp.

Every year, over 15,000 households face a new eviction filing on their record, despite having no judgement ruled against them.

Consumer rating agencies—which landlords rely on to screen prospective tenants— penalize households that have an eviction filing on their record, making it more and more difficult for these households to secure affordable housing.

For the second year in a row, a bill that would address this issue has failed to pass.

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T

he latest iteration of the bill— House Bill 2299, sponsored by state Representative Delia Ramirez, a Northwest Side progressive who was sworn in earlier this year—would require circuit court clerks to immediately impound eviction files until the court can rule on the eviction action. Under current law, when a landlord files a residential eviction action, the court file is public record, meaning that anyone can see the court file. The proposed bill would impound these court files until a judge can determine the validity of the claims. An impounded court file can only be viewed by the plaintiff (the landlord), the defendant (the tenant), and their respective legal counsel. Anyone else would require a court order to view the eviction file.

In cases where the court does not file an eviction order—the court finds in favor of the tenant, the complaint is dropped, or the tenant and landlord come to an agreement—the eviction filing would

remain impounded. In cases where the court finds in favor of the landlord and the court files an eviction order, the court file would be un-impounded and available to the public.

During this time, any member of the public could view the eviction order and associated court files—including prospective landlords and consumer reporting agencies. However, after five years, these court files, too, would be sealed, and thus only viewable with a court order.

The bill would also allow judges to impound court files even if they find in favor of the landlord and an eviction order is filed.

The bill lays out examples where the judge could order a discretionary impoundment of the court file, including cases where the judgment for the landlord is $1,000 or less, the tenant has a reasonable defense, or if the landlord and tenant reach an agreement allowing the tenant to remain in the property.

The court file would also remain impounded in a foreclosure-related eviction or not-for-

cause eviction. This protects tenants who are evicted because their landlord is foreclosed upon or in cases where the landlord decides not to renew a tenant’s lease.

Finally, the bill would prohibit consumer reporting agencies from disclosing sealed or impounded court files to prospective landlords. Eviction files are frequently used in assessments of prospective tenants that consumer reporting agencies provide landlords. Consumer reporting agencies frequently keep their own records of eviction filings. This means that if a court file ever existed on the public record, consumer reporting agencies can keep a record of the court file—even if the court file is later sealed or impounded. Consumer reporting agencies can then use these sealed or impounded eviction files in their assessment of prospective tenants. The proposed bill would prohibit the disclosure of sealed or impounded court records, meaning that consumer reporting agencies could not use

GOVERNMENT

the sealed or impounded court records in their report to landlords.

T

he bill passed the House’s JudiciaryCivil Committee’s Commercial Law subcommittee in a five-to-two vote—the subcommittee’s two Republicans voting against—but the Judiciary-Civil Committee failed to call the bill to a vote in the allotted amount of time, resulting in it being referred back to the Rules Committee, where bills can remain in limbo for the rest of the session. Having passed the deadline to be heard this session, the bill is in dire straits. “We came back with amendments to hopefully neutralize opposition in the committee,” Ramirez said. “However, after many meetings with the opposition…we weren’t able to come to an agreement.”

A similar bill sponsored by state Representative Theresa Mah, who represents parts of the South Side, also failed to pass last session. The current iteration of the bill included “substantial revisions and concessions to the bill from last year,” Ramirez told the Weekly. Still, the two sides were unable to agree to terms that would allow the bill to move forward.

Ramirez expressed frustration with realtors and landlord advocates, who she says feel pressured to make hard stands against eviction filing and rent control bills that were proposed this session. “Nothing that we could have done on that bill would have gotten through negotiations,” Ramirez said.

“It’s actually been quite frustrating—how many negotiations and how many meetings went nowhere.”

Bob Palmer, the policy director of Housing Action Illinois, which helped draft the bill along with the Lawyers Committee for Better Housing, remains optimistic that progress on the bill is still possible. “We just need more time to make sure we have the votes to pass the bill and see what additional changes we can make to address concerns, while still providing meaningful reforms to expand access to sealing tenant eviction records,” he said.

Ramirez and Palmer hope to keep working the bill over the summer and reintroduce a revised version next session.

In the meantime, tenants with eviction filings on their records continue to struggle to find housing, as the Weekly’s Nicole Bond wrote in an essay about her experiences in the 2018 Housing Issue. “It’s not unusual for bills to take multiple years to pass the General Assembly. We plan to keep working on the issue,” Palmer said. “However, we

“The longer it takes us to pass reforms, the more people will be harmed” know that the longer it takes us to pass reforms, the more people will be harmed due to having an eviction filing on their record.”

A March 2018 report by the two groups sheds a light on the magnitude of the issue, estimating that “15,091 people each year ended up or will end up with a public eviction record despite having not eviction order or other judgement against them,” and that “landlords often presume culpability from the existence of an eviction filing on the public record.”

Many landlords may not understand the difference between an eviction filing and an eviction order, and often rely on consumer reporting agencies to assess prospective tenants. And relying on eviction records can give a misleading impression of the prospective tenant, as the online court records that landlords and consumer reporting agencies rely on are often incomplete or difficult to interpret, according to Housing Action Illinois.

To make matters worse, the tight lowincome housing market makes it even harder for low-income renters to find affordable accomodations. Demand for affordable housing vastly outstrips the available supply in the Chicago area, and recent trends indicate that the problem is only getting worse. In this climate of scarce affordable housing, it can be near-impossible for a low-income household with an eviction filing on their record to find appropriate accommodation.

Low-income families often face the choice between low-quality affordable housing and paying rents that are above their means. Either choice creates an environment which can lead to disputes with landlords.

C

onsumer reporting agencies may be partially to blame for the problem.

The reports they aggregate for landlords are often generalized scores that do not provide a complete picture of the prospective tenant.

Consumer reporting agencies use a variety of factors to assess prospective tenants, including credit scores, background checks, and eviction filings. Often, a prospective tenant is penalized even for the existence of an eviction filing, regardless

of the context of the case or whether the an eviction order was ever filed. When a landlord receives the recommendation, this information is often aggregated into an overall score, and the details—including the judgement of the eviction action—is buried in the details of the report, or not reported at all.

Consumer reporting agencies pull from online public records. But this information can be difficult to interpret. “[It’s] hard to tell the difference between what a eviction filing is and what an eviction order actually is,” said Palmer. “Some companies make a recommendation to the landlord based on a variety of factors including a eviction judgement or an eviction filing. Maybe the prospective landlord isn’t looking at an actual record—they’re just getting a recommendation from some company that compiled online data without any context or details about the case.”

This problem is compounded when consumer reporting agencies keep a private records, based on the information they pull from public records. This can lead to problems when their records include out-of-date information, which may not update when eviction records are sealed.

“Certain [consumer reporting agencies] cannot be trusted to report accurately on the data,” Palmer said. “We know that a lot of companies don’t update their records.”

HB229 would prohibit consumer reporting agencies from disclosing impounded or sealed eviction files or from including using these eviction files in their assessments of prospective tenants.

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andlord associations argue that the proposed bill would make difficult to screen prospective tenants. “Evictions are a costly and time consuming process,” said M. Jane Garvey, of Chicago Creative Investors Association, a local real estate advocacy group. “Knowing about a tenant’s past history with evictions is critical for landlords.”

Garvey argues that eviction filings are still pertinent information for many landlords. “Many eviction cases do not go to judgment. This does not mean that they are cases filed without cause. They still

cost the landlord a lot of money, time, and aggravation.”

Even an eviction filing often indicates that “there was an interruption to the income, or disturbances that were creating enough of a problem for the landlord to take an expensive and time consuming action,” Garvey said.

Furthermore, Garvey argues that the bill could hurt all renters, just because of a few bad actors. “If the cases are sealed, all tenants will pay the price for the increased risk. Tenants who have a series of repeat evictions will not be as easy to detect, so they will continue their damaging behavior.”

Other landlord advocates say that sealing eviction records would enable “serial evictees,” who jump from landlord to landlord, leaving before their eviction record catches up to them.

Such complaints are “far-fetched scenarios about the worst tenant you could possibly imagine, which doesn’t reflect the vast majority of people,” says Palmer. “If a tenant is going from building-to-building then they’re going to have a rental history that reflects that they keep moving. That’s something that the landlord could take into consideration.”

In fact, Palmer said there are a variety of different methods that landlords could use to screen prospective tenants that do not rely on eviction filings. “They could do a credit report, they could do direct landlord references, they could do home visits. There are a whole variety of things to screen a tenant.”

However this issue is resolved, it is clear that thousands of renters are being locked out of access to affordable housing that they need. Tenants who are evicted for legitimate reasons must, of course, be held accountable.

But eviction filings are, at best, an imperfect indicator that landlords and consumer reporting agencies continue to misuse when screening prospective tenants.

