To the editors:
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This is no small achievement. We hear a lot of rhetoric about the importance of racial and class integration. Kenwood, south of 47th Street, is one of a handful of communities which has actually accomplished it. In contrast, North Kenwood-Oakland, KOCO’s turf, has lost over half its population during the last 20 years, the years of KOCO’s leadership, and is today one of America’s most impoverished communities.
The real issue at 4910 S. Blackstone Ave. is a cheap, substandard renovation plan and a developer with a terrible track record in the community. The building in question, given to KOCO for one dollar at a tax sale, is the old Hotel Riviera, a World War I-era hotel whose rooms had been converted to tiny kitchenettes. By the 1970s, it had become a notorious slum, a source of blight and danger in the community. Its chief defect was that its 270-square-foot, converted, hotel-room apartments were so small that the building could not attract a stable tenancy. Finally, overwhelmed with problems, the owner walked away and the building was abandoned.
The choice before Kenwood was simple: either give up and let KOCO roll over the community or resist. We chose to resist. This decision was influenced by long and bitter experience with KOCO. A few years before, on the very same block, KOCO had been the manager of a large multi-unit building with disastrous results–conflict, a rent strike, abandonment, demolition. One of our members said there ought to be a law to the effect that, “A developer should not be able to screw a block more than once.”
Chairman
