At Home on the Greater West Side 121323

December 13, 2023

GROWING COMMUNITY MEDIA

AT HOME ON THE GREATER WEST SIDE A GCM GUIDE TO HOMEOWNERSHIP

Introducing At Home on the Greater West Side The yearlong GCM project dives deep into homeownership in the area and offers guidance to show that despite barriers, it is attainable

By DELANEY NELSON

Special projects reporter

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hen Chicago Community Trust asked our publisher in April if we wanted to take part in a yearlong project aimed at boosting homeownership on the West Side, the answer was a no-brainer. Growing Community Media, a media organization committed to equity, would happily and graciously apply to take part in the project.

A proponent of community journalism, Dan Haley, president and publisher of GCM and its four flagship papers, has been with what is now GCM since its inception in 1980. When Haley launched the Oak Park Wednesday Journal 40 years ago, his main goal was to cover race and diversity throughout the community. At the time, that coverage included the ongoing racial integration of Oak Park and the greater West Side.

GCM’s At Home on the Greater West Side project is an opportunity to continue covering racial inequities and paths toward change. Our goal is to contribute to closing the racial homeownership gap in Black and Hispanic communities of the West Side.

The reality is that Black and Hispanic Chicagoans have lower homeownership rates than their white counterparts. In comparison to the citywide homeownership rate of 45.6%, 40% of Austin residents own a home, as do 23.8% of North Lawndale residents and 27.4% of West Garfield Park residents.

“The incessant inequities in housing in West Side communities, goes back forevermore,” Haley said. “It is baked in the cake of Chicago and this country that if you are Black or brown, if you have less resources, that your path to stability in housing is undermined – actively, consciously, undermined.”

Throughout the next 12 months, GCM will commit both print and digital space and resources to homeownership coverage in Austin, West Garfield Park, North Lawndale, and the greater West Side. Our goal is to produce onthe-ground, community-oriented journalism.

We’ll meet community members who have gone through, or are currently navigating, the homeownership process. We’ll connect with community organizations such as the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, Austin Coming Together, the Greater St. John Bible Church, and Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago. We’ll scour data and reports to learn about appraisals, mortgages, and credit. We’ll interrogate existing government housing programs and provide resources to help you maneuver the system of becoming a homeowner.

As Haley said, this grant provides GCM with the opportunity to dig into how “people have found ways through a corrupt system into homeownership or how people have lost their

bid for homeownership through these baked in inequities – to tell those stories, to provide resources for people who are trying to make this leap, and to report the fairly grotesque impact of disinvestment on the West Side.”

Be on the lookout for our four public community events for potential homeowners, where we’ll partner with trusted community organizations to share resources and information about the path to homeownership, and, just as importantly, to meet you and hear your stories and feedback.

In the next year, we don’t want to just report the news and tell stories. We want to find solutions to the disparities in homeownership in our communities. We’ll introduce you to folks who will share their own homeownership journeys. And we’ll give you resources to show how you can do it, too.

Follow us each month in print and at https://www.austinweeklynews.com/at-home/, where you’ll find additional resources and useful information.

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December 13, 2023

AT HOME ON THE GREATER WEST SIDE

GROWING COMMUNITY MEDIA

Homeownership then and now: Why disparities persist ROBERT K. NELSON, LADALE WINLING, RICHARD MARCIANO, NATHAN CONNOLLY, ET AL., “MAPPING INEQUALITY,” AMERICAN PANORAMA, ED. ROBERT K. NELSON AND EDWARD L. AYERS, ACCESSED DECEMBER 8, 2023, HTTPS://DSL. RICHMOND.EDU/PANORAMA/REDLINING/[YOUR VIEW]

From blockbusting to subprime loans — a look at why buying and maintaining a house on the West Side historically has been difficult

By DELANEY NELSON

Special projects reporter

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1969 Chicago Tribune headline said it all: O.B.A. Runs Housing Service to Brake Austin Racial Change.

That change, the reporter wrote, “brought fear and confusion” to homeowners in a neighborhood “long famous for its churches, schools, and community traditions.” That change referred to Black families at the time.

By 1969, the article said, Austin was 15% Black.

“Whether they are called panic peddlers, block busters or good businessmen, hundreds of licensed and unlicensed real estate agents have descended on Austin to take advantage of the property movement and some alarmed residents have resisted,” the Tribune reported.

“A group of residents, the Organization for a Better Austin (O.B.A.) have formed a housing referral committee and are striving militantly to keep the neighborhood from becoming totally black.”

The effort appeared to be working, the paper reported.

That was 55 years ago.

The same story, the same dance today? Yes and no.

Statistics show that homeownership in Austin is roughly 41%. In North Lawndale, it’s about 24%. And in West Garfield Park, it’s just more than 28%.