“We understand that landlords have an interest in having good tenants and reviewing the suitability of people to live in their building,” Palmer said. “If somebody is being evicted for nonpayment, we certainly understand that that’s part of the public record and landlords need to take that into consideration…We just feel like having an eviction filing without the judgment is not fair to the vast majority of people who have that eviction filing against them.” Ian Hodgson is a contributing editor at the Weekly.

APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

DEVELOPMENT

More Than a Church

How the potential sale of St. Adalbert threatens more than just the loss of a church, but a centuries-old anchor for the community

BY AMY QIN

AMY QIN

I

t’s a few minutes after noon and families are still trickling in through the large wooden doors of St. Adalbert Church.

Young and old are quietly making their way through the pews. A Kimball organ, one of the largest pipe organs in the Midwest, plays its final notes from the upper floor as Father Michael Enright and Deacon Juan Dominguez begin the introductory rites for mass.

Every Sunday morning, St. Adalbert holds two Catholic masses: one in English and one in Spanish. A Polish mass is also held at the beginning of every month, a modern-day testament to St. Adalbert’s historical roots as a church built by an immigrant Polish community more than a century ago.

The church sits on 17th Street between Ashland and Paulina, and its two defining 185-foot towers are visible from the platform of the 18th Street Pink Line “L” stop. Built in 1912 by architect Henry Schlacks, St. Adalbert was modeled after St. Paul’s Basilica in Rome. The building itself is magnificent, built in the neoclassical style with stained-glass rose windows and Italian marble adorning the space throughout.

Recently, however, the the future of St. Adalbert has become uncertain. According to a listing on commercial real estate site SVN as of September 2018, the Archdiocese of Chicago is selling St. Adalbert Church.

No buyer has been disclosed yet, though a number of religious and non-religious 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 17, 2019

organizations have expressed interest, according to Anne Maselli, a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese.

St. Adalbert is not only a beacon of Pilsen’s Catholic heritage, it is also a reminder of Chicago history. “It’s a symbol of the neighborhood’s working-class and immigrant background,” said Alicia Torres, a parishioner at Sunday mass, “and it’s important that the symbols of that remain today.”

Since moving to the Pilsen neighborhood in 1964, Torres has attended mass at St. Adalbert almost every Sunday and has never lived more than two blocks from the church. She raised her family around St. Adalbert as well; her daughters attended school on the campus of St. Adalbert’s premises and one was married in the basilica.

“I pray every day for this church not to close,” Torres continued, fighting back tears.

“It’s like a second home to me.”

One of Alicia Torres’s daughters, Blanca Torres, has lead efforts for the past few years to save the church as the Vice President of the St. Adalbert Preservation Society.

“St. Adalbert was where I grew up,” Blanca Torres reflected. “I’ve lived across the street, I’ve had this church in my life since I was a baby, and I consider it an honor and a privilege to be part of the movement to save the church.”

This is not the first time the church has been under threat of permanent closure. In

2016, St. Adalbert Parish was closed and merged with the neighboring St. Paul Parish as part of the Archdiocese’s Renew My Church initiative, an effort to consolidate parishes that were facing limited financial resources. The following October, the Archdiocese of Chicago announced the sale of the St. Adalbert church building to the Chicago Academy of Music, which would have converted the church into a music hall.

The deal fell apart a few months after the announcement.

“I pray every day for this church not to close. It’s like a second home to me.”

Maselli expressed, in a written statement to the Weekly on April 3, that the decision to sell St. Adalbert this time was still “consistent with the broader Renew My Church” process. When asked about why St. Adalbert in particular needed to be closed, Maselli said that it was the best outcome for the parish as a whole.

“Not unexpectedly, these reconfigurations will, in certain cases, result in different needs for worship and

supporting spaces, as is the case with the St. Adalbert parish campus,” said Maselli. “The parish determined that the other existing church spaces could better support the parish’s needs going forward.”

Selling St. Adalbert would be both a cost savings and a revenue opportunity at a time when the Archdiocese is financially strapped.

“The scaffolding has been up [on the towers] for five years, and from my understanding it’s costing about $12,000 a month,” said Julie Sawicki, president of the predominantly Polish Society of St. Adalbert (SOSA). Along with regular maintenance costs, the building also needs substantial repairs. Maselli estimates that the needed repairs could “total in the millions of dollars.”

“The Archdiocese is in a financial crunch,” said Ward Miller, Executive Director of Preservation Chicago, partially due to recent costs associated with public relations as well as an underfunded priests’ pension fund. According to the Sun-Times, about $100 million in proceeds from a recent sale of a parking lot at Holy Name Cathedral downtown will go towards “repaying money that was borrowed to cover the financial cost of clergy sex abuse claims.”

Although it is uncertain where the potential proceeds from St. Adalbert’s sale would go, it’s clear that the real estate is highly valuable. Sawicki estimates that the land value of St. Adalbert alone could sell

DEVELOPMENT

for around $4 to $6 million.

The battle for St. Adalbert is also reflective of a familiar narrative in Pilsen: as property values have soared, more and more developers have bought up properties, pushing out current residents in pursuit of tenants with deeper pockets.

A year ago, the Archdiocese closed down St. Ann Church, located in Pilsen a few blocks from St. Adalbert. Earlier this year, Block Club Chicago reported that the Archdiocese sold the church to a private developer for $1.35 million to convert into “residential living.”

The Archdiocese has cited declining parishioner enrollments as the primary rationale for its church closure and parish consolidation strategy in Pilsen. But Moises Moreno, a community organizer with the Pilsen Alliance, argues that the issue is broader than that.

“It’s all tied to the phenomenon of gentrification. As families move out and people get displaced or evicted, it reflects on the parish,” he said.

Rising rents have pushed out a large number of the neighborhood's working class and Mexican-American community, many of whom constitute the parishioner base at churches like St. Adalbert and St. Ann. Studies have shown that between 2000 and 2016, Pilsen lost more than 10,000 of its Latino residents, representing a twenty-

six percent decline.

Moreno cites that the Archdiocese has historically lacked genuine engagement and dialogue with the community. “They don’t really have a clear understanding of what community relations really looks like, and the impact that it has in parishes and communities of color,” he said.

In an email statement on behalf of the Archdiocese, Maselli wrote that the “Archdiocese and the parish are sensitive to the long history of St. Adalbert and its impact on the Pilsen community,” and that “input will be sought from a variety of constituents, both internally and externally.”

But unlike previous church closures, where the churches had been closed for years before the decision to sell, or the community was not as invested in saving the church, the proposed closure of St. Adalbert rallied various community groups and nonprofits to propose several potential solutions to save the church.

Blanca Torres and the St. Adalbert Preservation Society have sought help from the Vatican itself. In 2017, the group filed a parishioner appeal to oppose the church’s sale to the Chicago Academy of Music on the grounds that the Academy was a secular entity that was prohibited from owning the church under canon law of the Catholic Church.

Over the course of two years, the appeal

has moved through the courts, ultimately reaching the highest judicial authority in the Catholic Church, which ruled that St. Adalbert is still a sacred site and will remain within the parish of St. Paul.

The decree is significant because it could provide support for the case against selling St. Adalbert. It means that under canon law, the Archdiocese cannot sell the property to a non-sacred, secular entity, such as a private developer, because the church is still a sacred site and must be used only for religious purposes, Torres told the Weekly.

“The fact that we were able to do the Vatican appeal did help us in remaining open as long as we did, with masses still going on,” Torres said. “I think it was a major part of why St. Adalbert is still around today.”

However, the ruling is non-binding, and there are limitations to how the decree will play into the ultimate decision from the Archdiocese, which holds the final authority over St. Adalbert as the legal owner of the property. The decree also only protects the church building itself, and not the rest of the property including the convent, rectory, and parking lot, which parishioners would like to keep together.

Another idea is to designate St. Adalbert as a Chicago Landmark, a City of Chicago ordinance that protects historically significant buildings from demolition.

Such a designation would also qualify St. Adalbert for funds from the City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development to repair the exterior of the church building, according to Miller. However, designating St. Adalbert as a Chicago Landmark would require cooperation from the Archdiocese.

Still, the significance of preserving St. Adalbert goes beyond efforts to invoke the institutional strength of canon law or landmark status. For parishioners, staff, and volunteers, keeping the spirit of St. Adalbert alive every week is a testament to the legacy of both the church and the community it serves.

“It’s a community-wide effort,” said Torres. It is the parishioners, staff, and volunteers that keep the spirit of St. Adalbert alive every week. “The committed people of St. Adalbert, those are the unsung heroes.” Amy Qin is a contributor to the Weekly. She last wrote about a neighborhood's effort to save a community garden in Englewood, and has previously written about St. Adalbert.

AMY QIN

APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

HOUSING

What Is the CHA Doing?

Nearly two decades on, the legacy of the agency’s Plan for Transformation haunts Chicago.

