The vacant lot at 5406 N. Winthrop is ugly but innocuous looking, filled with knee-high weeds that climb up and around a cyclone fence. But last month the lot became the subject of a heated legal battle when members of the Edgewater Community Council, a local group, went to court to prevent the Chicago Housing Authority and the Habitat Company from building a six-unit building for low-income families there.
“The beauty of Edgewater is its diversity,” says Mimi Harris, who works for a local social-service organization and lives in the area. “But I get the feeling that some people–some poor people, I should say–aren’t so welcome here anymore. Rents are going up in Edgewater, they’re not going down. There’s a problem of displacement. I hear about it all the time from the people who come to my office. Let me tell you: I lived in Old Town when it was integrated. Now it’s all upscale. And I think it was a better neighborhood then.”
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Such confrontations have been part of city politics since the 1940s, when an enlightened liberal named Elizabeth Wood ran the CHA. Wood argued that the CHA should scatter low-rise public housing units in neighborhoods throughout the city to avoid massive concentrations of poor. Her proposals generated such a storm of protest from white middle-class communities that the city’s aldermen used their clout to bounce Wood from office. Her successors built high-rise projects, like the Robert Taylor Homes, in a handful of all-black neighborhoods.
“There was an immediate reaction against this plan,” says Alderman Mary Ann Smith of the 48th Ward. “And for many good reasons.” For starters, the CHA has a lousy track record managing scattered-site units, Smith says.
They also object to the proposed building’s design. “They’re building it lot line to lot line; that’s poor planning,” says Smith. “It’s going to be too congested for the people who live there. Scattered-site housing is supposed to improve living conditions for poor people. I’d like to see a little bit more creativity, don’t just dump something on a site. What really bothers me is that there are whole areas in the city that don’t have any low- income housing.”
“We’re talking about a dependent population with many needs,” says Charlie Sachs, ECC’s executive director. “There are a handful of families who bring problems with them. They can damage a neighborhood.”
But the ECC suit does argue that “the area is experiencing substantial resegregation, being less than 1 percent black in 1970, 17 percent black in 1980 and 30 percent black in 1988.”