Those figures show that yes, West Siders can and do buy homes. But the number of people who could buy them isn’t where it should be. The reason, as the Tribune story demonstrates, is far more complex than money.

MOVING TO CHICAGO During the Great Migration, more than 500,000 Black people from the South landed in

A 1930s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of Chicago. Through these maps, the federal government classified neighborhoods by their lending risk. Areas the agency deemed to have the highest risk level were colored with red ink. Most “redlined” areas were majority Black neighborhoods. Yellow, one tier above red, indicated a “declining” area. Majority white neighborhoods were often colored green, classified as the best places for banks to lend.

Chicago, sending the number of African Americans to 33% of the population in 1970 from 2% before the migration north began, data from the Chicago Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Chicago shows. From 1910 to 1930 alone, the Black population in Chicago increased fivefold, from 44,000 to over 230,000, according to a WTTW report. Most settled along Chicago’s “Black Belt” on the South Side, but the West Side also became a large area for housing Black residents. After World War II, “housing-starved” Black citizens flocked to North Lawndale, making it the largest

new Black community created in that period, according to Arnold R. Hirsch in his book “Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.”

The Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading Black newspaper, in its own way, helped recruit these transplants by running stories during this period detailing racial atrocities in the south and promoting a better life in northern cities. Many Black soon-to-be migrants wrote to the paper for advice and information about securing housing and employment, such as in this archived letter

from a woman in Greenwood, Mississippi, on April 22, 1917: “Sir: I noticed in the Defender about receiving some information from you about positions up there or rather work and I am very anxious to know what the chances are for business men. I am very anxious to leave the South on account of my children but my husband doesn’t seem to think that he can succeed there in business, he is a merchant and also knows the barber trade what are the chances for either? Some of our folks down here have the idea that this Northern movement means nothing to any body but those who go out and labor by the day. I am willing to work myself to get a start.

Tell me what we could really do. I will do most anything to get our family out of Barn. Please let this be confidential.”

The promise of an alluring, new life in the north, however, didn’t always pan out.

The 1930s New Deal brought the Federal Housing Administration, whose purpose was to stimulate new home construction, ensure “economically sound” home loans and create lending guidelines outlining which borrowers should be given loans.

The FHA and the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation, however, implemented redlining maps, which classified areas across 200 U.S. cities by relative lending risk — that is, how likely borrowers were to pay home loans back to banks — to determine which areas were worthy of government-backed mortgages and other home lending programs. Places with the highest risk level, D, were often colored with red ink, hence the term “redlining.” Those most redlined: Majority Black neighborhoods.

The FHA also supported racially restrictive covenants, which prevented Black people or members of other racial/ethnic groups from buying a property or parcel of land. As WBEZ’s Natalie Moore reported, remnants of these restrictive covenants linger on property deeds across the Chicago area to this day, such as this one: “The restriction of that no part of said premises shall in manner be used or occupied directly or indirectly by any Negro or Negroes. … except house servants or janitors or chauffeurs employed…”

These covenants were outlawed in 1948 and are not enforceable today.

But because of this redlining, residents of

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AT HOME ON THE GREATER WEST SIDE

December 13, 2023

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Who owns homes on the Greater West Side?

By DELANEY NELSON

Special projects reporter

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hy do households of color own only a quarter of the nation’s housing wealth when they compose a third of the nation’s households?

This is the question that begins a 2021 research report from the Urban Institute, a D.C. think tank that studies among other things, the relationship between housing and finances. A central reason is the racial wealth gap.

The study’s analysis uses American Community Survey data, which comes from the Census Bureau. Their research shows that white Americans are more likely to achieve homeownership than households of color.

When Black or Latino families do buy homes, they tend to be of lower value than their white counterparts. Because home value contributes to housing wealth, this puts white homeowners at an advantage.

Measuring housing wealth is important, the authors wrote, because it can “uncover compromises households of color make to achieve homeownership.” In other words, families of color may sometimes choose small homes or property in less desirable locations to achieve homeownership. But beyond that, this data shows a broader trend of discrimination in the process of buying a home, which contributes to the lower net wealth of Black and Latino families when compared with white families.

The racial wealth gap means families

Black neighborhoods across Chicago were denied access to credit, and the increasing borrowing costs made homeownership difficult. It also led to housing disinvestment, setting up Black Americans to be generations behind white ones in terms of the wealth that comes with owning one’s home.

But it’s just part of the story.

BLOCKBUSTING THE GREATER WEST SIDE Much of the West Side wasn’t redlined — the practice was made illegal in 1968, while Austin was still majority white and Black families had begun to move to adjacent neighborhoods. At the time, most of Austin was rated “declining,” one

of color are at a disadvantage when it comes to buying a home, and by being unable to achieve homeownership, it’s difficult for families of color to accumulate wealth.