BY JAKE BITTLE

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his year, nearly a quarter-century after the federal government first took over the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), the agency charged with housing the poorest Chicagoans will finally complete the goal it set in the early days after that takeover. The goal, outlined in CHA’s Plan for Transformation, was to build or renovate 25,000 new units of affordable housing.

Building those 25,000 homes was supposed to take the CHA ten years at most, according to an agreement between the agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Instead it has taken nearly twice as long. And on its way to fulfilling that obligation, the CHA has changed not only how it defines a “new unit of affordable housing” but also its overall approach to providing housing, so that the 25,000 number has become almost meaningless. Some of these changes are part of a nationwide move away from building new housing and toward privatization, while others are unique to Chicago.

In the 2017 Housing Issue, the Weekly reported on the CHA’s failure to rebuild housing on the State Street Corridor in Bronzeville, a linked network of highrise projects that at one time housed more than 100,000 people. Since that story was published, the transformation in the CHA’s housing strategy has become even clearer, as 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 17, 2019

have its consequences: a significant decrease in affordable housing at a time when many parts of Chicago are becoming less affordable than ever.

This year’s version of the agency’s annual plan, which it’s required to submit to HUD, highlights the scope of the change. The agency’s banner item for 2019 is a mixed-income housing project in Little Italy that will be paired with a new Chicago Public Library branch. The project is one of three combination housing and library projects the CHA has planned as part of an effort to, in the words of a city press release, “rethink old assumptions and come up with new design solutions” and “break the mold of what world-class libraries and housing can look like.” Another two library-housing projects, both on the Far North Side, have opened this year—one in Irving Park and another in West Ridge.

From one standpoint, the authority’s new emphasis on pairing housing with other services such as libraries or grocery stores can be seen as an attempt to learn from its past mistakes—the early State Street Corridor redevelopments were clusters of mid-rise housing that remained surrounded for years by brownfields and vacant properties, far from complete neighborhoods. From another standpoint, the focus on such projects seems to indicate that the agency places less weight than it did

in the early 2000s on making up the deficit in public housing units created by the Plan for Transformation.

Forthcoming construction along the State Street Corridor seems poised to follow the same pattern: a 900-unit mixed-income development on the site of the former Harold Ickes homes in the South Loop, expected to break ground later this year after a decade of delay, will include multiple retail stores and a dog spa. The forthcoming fourth phase of the Stateway Gardens redevelopment, meanwhile, is anchored around a Pete’s Fresh Market with more than 200 parking spaces and will likely include about 150 public housing units. (Stateway Gardens originally contained more than 1,600 lowincome apartments.) And in the Ida B. Wells development farther east, a sizable parcel of CHA land was used not to build any housing but rather to build a large-scale Mariano’s grocery store which also had more than one hundred parking spaces.

Beyond these projects, the CHA’s creation of new public housing has been slow over the past few years; at the same time, other city programs designed to create more affordable housing on the private market, such as the Affordable Requirements Ordinance, have underperformed expectations. The authority renovated the former Sears headquarters on the West Side, which resulted in sixty-six new public-

housing apartments, and has completed smaller projects in Washington Park, Pilsen, and on the site of the former Maplewood Courts housing project on the Near West Side. These projects, nearly all of which were completed well behind schedule, have resulted in the delivery of a few hundred units of public housing for Chicagoans who make under thirty percent of the Chicago area median income (about $25,000 for a family of four). The developments also include a few hundred more apartments for those who make between forty and eighty percent of the area median income.

To some extent, the authority can blame this shift on factors beyond its control: since the recession, construction costs have risen by more than ten percent, and Congress has slowly winnowed away the federal funding pool for new public housing construction over the past few decades. But some activist groups, including the Chicago Housing Initiative, have argued that the authority’s shift away from new construction represents a deviation from the proposals outlined in the Plan for Transformation and only began once outgoing mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011. Thus, despite the fact that it owns hundreds of acres of vacant land across the city, the authority for the most part does not build new housing anymore; indeed, in its latest annual plans the agency has proposed selling off or leasing much of the

HOUSING

In its current iteration, the ultimate result of the Plan for Transformation is not an evolution of Chicago’s public housing landscape, but an erasure of it. extra land it still owns. Instead, the CHA has focused on the expansion of its projectbased voucher (PBV) programs. A PBV development is an existing private property whose landlord enters into an agreement with the CHA: the landlord rents her property to low-income residents and the CHA subsidizes the rent. The CHA has counted new project-based vouchers (PBVs) toward its 25,000-unit goal since 2010, and such contracts have accounted for almost exactly half of the 5,500 housing units the authority has delivered in that period.

Given that the CHA has long since slashed staffing for public housing construction and maintenance, outsourcing most of its new units to private landlords might seem like the only practical decision.

But the agency’s reliance on PBVs has led to some of the same issues as its reliance on the Section 8 voucher program more generally: so long as it focuses on PBVs and vouchers, the CHA can only build new units in neighborhoods where vouchers are accepted or where landlords apply to join the PBV program. And since white and wealthy neighborhoods have a well-documented history of illegally refusing to accept lowincome tenants, PBVs as well as housing vouchers run the risk of reproducing the dynamics of segregation. A 2017 study from the University of Chicago’s Chicago Policy Research Team found that South Shore had more voucher-based tenants as thirty of the low-poverty neighborhoods CHA aimed to

push those renters toward.

More recently the CHA has experimented with another initiative, the Real Estate Acquisition Program (REAP), which has failed to pan out as expected.

REAP allows the CHA to buy newly completed buildings and operate them as public housing in perpetuity. Rather than paying landlords to rent their buildings as mixed-income developments for five to thirty years, as with PBVs, REAP in theory would enable the CHA to build permanent footholds of public housing in wealthier, whiter areas that have none. But according to the agency’s own numbers, the program has yielded practically nonexistent results: since 2013 the CHA has projected that it would acquire 1,355 units through the program. It has acquired seventy-five. (The CHA did not respond to a request for comment.)

In recent years the CHA has also embraced the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program, an Obama-administration initiative that taps private funding to pay for repairs to public housing projects. Chicago is far from the only city that has begun transitioning about half its public housing portfolio to RAD—Baltimore, San Francisco, and New York, to name just a few, have also transitioned thousands of their units to private management. Some residents and activists have criticized the program as an under-the-radar attempt to privatize public housing, but given that critical federal

funding for public housing renovation has all but dried up—the nationwide repair backlog is over $30 billion—RAD likely represents the lesser of two evils. Some cities, including New York, have instituted safeguards to protect landlords from hiking rents for RAD apartments, and a coalition of organizers called Keeping the Promise is urging Chicago to do the same.

For the CHA, some of these ongoing RAD conversions are also performing double duty as “new public housing units” delivered under the Plan for Transformation.

In this arrangement, existing affordable housing developments are “converted” to RAD developments, and the CHA leverages private capital to pay for their renovation and maintenance. As with PBVs, executing a RAD conversion does not add any new affordable housing in the city, but merely protects existing apartments. Most of these are housing developments for seniors, whereas all the high-rises knocked down at the turn of the century were family housing.

The RAD and PBV programs provide necessary repairs to rapidly aging developments, but the CHA’s reliance on these initiatives to fulfill the Plan for Transformation is perplexing. The Plan was conceived as a way to recoup the destruction of at least 100,000 peoples’ homes, perhaps the largest net loss of affordable housing in the history of the United States. Twenty years on, most of the “reconstruction” now comes in the form of repairs to senior

housing developments that predate the Plan for Transformation and were not affected by it.

It’s still unclear how the CHA’s housing strategy may change under a new mayor and without the Plan for Transformation to constrain them. Two councilmembers introduced bills last summer to strengthen the city’s affordable housing regulations, but neither passed. As federal funding has decreased and the cost of construction has ballooned, cities across the country have all but stopped building new public housing and have instead subsidized private developers to offer apartments at lower rents. It was unlikely that the CHA would ever stand as an exception to this rule.

Given Chicago’s history, the decision to rely on vouchers and RAD conversions is not merely a practical response to larger trend. In its current iteration, the ultimate result of the Plan for Transformation is not an evolution of Chicago’s public housing landscape, but an erasure of it. The communities that the CHA demolished in the early 2000s will now only reappear in fits and starts, if they reappear at all.

And as rents across the city continue to rise, hundreds of thousands of low-income Chicagoans will have fewer places than ever to look for assistance in finding a home they can afford. Jake Bittle is a former editor-in-chief of the Weekly.

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silvestrolab.com/architecture c o r r i d o r o f f i c e . c o m / r e s e a r c h JAMES@SILVESTRODESIGNOPS.COM APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

DEVELOPMENT

Back to the Land Trust A new generation of community land trusts looks back to the movement’s radical roots.

