All of Mary’s special possessions are now at the city dump, where they would have been years ago had she not saved them from the trash cans and alleys of Uptown and taken them to her sleeping room in the Norman Hotel. The 80-year-old Mary (which isn’t her real name) doesn’t talk much about herself, though she once said she’d been a bookkeeper 20 years ago. For years she hauled debris up to her room at the Norman. There was no place for her to lie down, no apparent way for her to get to her bathroom. Pieces of furniture and plastic bags filled with junk rose from floor to ceiling, except along a small passageway from the door to the chair where she slept.
There may have been a note of sadness in Roddy’s voice when he reported a few weeks ago that Mary had moved into senior-citizen public housing, which was still cheaper, and that he had disposed of her things. It was as if she was a symbol of the transition of the Norman from its fleabag status to its current life–as if she was a symbol of what Roddy and Holsten are doing in their work as rehabbers of low- and moderate-income housing.
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Holsten and Roddy went to the Organization of the North East (ONE), a community organization in Uptown, for help. After talking the matter over with them and doing some investigation, Jack Crane, who was then on the staff of ONE and is now a private housing consultant in Uptown, went to the bank and convinced the officials to lend Holsten the money. He says he told them of the need for SROs among the stable poor in Uptown and about Holsten’s superlative record as a developer, and that if anyone could make the building a stable and profitable one, Holsten and Roddy could. The bank relented and gave Holsten $1.8 million toward the total cost of more than $2.1 million. It was the first time that the bank had given the developer of an SRO conventional lending.
The rehabbing began about a year ago. No gutting was done. It was not to be a yuppie-style rehab like so many in Lincoln Park, Lakeview, and more recently in Uptown, where tenants were displaced and rents were hiked. Only what was needed would be done. New walls, ceilings, and bathrooms were necessary in some units, new kitchens in all the units. The building needed $30,000 worth of heating equipment, $90,000 worth of new wiring, renovated halls and lobby, a canopy over the front door, new signs for the ground-floor stores, storm windows, and $17,000 for the patio. The work is being done floor by floor. Empty apartments were used to house first-floor tenants while that floor was being rehabbed, and then tenants were shifted from old to new units.
Roddy agrees. “There is a certain service to the community those landlords are performing. They will take the people we kick out–I know where I can send people when I kick them out. Those guys aren’t horrible. They try to make things work, but it’s tough. They have fires. One place had a baby thrown out of the window. Shootings, burglaries, doors kicked in. It’s a hell of a life for those managers. The owners usually don’t go near the place. It was like that here. The police were here several times a day. And we still do have problems. The police come on the average of once a week even now.”
“The Norman is excellent now,” says Jack Crane. “Matthew has a great deal of experience in rehab. They do a very good job. If they can get a reasonable price to acquire it, they can do a modest rehab and provide a very good product without having to increase rents very much. They’ve established themselves as successful developers in the low-moderate range. They’re not providing housing for the very poor because they don’t do subsidized projects.
The renovation was scheduled to be complete December 15. As I write this, about 85 percent of the units are renovated; about 70 percent of those have been rented. Roddy carefully screens potential tenants. He gets referrals from social agencies such as Travelers and Immigrants Aid of Chicago, but he is also doing some conventional marketing. His ads have brought a few students and a few moderate-income working people–a hairdresser, a grocery-store manager, a “social-work type.” Roddy says elderly people in the neighborhood who have heard what’s happening in the Norman come in to say “This is where I want to hang out.” In addition some tenants from Holsten’s other buildings who have fallen on hard times have taken a sleeping room until they get back on their feet.