BY THE NUMBERS Research out of the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative at nonprofit Prosperity Now showed that in 2017, more than half of white households in Chicago owned their homes. In contrast, homeownership rates hover at around one-third for Black households and 43% for Latino households, the study, cited by the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University, showed.

The Community Metropolitan Agency for Planning, a regional planning agency, collects

tier above redlined areas.

But neither restrictive covenants nor redlining were the only tactics white realtors and homeowners used to keep Black families from moving into neighborhoods. In the 1940s, Austin was a largely white and somewhat affluent area, one that was growing and attractive to Black residents who were being pushed out from the crowded South Side.

Real estate agents engaged in “blockbusting,” or sowing fear among white homeowners living next to Black families, by telling them these new neighbors would decrease their property values. As the Tribune reported in 1969, one Austin group worked “militantly” to peddle panic so that eventually, white residents sold

demographic data – from race to income to housing costs – from all of the city’s community areas to produce community snapshots. Its data shows that Austin, North Lawndale, and West Garfield Park – all majority Black neighborhoods – have lower homeownership rates than the city as a whole. The homeownership rate in North Lawndale, for example, is more than 20 percentage points lower than the city average.

Some have pointed to disinvestment and the exodus of Black people from Chicago as a factor for the neighborhood’s low homeownership rates.

And according to a study from Chicago Urban League, Black

residents are more likely to own homes in majority Black neighborhoods, where research also has shown there are higher vacancy and foreclosure rates – both of which diminish the benefits of homeownership and cause further disinvestment.

“Black Chicagoans bear the triple burden of having been relegated to the least valued land and then having their property undervalued for being owned by Blacks and existing in a Black community,” the authors wrote.

The Urban Institute has also cited high rental cost burdens, lack of knowledge about the housing system and language barriers as impediments to homeownership among marginalized groups.

These factors are compounded by the historically racist housing-finance system, and inequitable income, credit access, generational wealth accumulation, as well as historic city disinvestment on the Greater West Side.

their property at lower prices. However, Black Chicagoans — whose housing options were limited — were forced to pay inflated prices on those same houses.

White residents in the meantime were promised “something better.” Matt Wilson, economic development planner at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute, explained the suburbs were sold to white families as a “pure utopia and the greatest human invention ever.”

Part of that utopia promise was that the suburbs were mostly off-limits to people of color due to racially restrictive covenants. Enter white flight.

Manufacturers and industries followed white residents to the suburbs, where land was cheaper, Wilson said. As neighborhoods like Austin hol-

lowed out, more houses became vacant, lowering property values in the area and discouraging investment. Meanwhile, blockbusting caused home values to drop by 14% from 1950 to 1980 in majority-Black neighborhoods, according to a study by the Chicago Federal Reserve.

“The downward pressure on housing prices came from the onerous financial positions in which blockbusters left new Black residents. Significantly marked up sales prices likely contributed to highly elevated foreclosure rates among those who dealt with blockbusters,” the authors wrote. “The results depict the challenges faced by new Black homeowners in building wealth

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AT HOME ON THE GREATER WEST SIDE

GROWING COMMUNITY MEDIA

The benefits of homeownership

‘Being able to own property and own our home is really key to a sense of belonging,’ one homeowner says

By DELANEY NELSON and FRANCIA GARCIA HERNANDEZ Special projects reporters

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ronzeville homeowner Lionel Kimble Jr. has watched the advantages of homeownership firsthand. His mom took out a home loan to help pay for his sister’s wedding. His aunt and uncle used earned home equity to prepare for retirement.

“Owning a home is the bedrock of America,” said Kimble, history professor at Chicago State University and vice president and executive director of the Research and Policy Center at the Chicago Urban League. “It allows people once they die to pass on something to their children and grandchildren, which they can use as investments to build wealth.”

HOMEOWNERSHIP Continued from page B3

through housing at the moment many likely became homeowners for the first time.”

Government initiatives like the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which required banks to meet the credit needs of low and moderate-income depositors, tried to alleviate the effects of discriminatory housing practices. But disinvestment in these neighborhoods persisted.

Much of this was by design from the city. As ProPublica reported in 2020, after the 1968 riots, the city never created a comprehensive plan to revitalize Madison Street in East Garfield Park, one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, and former Mayor Lori Lightfoot even left it out of her West Side reinvestment plan.

DISINVESTMENT AND HOMEOWNERSHIP Disinvestment leads to inadequate infrastructure and parks, low commercial development and poor schooling – all of which drive property values down.