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

GABBY FEBLAND

I

n February, the Hyde Park Herald reported that 4th Ward Alderman Sophia King had floated the idea of forming a community land trust in Bronzeville. Created in partnership with GN Bank, the land trust would provide a way for nonprofits to cheaply acquire and develop vacant lots in Bronzeville. “We’re not [averse] to developers developing, but we want to make sure that money stays in the community first and we harness the equity that’s in the land,” she said. (When reached for comment, King’s office said the proposal is still in its early stages.)

In her losing campaign for the 20th Ward aldermanic office, Nicole Johnson also suggested the creation of a community land trust, intended to combat displacement as Woodlawn feels the effects of Obama Center–related investment and speculation. And the newly elected 25th Ward Alderman, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, is the former executive director of Pilsen Alliance, a neighborhood organization that has advocated for community land trusts as part of its affordable housing plan.

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All of which is to say, community land trusts—nonprofits that buy land and lease it out to low-income homeowners—are, at least rhetorically, increasingly popular among politicians eager to signal their commitment to fighting for affordability in the face of rapid neighborhood change.

The last few decades have seen the formation of several community land trusts (CLTs) in and around Chicago, including the controversial citywide Chicago Community Land Trust. However, there are currently no CLTs focused solely on the South Side. That will soon change: over the next couple months, a group of nonprofits and community organizations will begin acquiring property in Chicago Lawn and, later, Woodlawn, taking over vacant and foreclosed homes and leasing them to community members. Over time, they hope to expand to four or so neighborhoods in total, with about fifty homes in each area.

Community land trusts have a long and complicated history, stretching back through the urban crisis of the second half of the twentieth century, the Civil

Rights Movement, and back-to-the-land optimism. It’s been a contentious evolution, one that some critics argue has resulted in a kind of institutionalized toothlessness.

What started as a radical and democratic movement has given way to an affordable housing policy tool that, for all its benefits, fails to truly empower Black and brown communities.

This new land trust was formed in part by progressive housing organizers who rose to prominence for their militant activism in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. Whether it can restore the concept to its roots remains to be seen.

The new Chicago initiative’s lead organization is the Chicago Community Loan Fund (CCLF), a nonprofit lender that has been around since 1991. “The land trust is trying to accomplish a couple of things. As property values do increase in neighborhoods, we’re trying to maintain economic diversity, and trying to promote homeownership,” said Bob Tucker, the CCLF’s chief operating officer.

In one sense, then, the land trust is

intended as a preemptive strike against the displacement that can follow gentrification.

But it’s also part of the ongoing attempt to clean up after the housing crisis. Between 2007 and 2012, for instance, Chicago Lawn saw more than 500 foreclosure filings each year, according to the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul. And many of those buildings are still vacant, often because mortgage lenders hold them in a kind of administrative limbo, refusing to claim “official ownership.” Within the neighborhood, the land trust is one part of an ongoing effort by a number of Southwest Chicago community organizations to rehabilitate and restore those properties.

(The project is also tied to the foreclosure crisis in another sense: some of the land trust’s initial funding came from Bank of America, money from its $17 billion settlement with the Department of Justice over the sale of bundles of risky mortgages to investors.)

The CCLF is working with the Greater Southwest Development Corporation (GSDC), as well as Action Now and the

DEVELOPMENT

“The community land trust is not primarily concerned with common ownership. Rather, its concern is for ownership for the common good, which may or may not be combined with common ownership.”

Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, all community organizations or nonprofits that work on housing and development on the South Side. “Because there’s so much available, there’s already investors buying properties who want to flip them,” said Christine James, the director of operations at the GSDC. “How can we think about displaced families and what would actually work in a rapidly changing neighborhood?”

The trust will acquire the property from a couple of different places—some of it will come from the city, while other lots will be bought on the private market. Tucker also mentioned that they’ve been working with the Cook County Land Bank Authority, which owns dozens of properties, most of it vacant land, in West Woodlawn. Once the CLT owns the land, it will lease it out to local residents looking to buy a house.

(Not all of those people will necessarily be renters; some might be looking to downsize to smaller and more manageable houses.)

Tucker says that the land trust will be “real sensitive to the neighborhoods” it’s in. To that end, Woodlawn and Chicago Lawn, and any other new area the land trust expands into, will have their own community advisory boards, composed of residents from the area, that will offer guidance on outreach, expansion, and other issues pertaining to the neighborhood.

A

ttempts at communal ownership of land, usually animated by utopian hopes, have existed for centuries, but historians locate the roots of the community land trust in Southwest Georgia in 1968. There, activists affiliated with the civil rights movement’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—after taking a trip to Israel to study kibbutzes, the collective farms first organized by Labor Zionists—started New Communities, Inc on 5,700 acres of farm- and woodland.

There, they raised cattle, and grew corn, peanuts, and soybeans.

Charles Sherrod, one of the founders, argued at the time that the land trust would give Black people a way to fight back against

the terror of everyday life in the South.

“Land is the source of power, the source of all power. It’s the source of life. And with land a man holds in his hand the mechanism to control his destiny,” he said. “If a people is going to rise, it must have land.”

New Communities broke up after sixteen years, undone by drought and debt. (In 1999, the land trust was part of a successful class-action lawsuit alleging that the Department of Agriculture’s failure to provide proper loan assistance to thousands of Black farmers reflected racial bias at the agency.) In the early seventies, however, some of the people affiliated with New Communities wrote a book in which they coined the phrase “community land trust,” and described how the Southwest Georgia experiment provided a model for community-controlled development.

“The community land trust is not primarily concerned with common ownership,” they write. “Rather, its concern is for ownership for the common good, which may or may not be combined with common ownership.” The book goes on to sketch a vision of property that’s essentially decommodified, removed from the market through long-term leases with heavy restrictions.

Importantly, the authors also emphasize that the idea of community—“an overused, imprecise, and confusing word”—extends not just to residents living on the land, but also to others near the land, or those who have some vested interest in it. In the case of New Communities, that included local civil rights organizations tied to the land trust, businesses that bought from the trust, and Georgians living in the surrounding counties. In a broader sense, the authors add, the community encompasses “the community of all mankind.”

Concretely, this meant that CLT advocates suggested the formation of a tripartite structure within any individual land trust’s board of directors, one that would represent three distinct groups: leaseholders, residents of the land trust’s service area who didn’t live on the land, and the general

public. There were other characteristics sketched out too—the land trust was to be a nonprofit open to anyone living in the area it covered, and the board of directors should be democratically elected by CLT members.

In the late seventies, a couple of community land trusts—one in Tennessee, another in Maine—formed along the lines of this model. Like New Communities, both were rural; it wasn’t until 1980 that the first urban community land trust was established in Cincinnati. When it formed, the organizers behind it realized that the model created a decade earlier needed some adjustments to work in a city. In particular, activists in Cincinnati emphasized the need for land trusts that maintained affordable housing and helped disadvantaged, lowincome people beyond simply providing them with cheap access to land. “In the vocabulary of the liberation theology of that period, there should be a ‘preferential option for the poor,’” writes historian and CLT advocate John Emmeus Davis.

Throughout the rest of the 1980s, other urban land trusts formed, some of which still exist today. Much-lauded success stories include Dudley Neighbors, Inc in Boston, and the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont. A few decades later, after the onset of the housing crisis, land trusts—which, remember, primarily exist in low-income communities—gained attention because they were about eight times less likely to be in foreclosure than all other mortgage types combined. (That stat is obviously slightly skewed, since it includes subprime loans, but land trusts still went into foreclosure about seven times less often than loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration.) That finding sparked even more investment from large-scale philanthropic groups, like the Ford Foundation that had already taken an interest in CLTs. A 2016 report from the Center for American Progress estimated there are about 220 community land trusts in the United States.

But during that time, some people have also noted a shift in the way land

trusts have been employed, away from their beginnings as radically democratic community organizations. In a 2018 academic paper, James DeFilippis, Brian Stromberg, and Olivia R. Williams argue that the CLT has become a “tool for policy elites looking to create a subsidy-efficient stock of individualistic, owner-occupied homes.” In interviews with CLT executives, and through examinations of board statements, the authors note that the focus of most CLTs now seems to be on providing affordable housing, as opposed to creating a community of people in a neighborhood or city. “I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid, you can’t make me, I think you’re all nuts. That you’re taking the commune kind of approach to life. That’s not what we’re about. We’re about getting people into homeownership,” said the executive director of one land trust.

“There’s nothing radical about community, there’s no inherent political content in any kind of geographic scale of anything. The most durable expression of community control we have is rich white suburbs, [which] have spent last seventy-five years keeping Black and brown people out,” James DeFilippis, one of the paper’s authors, told the Weekly. “But if you’re talking about poor people and people of color, and at least working-class people, that is much more radical, because that’s not a set of people in a position to control much—full stop.”

But in today’s land trusts, Charles Sherrod’s bid for emancipation—the hope that a people’s ownership of land might allow it to “rise” and rebel against oppression—has in many cases been gutted of its most radical content.

