As soon as she saw the town houses in the Sanctuary two years ago, Suzanne Hogan knew it was as close as she’d get to middle-class paradise on earth, and in the heart of Chicago yet. Located at the corner of Sheffield and Fullerton, the condominium complex–62 apartments and 17 town houses built around an enclosed courtyard is in the heart of Lincoln Park, a block from the el and five minutes from the lake.
What’s most painful to the townhouse residents (about 30 people all told, children included) is the relative indifference of the powers that be. Edwin Eisendrath, their alderman, says he must study the plan; Mayor Eugene Sawyer praised it; and the Sun-Tim dismissed the Sanctuary town-house residents as “yuppies.”
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“DePaul has offered a very reasonable price,” the Reverend John Richardson, president of DePaul, said at the press conference unveiling the expansion plan. “Living next to students might not be what they [the residents] wanted, but they purchased property rights in the middle of our campus.”
When it comes to Lincoln Park, otherwise sensible men and women lose control. They pay inflated prices for whatever units they can find; meanwhile developers scramble to fill any available land with cheap, shoddy construction they know will rent or sell anyway.
“We knew we were taking a risk when we bought here,” says Tim Vezeau, an attorney who bought his three-bedroom town house in 1987. “The prices were low because of all the problems. There were other problems: like bad plumbing. Sometimes the management company was slow answering our complaints. But we all figured the building had potential.”
The residents were shocked to find out at the meeting what DePaul planned for the Sanctuary–up until then, they had assumed DePaul was buying for investment. They felt duped because Lyons, which has three representatives on the five-person condominium association, hadn’t told them about DePaul’s interest–a violation, they charge, of their condominium association’s guidelines.
“If you ask most people in Lincoln Park–as we did, we worked with them on every stage of the plan–they’ll say they’d rather have us convert an existing building than build a new one for a dorm; that way there’s less congestion,” says Coffey. “OK, we didn’t tell the town-house owners we were buying the apartments. But if we’d done that, apartment owners would know DePaul was the buyer; they would have asked for more money, and we wouldn’t have gotten a fair price.