“Why invest in North Lawndale when I can

ments to a home without being Homeownership is a key at the mercy of a landlord or havtool for building generational ing to move if rent prices drastiwealth. It provides homeowners cally increase. with unique opportunities rentYet, the road to owning a ers can’t access, and resources home does not always look the they can tap into to pay for same. Though Franklin’s homeweddings, retirement, and colbuying journey started in 2018, lege, Kimble said. she did not purchase a property Shantel N. Franklin, a real esuntil 2021. Like Franklin, potentate broker who lives and works tial homebuyers may need to on the West Side, has helped Shantel N. Franklin improve their credit score, infamilies and individuals become Real estate broker crease their savings or reduce homeowners since 2020. Franklin is an Austin homeowner. their debt-to-income ratio beA quick scroll through her social media (@Sh- fore moving forward on a home purchase. antelsellsproperties) shows the variety of propBeing informed about the home-buying proerties available for sale in communities such as cess, improving their finances and accessing Austin, Garfield Park and North Lawndale. A available financial tools are key to “getting to the well-maintained single-family home, a beautiful closing table,” she said. As a real estate broker, brick two-unit building and a historic graystone she said she not only helps potential homebuyhome are among the properties she has helped ers find a home, she helps them be ready to buy. get on – and off – the housing market.

Purchasing a home can bring financial benefits As a real estate broker affiliated with Coldwell as property values increase over time, helping Banker, Franklin helps owners sell their prop- homeowners accumulate thousands of dollars in erties and helps others reap the benefits of equity. With higher interest rates and increased homeownership. prices, it may not be the best time to buy, WilOther homeownership benefits include having son said. Yet, if house prices continue to increase, the ability to make desired changes or improve- those who buy now may see their property value

take the same amount of money and go out to Oak Park?” said Lionel Kimble Jr., vice president and executive director of the Research and Policy Center at the Chicago Urban League.

For example, Wilson said, while banks may not directly discriminate based on race, practices like avoiding investment in certain neighborhoods deepens the racial divide. “(Banks) more indirectly (discriminate) through either not seeing certain neighborhoods as good investments or they don’t want to get involved in certain neighborhoods,” Wilson said. “They’re systematically isolating some populations from lending.”

It’s not just banks who have avoided neighborhoods that have experienced historic disinvestment. Affluent people moving to the city are most likely to choose an affluent neighborhood, bringing their income and spending power with them. The result is concentrated wealth – and homeownership – in areas like the Loop and the North Side of the city.

Black Chicagoans, on the other hand, are concentrated in areas experiencing disinvestment, with lower home values, less access to loans and fewer opportunities for homeownership.

“As a result, the financial resources that the

house can provide between the average white family and the average Black family has disparate returns,” said Kimble. “So Black homeownership, while still a path into the middle class, doesn’t allow Black people and white people to appreciate what middle classness in Chicago means on equal levels.”

Not only have Black residents faced greater difficulty buying a home, but they have also disproportionately experienced foreclosure. The financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting real estate crash is an example.

That year, the average foreclosure rate in Chicago was 2.9%. Lincoln Park, which is nearly 80% white, experienced a foreclosure rate of 0.4%, with Lakeview at 0.7%. In contrast, Austin, North Lawndale, and West Garfield Park all experienced higher-thanaverage foreclosure rates: 5.9%, 7.2% and 7.6%, respectively.

One reason for those higher foreclosure rates is that Black and Latino homeowners were more likely to have loans with high-interest rates, or subprime loans.

Subprime lending is a predatory practice banks employed to the detriment of Black and Latino homeowners across the country. By

increase within a few years.

“I’m somebody who bought back in 2021 and I’m reaping the benefits as of today, in 2023,” Franklin said.

Like Franklin, who is also a block president, many who purchase homes in communities like North Lawndale, Austin and Garfield Park are not only overcoming systemic barriers causing low homeownership rates, but also are fostering a sense of pride and care for the community they live in and sharing it with others.

“Homeownership gives you that pride to want to step up and want to see better on these blocks and in the community as a whole.”

For Kimble, owning a home gives people a connection to a place and is a way to pursue the so-called “American dream,” especially for Black residents.

“Since 1619, [Black people] have been trying to figure out where we really fit here. The larger American ethos is owning a home. Making your own way is something that all Americans strive for, and having access to your own home helps Black folks try to make sense of what the American dream is,” Kimble said. “That dream has been denied us for so many years. Being able to own property and own our home is really key to a sense of belonging.”

2006, 54% of African American and 47% of Hispanic mortgage holders had subprime loans, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. These mortgages were extremely difficult to pay on schedule, causing many to lose their homes — and their wealth.

In 2005, the median net worth for Black families was a little over $12,000, according to the Pew Research Center. By 2009, it was less than half that.

As a result, most families of color haven’t been able to accumulate wealth through homeownership in the same way white families did, which contributes to homeownership disparities today.

Next up: But that doesn’t mean homeownership is out of reach for people of color. In January, we’ll explore the policies that helped break down historical barriers for those on the Greater West Side and demonstrate how owning a home is within reach as we continue our yearlong series.

For an online supplement to see maps and other archived materials, visit: https://www.austinweeklynews.com/at-home/