O

ne example DeFilippis and his coauthors cite disapprovingly is the Chicago Community Land Trust (CCLT), a city program created in 2006. The CCLT provides low-income homebuyers with subsidies and property tax reductions if they purchase a home through the trust, but, as DeFilippis’s paper describes it: “Its board consists entirely of members appointed by the mayor, and its meetings are held at City APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

DEVELOPMENT

Hall. Though many community groups were initially involved in the creation of the CLT, there is not even a pretense of community control in its operations.” (The trust’s website notes that once the CCLT acquires 200 houses, a third of the board will consist of homeowners in the trust; at the moment, thirteen years since its inception, there are ninety-nine houses in its portfolio.)

A 2017 report from the Office of the Inspector General also found that the land trust was never given enough money from the city to fulfil its mission, and the city should either fully fund it or “sunset” the organization altogether. In response, The Department of Planning and Development promised that it would expand its operations and begin to fundraise more actively; it also said it would change the CCLT’s name, no longer classifying it as a “land trust”—a request the inspector general made because the organization does not actually acquire land.

A follow-up report from the inspector general, released this past February, praised the trust for hiring an executive director and making efforts to fundraise from outside philanthropic sources. But it also noted that it had failed to implement other recommendations, such as leasing deeds for ninety-nine years. (And in the end, DPD elected not to change the name of the land trust, “because its board was unable to find a name that correctly and adequately described CCLT activities and was sufficiently different from similar organizations in Chicago.”)

There have been other, more successful community land trusts in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, though. The first CLT in the state was founded in 2003, in north suburban Highland Park. (Buzz Bissinger once described it as a place that “would look familiar to the creators of The Truman Show.”) Amy Kaufman, associate director of the nonprofit that runs the land trust, said the land trust was started as a way to provide housing for the “people who have lived there for decades...seniors, people who raised their families, policemen, firemen, teachers, people who work in schools and hospitals.” At the moment, it has about ninety properties in it. The Highland Park trust seems to have become something of a model for other land trusts; the CCLF’s Tucker, for instance, said it was a good example of what his organization had in mind.

It didn’t, however, manage to prevent Highland Park from finding itself on a 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 17, 2019

GABBY FEBLAND

December list of statewide communities required to submit affordable housing plans to the Illinois Housing Development Authority because less than ten percent of their housing stock is affordable—though, at 9.3 percent, it was the best of the fortysix towns named. Of course, it would be slightly unfair to blame the larger lack of affordable housing in a wealthy suburb on a land trust that only contains approximately ninety properties. But it does show that CLTs aren’t primarily designed to create affordable housing at larger scales, which may only make it more important to focus on preserving their radical potential.

Will the CCLF’s land trust do that?

One possible reason for optimism is the participation of the Anti-Eviction Campaign. Earlier this decade, the organization came to prominence for its work to protect “the human right to

housing,” including its takeover of vacant homes on the South Side, which it would fix up for people to squat and live in. “There’s a wealth of understanding about relationship to land and indigenous communities and how nomadic society has become,” said J.R. Fleming, the group’s co-founder. But on the South Side, there were no mechanisms to ensure people could remain in their neighborhoods—“communities were being uprooted.”

The Anti-Eviction Campaign’s interest in land trusts had its basis in the goal of creating more permanent housing for the vulnerable. But according to Fleming and Toussaint Losier, the other founder, it also emerged out of thinking about another problem they sometimes faced—how to ensure that neighbors were invested in the group’s work. “Something that was really important not only to our members, but also

people who were neighbors who were asking questions, like, ‘What’s the neighborhood benefit of the work that you’re doing?’ ” said Losier.

Either way, Fleming said he hopes the land trust can involve other residents of the neighborhood. “Once the homes start selling, other board members will take position of homeowners, and [become part of the] decision-making body,” he said. “[We want to get people] invested in community to the degree where there is concern about the type of commercial development that is happening….When you have people invested in community, you tend to have a good community.” Christian Belanger is a senior editor at the Weekly. He last wrote about the 20th Ward election.

OP-ED

A Case for the ADU The accessory dwelling unit—banned in the city since 1957—could soon be legal again.

Here’s why that’s a good idea.

BY STEVEN VANCE

T

his spring, City Council could consider lifting the ban on "accessory dwelling units" in Chicago. ADUs are a form of apartment most commonly seen in Chicago's neighborhoods as coach houses behind a bigger house (also called rear houses if the main building doesn’t have a garage.)

Other types include attic and basement apartments. They’re known as “granny flats” and “laneway houses” in other cities.

Coach houses are prevalent on the South Side. The Lower West Side and South Lawndale community areas have the plurality of existing coach houses, with 412 potential coach houses. (There is no official registry, so these are estimated figures based on Chicago building footprint and OpenStreetMap data.) Yet New City, Bridgeport, West Pullman, and South Chicago are no slackers, with 359 potential coach houses.

New coach houses and rear houses haven't been legal in Chicago since 1957, when the zoning code outlawed second ("accessory") buildings on lots. (According to the Tribune, city planners were worried that overcrowding, at a time when Chicago was hitting its peak population, might lower property values.) The nearly 3,000 existing coach houses are allowed to remain, but they can't be expanded up or out. In fact, renovations for upgrades and maintenance

can be tricky: if they take longer than a year to finish, and no one has been renting the coach house out during that time, the zoning code says it cannot be rented out again.

The city’s new five-year housing plan, approved this past December, includes a policy to legalize accessory dwelling units. The Department of Planning & Development has drafted legislation, but it hasn't been introduced yet.

ADUs, particularly if legalized, have a number of benefits. I’d like to promote these five: Increase the supply of affordable housing. Coach house apartments are generally smaller and older, meaning they have lower rents.

Increase income for homeowners.

Two and three-flat owners already have an income opportunity, but one more unit can bring in an additional tenant. Single-family homeowners can also rent out a small, new building in the backyard without having to modify the main house.

Support "aging in place" and multigenerational housing. ADUs give families flexibility to share property and living space with extended family members.

Increase work for small and local architects and contractors. The construction of ADUs would provide more work for

"I have a daughter with a significant developmental delay. I would like her to be able to live somewhat independently in a coach house behind my house.”

STEVEN VANCE

designers and builders who work on smallerscale projects.

Boost local businesses by creating space for and drawing in more residents to historically underpopulated areas.

Attic, basement, and garden apartments are also kinds of accessory dwelling units because they're often smaller and rent for less. They differ from coach and rear houses because they're in the same building as the main house, and they're generally legal in Chicago, but hard to get permission for.

Say the owner of a two or three-flat wants to add another unit in the basement or the attic because the basement has some extra space. If their building is in a "downzoned" area that only allows single-family houses, the owner has to go through an arduous, expensive zoning change process.

The outcome, which would allow one or two more units, isn't even guaranteed. What is guaranteed is the City of Chicago's zoning change application fee of $1,025 and a zoning lawyer that charges at least $5,000.

I started a petition in January calling on City Council to re-legalize coach houses, rear houses, and other types of accessory dwelling units. At the time of publication, it had over 1,350 signers. Dozens of signers have left personal messages of support, indicating how re-legalizing coach houses would improve their lives. Some want the ability to earn more income, while others wanted to provide a place for immediate, extended, and older family members to live close by.

These are a few of my favorite stories— endorsements for allowing coach houses—

that people sent in: "I have a daughter with a significant developmental delay. I would like her to be able to live somewhat independently in a coach house behind my house.”

“Although we have loved having my parents in the same town (and my kids have enjoyed having their grandparents nearby), they would appreciate the independence that would come from having separate space in a coach house. It would be a great way for us to continue to have the benefits of multigenerational living (after school childcare and communal meals), but also providing all of us more privacy and freedom.”

There are likely to be some issues that need ironing out, including coming up with ways to ensure that lower-income homeowners can access capital to pay for the construction of an income-generating accessory dwelling unit; monitoring ADUs to see how many become actual housing and how many are listed on short term vacation rental websites; and the possibility that some landlords may use the law to subdivide existing apartments and remove family-size units from the market. But cities and states across the country have legalized ADUs, and I think Chicagoans will benefit immensely when the same happens here. Sign the petition to lift the ban on ADUs at bit.ly/CoachHousePetition.

Steven Vance runs Chicago Cityscape, and writes for Streetsblog Chicago. This is his first article for the Weekly.

APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

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ENVIRONMENT

Urban Flooding by the Numbers

SOFIE LIE

Chicago has an urban flooding problem, and Chatham sits at its heart.

BY SAM JOYCE

C

hicago has an urban flooding problem. The latest report on this issue, released by the Environmental Law & Policy Center and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in March, found that climate change in the Great Lakes will result in an increase in “extreme precipitation,” heavy rainfalls that are more likely to lead to flooding. This report is only the latest in a series that have sought to quantify the problem of urban flooding in Chicago, and its disproportionate impact on the South Side. In the wake of this report’s release, the Weekly went through literature

on urban flooding, and pulled out the most important numbers that describe the problem.

A

cross the country, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates that twenty to twenty-five percent of all economic losses from flooding occur in areas that are not designated as a floodplain—instead, these losses are the result of urban flooding. In Illinois, that number is much larger, with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) finding that over ninety percent of

urban flooding claims in the state between 2007 and 2014 occurred outside the mapped floodplain. In Illinois, in other words, the vast majority of flooding damage doesn’t come from rivers overflowing; instead, it comes from urban landscapes and sewer systems unable to cope with rainfall, causing water to back up into streets and basements.

In Cook County specifically, the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) found zero correlation between whether a ZIP code is located in a FEMA-designated floodplain and the amount of flooding in that ZIP code.

The reason that matters is because flood insurance, administered through the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), can help cover the costs of the damage. Flood insurance, however, is only required for mortgaged properties in areas identified by FEMA as high-risk flood areas. Since FEMA’s maps don’t accurately predict where urban flooding events occur in Cook County, there’s no requirement for the vast majority of Chicagoans most at risk of urban flooding to actually carry insurance that would help them cover the costs of that event.

APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

ENVIRONMENT

Some costs can also be covered through individual assistance payments from FEMA, but this funding is only available after a federal disaster declaration. This has happened occasionally for exceptionally severe flood events, but the most recent declaration in Illinois was in 2013. For everyday basement flooding, there’s often no help from the federal government.

Some homeowners are able to purchase an additional rider for their homeowners insurance, covering water damage from sewer and drain backups. The CNT’s 2014 study found 20,461 claims made to private insurers, more than five times the number made under the NFIP. This number doesn’t include all insurance companies that cover Cook County, and it doesn’t include property owners who are not covered for sewer backups or who chose not to make an insurance claim, which means the real extent of the problem is likely much greater.

U

rban flooding has a serious financial cost: the IDNR study found $2.319 billion in documented damage between 2007 and 2014, while the CNT found $773 million in damage in Cook County alone between 2007 and 2011. But the cost is more than just money. In a 2014 survey of people affected by urban flooding, the CNT found that eighty-four percent of flooding victims experienced additional stress as a result of flooding, forty-four percent lost items of emotional value like family heirlooms, and thirteen percent said flooding affected the health of a family member.

Only eight percent said they lost business income, but this small percentage may understate the risk urban flooding poses to the economic health of communities.

After a flooding disaster forces them to close, FEMA estimates that nearly forty percent of small businesses never reopen.

Flooding can have a similarly devastating effect on real estate. Basement Systems Inc., a basement waterproofing company, estimates that urban flooding can lower property values by anything from ten to twenty-five percent. Urban flooding doesn’t just mean wet basements: it means closed businesses, lost home value, and priceless heirlooms destroyed.

C

hatham sits at the heart of Chicago’s flooding problem. The city gets more calls about flooding in Chatham and

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¬ APRIL 17, 2019

surrounding areas of the South Side than anywhere else, and the Cook County ZIP code with the most damage from urban flooding between 2007 and 2011 was 60619, which includes part of Chatham.

Before it was developed, Chatham was a low-lying area known as Hogs Swamp.

While the neighborhood has changed a lot since the first houses were built, water still rolls downhill. Compounding the problem is a quirk of manmade geography: Chatham sits at the midpoint between two of the seven water reclamation plants operated by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD), the Calumet Water Reclamation Plant in Riverdale, and the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant in Cicero. These plants filter, clean, and release water flowing in from sinks, showers, and toilets. During heavy rains, however, stormwater is added to that existing water load, often overloading the decades-old pipes that carry water to the plants.

When an intense storm hits Chicago, rainfall in other communities fills up the sewer system first, leaving no space in the system for Chatham’s water. When that happens, water leaks out of the system in both directions: untreated sewage flows into local waterways while also backing up into basements. Because the city uses the same pipes for sewage and stormwater, there’s no way to dump stormwater in the river while reserving sewage for treatment. Instead, it all gets mixed together into sewage, and it ends up in Chatham’s basements.

E

fforts to manage urban flooding began in earnest in 1975, when the MWRD began construction on the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, also known as the Deep Tunnel. The system—still under construction—will eventually be able to contain 20.6 billion gallons of sewage. 109 miles of tunnels are already complete, and work is now underway on three reservoirs that will provide the bulk of the system’s capacity. The total cost of the project is now well over $3 billion, with more spending expected between now and the completion of the reservoirs in 2029. The MWRD’s fact sheet about the project claims that, after its completion, the Deep Tunnel will prevent $180 million in damages from flooding every year, with tunnels and reservoirs capable of holding over twenty billion gallons—enough to cover every inch of the city with five inches of water.

But the Deep Tunnel is only necessary in the first place because continued development has paved over more and more of the Chicago area’s natural wetlands. In 2014, the MWRD introduced measures to address this problem at the source, by establishing standards for the amount of stormwater that properties have to handle on site. These rules, however, are less strict than they sound. They only apply to new developments, and even then only to parcels over a certain size. Single-family homes, the dominant housing stock in Chatham, are exempt entirely. For new megadevelopments like The 78, these regulations help to control urban flooding. For an older residential neighborhood like Chatham, however, the problem will persist.

And the problem will only keep getting worse. That March report from the Environmental Law & Policy Center found that climate change will result in an increase in “extreme precipitation.” When temperatures increase, water evaporates more quickly, and a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor. The overall impact on precipitation is mixed, but more of the rain that does fall will fall in heavy bursts, often exceeding six inches. These intense storms saturate the ground, leaving the water with nowhere to go but into the sewer system. In Chatham, that means a lot more water ending up in basements.

U

ndisturbed, nature does a great job of handling rainfall: some of it is absorbed into the ground to nourish plants, some is absorbed deeper into the ground to form aquifers, and some runs downhill to form rivers and lakes. One of the consequences of urban development, in Chicago as in every other city, is the loss of this natural drainage system. Green space is replaced with pavement and buildings, and there are fewer trees to absorb water, fewer places where water can enter the ground, and fewer paths to rivers and lakes.

One way to control urban flooding— one that’s a lot cheaper than building new reservoirs—is turning pavement back into forests. Natural areas, especially wetlands, offer a place to hold stormwater while the rest of it works its way through the sewer system. As the CNT notes in their report on flooding in Chatham, the neighborhood’s place at the end of the sewer system is a blessing as well as a curse: while it means there’s often no place for Chatham’s water

to go, it also means water from other communities never ends up in Chatham.

Chatham can control its own destiny, and can solve its basement flooding problem by creating a place for water to go.

Individual homeowners have already done this by installing “rain gardens,” planted areas that absorb rainwater. Rather than going into the sewer system, the water soaks into the ground and is eventually used by plants. The CNT’s survey of residents found that rain gardens are one of the most inexpensive ways to help prevent flooding, estimating the cost of a rain garden at around a quarter of the cost of waterproofing a basement.

Well-designed natural areas can further help control stormwater. Brittany Janney and Michelle Giles, students at Roosevelt University, studied this question over the summer with the Field Museum’s Urban Ecology Field Lab. Their research, which they presented at the 2019 Wild Things Conference in Rosemont, explored water infiltration rates in different parts of the Burnham Wildlife Corridor along the south lakefront. They compared restored natural areas to turf areas, hypothesizing that natural areas, full of native plants, would be able to absorb water more quickly. The results confirmed their hypothesis: natural areas are significantly better at managing stormwater than parks, and native plantings in parks and along boulevards can allow these places to contribute to stormwater control.

But how much is needed is an open question. The Calumet Stormwater Collaborative, a collaborative effort organized by the Metropolitan Planning Council, recently announced their plan to develop an estimate of the current urban flooding problem in the Calumet region, which includes Chatham, as well as estimates of both green infrastructure and stormwater management capacity. This data will be used to develop specific solutions for different communities, responding to their different needs and capacities. Sam Joyce is the Weekly's director of factchecking and a contributing editor. He last wrote about the Jackson Park tour of the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center.

EVENTS

BULLETIN Hear it Directly: Speak With Survivors The Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Wednesdays through April 24, 1pm–4pm. Free. bit.ly/HearItDirectly Survivors of torture at the hands of Chicago police sergeant Jon Burge and his underlings will be discussing proposals for a long-promised memorial to their torture.

The proposals are on display as part of the Arts Incubator’s exhibit “Still Here,” curated by the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, and the subject of the Weekly’s March 27th cover story. (Sam Stecklow)

Behind Enemy Lines: Resisting Empire From Inside the U.S. Chinatown Branch Library, 2100 S. Wentworth Ave. Wednesday, April 17, 6pm–7:30pm. Free. bit.ly/BehindEnemyLinesChiResists Activist group Chi Resists hosts this discussion of anti-war activism between community organizer Vincent Emanuele and Bev Tang of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle. The event promises to tie together drone strikes, U.S. aid to Saudi Arabia, and regime change efforts in Venezuela in a discussion of the reached of the “United States empire.” (Sam Stecklow)

Public Newsroom 104: Beyond “Shock Value” Photojournalism Build Coffee, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Thursday, April 18, 6pm–8pm. Free. citybureau.org Award-winning photographer (and incoming Weekly photo editor) Sebastián Hidalgo leads this public conversation on how photojournalists can avoid exploitation in their work, and rehumanize major issues like immigration. (Sam Stecklow)

South Chicago 420 Block Party 8554 S. Commercial Ave. Saturday, April 20, 11am–4:20pm. Free. bit.ly/SouthChicago420BlockParty

that cannabis legalization advocates have made. Cannabis wellness and awareness group 606CannaBliss hosts this day of food, music, live art, and giveaways. (Public consumption not allowed.) (Sam Stecklow)

ChiTeen Lit Fest Columbia College Chicago, 1104 S. Wabash Ave. Saturday, April 27, 11am–2pm. Free for teens 13-19. chiteenlitfest.org The ChiTeen Lit Fest is a by-teen, for-teen literary arts gathering space. Eve Ewing is the featured poet for the event, but otherwise, no adults are allowed to attend events besides parents and chaperones.

(Sam Stecklow)

VISUAL ARTS Voices: Maria Gaspar, “Speech Acts” Gallery 400, 400 S Peoria St. Tuesday, April 23, 6pm–7:30pm. bit.ly/MGSpeechActs Maria Gaspar will discuss her recent project, titled Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall, a public site intervention held in the form of projected animations outside of the Cook County Jail this past fall. The project explores the power of sound through the stories of men who were incarcerated within Cook County.

(Roderick Sawyer)

FANS OF DRAG: Part 1 Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Wednesday, April 17, 6pm–8pm. Free, space may be limited. Registration is prefered at bit.ly/SmartFansofDrag Explore identity and drag with guest artist and “heteroflexible cisgender woman of distinction” Irregular Girl. First participants will take a tour of the “Smart’s exhibit Embodying the Self,” examining work such as artist Yasumasa Morimura’s “Ambiguous Beauty / Aimai-no-bi,” which is a depiction of himself as Marilyn Monroe’s first Playboy pin-up. After the tour, Irregular Girl will lead a workshop where participants can create their own drag identities. (Roderick Sawyer)

As statewide cannabis legalization seems like a strong likelihood, given Governor J.B. Pritzker’s rhetoric, there couldn’t be a better time to celebrate the progress APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

EVENTS

Third Friday at the Frame Shop with Pigment International

Cold Beaches, Drama Moth, Bailie, Boys vs. Girls

The Frame Shop, 3520 S Morgan St. Friday, April 19, 6pm–10pm. bit.ly/ThirdFridayPigment

Bohemian Grove McKinley, ask.a punk.

Saturday, April 20, doors 7pm, show 7:30pm. $5–$10 suggested donation. bit.ly/cold-beaches-show

As part of Third Friday at the Bridgeport Art Center and Zhou B, the artists of Pigment International will be showing artwork available for purchase! Come by for food and festivities and dont forget to pick up a copy of Pigment Magazine. (Roderick Sawyer)

MUSIC HerbanSoulRadio Open Mic Some Like it Black Creative Arts Bar, 810 E. 43rd St. Friday, April 19, 7:30pm–midnight. $10. (773) 891-4866. somelikeitblack.com Kick off the weekend right with an evening of spoken word, live music, and cocktails, hosted by HerbanSoulRadio’s Deana Dean and Awthentik ThePoet. (Christopher Good)

DIZZY Invert 3 Situations (ask a punk) and Archer Ballroom, 3000 S. Archer Ave. Friday, April 19, 5pm–late. Saturday, April 20, 3:30pm–late.

Donation suggested. bit.ly/dizzy-invert-3 The lineup for the third round of this queer experimental music weekender is, fittingly enough, dizzying in scale and ambition. More than two dozen nonbinary and women-fronted acts will perform across Friday and Saturday in support of Medusa House, an anarchist feminist co-op in the Little Village Solidarity Network.

(Christopher Good)

Back in the Backyard 945 W. 32nd St. Saturday, April 20, doors 5pm, show 6pm–10pm. Food 6pm–9pm. $3 at the door, BYOB. bit.ly/backyard-series Bridgeport-based arts space Backyard Series will celebrate the thawing snowpack and rising temperature with an open mic centered on creativity and community.

Expect poetry, comedy, food, a pop-up shop, and featured performances from some talented locals. (Christopher Good)

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¬ APRIL 17, 2019

Bad Witch Club has culled a lineup with something for everyone: goth-chic synthpop group Drama Moth, PeptoBismol-colored oddball rapper UaZit, glitch producer Bailie, and power-pop outfit Cold Beaches, which promise to “skyrocket your heart into planetary orbit around love, true friendship and partying forever.” A portion of proceeds will support Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

(Christopher Good)

Ouedraogo of the Republic of Upper Volta; and Yeelen, by Souleymane Cissee of Mali.

(Nicole Bond)

Arts Bank Cinema presents: Southside With You Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Saturday, April 20, 4pm–6pm. Free.

Seating is limited and on a first-come firstseated basis. Registration at Eventbrite is preferred, but does not guarantee seating. bit. ly/SouthSideWithU.

What Use Are Flowers?: A Fable

by Lorraine Hansberry

Southside With You tells the story of a blooming romance between a young Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson.

The film gives audiences a bird's-eye view of the power couple’s first date, from their trip to the Art Institute, then to see Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing, and their first kiss outside of an ice cream parlor.

Come out to relive the romance! (Roderick Sawyer)

makebelieve.fm/flowers

Hamilton: The Exhibition

STAGE & SCREEN

Listen online to an audio drama produced by the Make Believe Association of a littleknown one-act play intended for television, written in 1961 by South Side playwright Lorraine Hansberry. The dystopian though timely tale of a hermit returning to a society he had abandoned features: Grammy nominee Billy Branch, director and performer Daniel Kyri, Khloe Janel, Tevion Lanier, Kiayla Ryann, and sound by the Weekly’s Radio Executive Producer Erisa Apantaku and Mikhail Fiksel.

(Nicole Bond)

Afro Film Series Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave. Thursdays now through May 23. Doors open 6:30pm, screening 7pm. Free. bit.ly/2UXGPeW So Live Experiences presents a series of films to showcase the work of African and Caribbean talent. This week–Osuofia in London, directed by Kingsley Ogoro of Nigeria, which tells the story of a man arriving in London from an African village to claim an inheritance left by his late brother. In the coming weeks catch Sometimes in April, by Haitian director Raoul Peck; Black Girl, directed by Ousmane Sembene of Senegal; Lumumba, a political thriller based on a true story, also directed by Peck. Yabba, by Idriss

Northerly Island, 1300 S. Linn White Dr. Opens April 27 through September 8.

Mondays and Tuesdays noon–6pm (last entry 4pm); Wednesdays, 10am–6pm (last entry 5pm); Thursdays–Saturdays, 10am–8pm (last entry 6pm); Sundays, 10am-6pm (last entry 4pm). $39.50 adults, $32.50 seniors/ military, $25 ages 4-14. Discounts available for CPS groups or groups of 10 or more. hamiltonexhibition.com Whether you have or haven’t yet seen the theatrical phenomenon that is Hamilton, this exhibition of interactive lighting, sound, multimedia, music, and historical artifacts, featuring an audio tour by Hamilton director Lin-Manuel Miranda, will be an experience beyond the musical to immerse attendees into the world of the now famed founding father. (Nicole Bond)

Too Heavy for Your Pocket TimeLine Theatre, 615 W. Wellington Ave. April 24–June 29. $25-$54. (773) 281-8463 ext. 6. timelinetheatre.com Court Theatre Resident Artist Ron OJ Parson directs a story by playwright Jiréh Breon Holder, who was recently named one of “Tomorrow’s Marquee Names, Now in the Making” by the New York Times.

Holder’s play examines the bonds of love and friendship, and the personal cost of

progress when the opportunity to fight racism in the Deep South, as a Freedom Rider, supersedes a college scholarship.

Too Heavy For Your Pocket was seen in an extended Off-Broadway run at the Roundabout Theater in 2017. (Nicole Bond)

Southern Gothic Windy City Playhouse South, 2229 S. Michigan Ave. Through May 26. Tuesdays through Sundays, performance times vary.

Tickets start at $65. (773) 891-8985. windycityplayhouse.com Order yourself a Tom Collins and get up close and personal for an intimate theater experience at Windy City Playhouse. Their new South Side location and audience style seats only thirty per show and welcomes audience members to wander about the set at their leisure to see the drama unfold and secrets revealed when four couples of old college buddies gather to celebrate a fortieth birthday in 1961 Ashford, Georgia.

(Nicole Bond)

FOOD & LAND Sacred Keepers Earth Day Butterfly Planting Burnham Nature Sanctuary, 4700 S. Cornell Ave. Saturday, April 20, 9:30am–11:30am.

Free. bit.ly/2UbBb4o As Earth Week approaches, local and national stewards are joining together to create a butterfly habitat in the Burnham Nature Sanctuary corridor along the south lakefront. Join the Sacred Keepers, the Bodhi Spiritual Center, the Nature Conservancy, and the Chicago Park District for a morning of planting butterfly-friendly perennials, and keep watch over the rest of the summer as the plantings create a butterfly sanctuary.

Metered parking available at 47th and Cornell. (Emeline Posner)

Volunteer for Restaurant: Impossible @ Josephine’s Cooking Captain Hard Times and Josephine’s Cooking, 436 E. 79th St. Tuesday, April 23, 12pm– 7pm and 7pm–2am; and Wednesday, April 24, 10:30am–6pm. bit.ly/2v5HwUH Restaurant: Impossible has been invited

EVENTS

to Josephine’s Cooking—one half of the beloved Chatham soul food institution that also includes Captain Hard Time’s Cooking—to renovate the interiors. But Restaurant: Impossible needs volunteers to help them out! Email rivolunteer@ levitylive.com with the subject line “1501 IL Volunteer” to sign up for a shift. Be sure to include which of the three shifts listed above you’d prefer to work, your email, cell phone, and any relevant skills. (Emeline Posner)

Food Fun(d)ing Fridays: Spring Edition The Woodlawn, 1200 E. 79th St. Friday, April 26, 6pm–8pm. $20; ticket includes food and drink. bit.ly/2UzVbCO Food Fun(d)ing Friday, Chicago’s local Sunday Soup–style event to support Black and brown stewards and growers, is back for its spring edition. This season, the groups seeking funding include the Street Vendors Association, Chef Jay’s Urban Kitchen, Lightly Farmed, and Food for Change Chicago. Come hear about each group’s work, vote to fund two of them, and enjoy food and drink with neighbors and other food justice advocates. (Emeline Posner)

Intro to Urban Beekeeping The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. Saturday, April 27, 3pm–4pm. $15. plantchicago.org Come learn the basics of beekeeping—from identifying different parts of your hive to feeding your bees and preventing swarms— at this hour-long class with Brittany Buckles, entomologist and beekeeper with local honey company Bike a Bee.

Earth Day Cleanups Various locations (see below). Saturday, April 27, 9am–noon. Free.

Across the city, the Park District and Friends of the Parks are gearing up for their annual Earth Day park cleanup: an opportunity for park users to get outside on (what is hopefully) a warm day, meet your neighbors, pick up the garbage that got trapped under all the snow, and do some habitat restoration. The Weekly compiled a list of all participating South Side parks:

Arcade Park/Pullman/Langley, 11132 S. Cottage Grove Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2VHf4Eq Arthur Ashe Park, 2701 E. 74th St. 9am. bit.ly/2U9GEbO Bessemer Park, 8930 S. Muskegon Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2KArQ6v Burnside Park, 9400 S. Greenwood Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2Pa6XO7 Calumet Park, 9801 S. Avenue G. 9am. bit.ly/2UeOMrz Cotton Tail Park, 44 W. 15th St. 9am. bit.ly/2US4RHZ Davis Square Park, 4430 S. Marshfield Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2XbzF4b Ellis Park, 3520 S. Cottage Grove Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2Gk0bmk Elm Park, 5215 S. Woodlawn Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2UxiLQt Euclid Park, 9800 S. Parnell Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2GiuZUg Franklin Park, 4320 W. 15th St. 9am. bit.ly/2ItNWoI Golden Gate Park, 13000 S. Eberhart Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2IhcNNa Grand Crossing Park, 7655 S. Ingleside Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2Z6VbIY Hadiya Pendleton Park, 4345 S. Calumet Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2v1XTBJ Hayes Park, 2936 W. 85th St. 9am. bit.ly/2UgNOuK Indian Ridge Marsh Park, 11600 S. Torrence Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2KCdnqH Kelly (Edward) Park, 2725 W. 41st St. 9am. bit.ly/2KzD3o4 Lake Meadows Park, 3117 S. Rhodes Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2v4uRRS La Villita Park, 2800 S. Sacramento Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2IiQHK0 Mamie Till-Mobley Hill Park, 6372 S. Ellis Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2KzjsnV Mary Richardson Jones Park, 1240 S. Plymouth Ct. 9am. bit.ly/2Ucyf7D McGuane Park, 2901 S. Poplar Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2UBne4y McKinley Park, 2210 W. Pershing Rd. 9am. bit.ly/2P78h4u Midway Plaisance Park, Women’s Memorial Bench. 9am. bit.ly/2UkYzMY Ogden Park, 6500 S. Racine Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2v0Hq0F Park 540, 24th and Federal. 9am. bit.ly/2v1RpCX Ping Tom Park, 1700 S. Wentworth Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2IwQKS2 Prairie Pointe Park, 1600 S. Prairie Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2Ux7kIB Railroad Junction Playlot Park, 7334 S. Maryland Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2ZbxtLB Rainbow Beach Park, 3111 E. 77th St. 9am. bit.ly/2Is3iKg

Rowan Park, 11546 S. Avenue L. 9am. bit.ly/2X7ZySk Scottsdale Park, 4637 W. 83rd St. 9am. bit.ly/2USREPf South Chicago People’s Park, 3257 E. 91st St. 9am. bit.ly/2YpsbvQ Steelworkers Park, E. 87th at Lake Michigan.

9am. bit.ly/2v3C4lu West Chatham Park, 8223 S. Princeton Ave. 9am. bit.ly/2GaBAir West Lawn Park, 4233 W. 65th St. 9am. bit.ly/2DdC7PZ Sponsored

Sip 'n' Shop for Wives, Brides, Proms & Moms Juicy Luzy Sangria, 5435 West 110th St #2. Saturday, April 20, 11am–5pm. Free (Donations accepted to benefit Prom Girls Rock!) bit.ly/sip_n_shop Getting married? Preparing for prom?

Looking for the perfect Mother's Day gift? Just need to unwind with adult conversation away from the kids? Join us for this extra special Sip 'n' Shop pop-up shopping experience! Shop our vendors including: Juicy Luzy Sangria, T-Mobile, Chiro One Wellness, Keto Kickstart with Coach Niquenya, Ms. Val's Total Wellness, Chicago Love Connection, Blushbeautyhair and Cosmetics, Crystal Hi' Yella Banks presents Books, Bonnets, & Bundles, Noble Lengths, La'Char Extensions, Nails by Skylar, Zero Balance, 2 Ladies and a Broom, The Hair Ritz, Paparazzi, and KJ Medi-Cosmetics.

Attendees age 21+ may also receive a free sangria tasting and free raffle entry for one of our spectacular door prizes. Must be present to win.

THE ITTY BITTY

EVENTS CALENDAR 6100 S Blackstone (773) 627-5058 More info online at buildcoffee.org

Thursday, April 25 Public Newsroom 105: Storytelling & Journalism 6:00 pm — 8:00 pm How can personal storytelling and journalism come together to challenge dominant narratives, and how they can be used as a tool for building community? To explore this questions, City Bureau and 2nd Story are bringing together a panel with WBEZ’s South Side reporter Natalie Moore, Free Street Theater’s Artistic Director, Coya Paz, and 2nd Story company member Eric May.

Monday, May 6 The Experiment Open Mic 6:00 pm — 8:00 pm The Experiment is a free open mic at Build Coffee every first Monday of the month. Bring your songs, poems, music, stories, dances—whatever you can do in five minutes. Sign-ups open up at 6pm! Pre-show writing workshop runs 5-6pm.

Saturday, May 11 South Rhodes Records Patio Pop-Up 9:00 am — 1:00 pm South Rhodes Records is returning to the Build Coffee patio!

Operating from Woodlawn, SRR provides select new and reissued music as well as rare, mintcondition originals. This is during the 61st Street Farmers Market— stop by and pick up some vinyl to spin with your local fruits and veggies!

APRIL 17, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

It’s time to register for Summer programs with the Chicago Park District!

MAY 23 – JULY 14

STAY CONNECTED.

Online registration begins: Monday, April 22 at 9AM for parks West of California Ave. (2800 W.) Tuesday, April 23 at 9AM for parks East of California Ave. (2800 W.) In-Person registration begins: Saturday, April 27 for most parks.

Some parks begin on Monday, April 29 Please note: registration dates vary for gymnastics centers as well as Morgan Park Sports Center & McFetridge Sports Center.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners Michael P. Kelly, General Superintendent & CEO

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