Changing Chicago Area a Study in Gentrification

Most people wouldn’t even save such a letter, let alone tape it up in public. Zenaida Lopez posts it like a neon sign.

The letter, unsigned, arrived last fall after residents in working-class, mostly Puerto Rican, Humboldt Park gathered to talk about saving the neighborhood. Their concern was not so much crime and blight as it was the wave of mostly white professionals who are buying homes and driving up prices.

“Just as some of you displaced the European immigrants and non-Latino folks whose neighborhood Humboldt Park used to be, it’s time to move on,” declares the letter, whose author claimed to be a former Humboldt Park resident. “Deal with it.”

“Deal with us,” Lopez mutters-- a sentiment she’s scrawled in broad black ink across the top of the letter, tattered around the edges but still attached with yellowing tape to a glass case in her bakery a few miles northwest of downtown Chicago.

“ ‘Criminally minded, selfish, racist people’--that’s what they’re calling us,” Lopez sputters as she reads from the page.

Similar clashes are playing out across the country, from New York’s East Village to Washington’s Adams-Morgan, from Minneapolis’ Whittier to San Francisco’s Mission District, as demand for inner-city housing rises and older neighborhoods become trendy.

Most pit young professionals whose own parents may once have fled the city against working-class families trying to hold on to turf they have claimed with the sweat equity of generations.

Lopez grew up in Humboldt Park. She reared her son here. After years as a pharmacist, she quit her job to buy the bakery from a departing Ukrainian family. It sits squarely in the middle of Division Street’s seven-block business district, which is flanked by oversized, rippled wrought-iron Puerto Rican flags that extend over either end of the street like entrance gates.

She knows the neighborhood has problems. Last summer, two young people were gunned down--one 17-year-old after a foot chase by police, and a 12-year-old boy caught in gang cross-fire as he rode a bicycle near home.

And she knows market forces may change the face of the neighborhood. “But it will be over my dead body.”

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Humboldt Park is in ferment. Activists are circulating petitions to freeze property taxes for poor residents. A few developers are building and refurbishing affordable housing--part of a multiyear, city-funded redevelopment plan. The neighborhood business development association is almost finished with plans to create a Puerto Rican restaurant district between the flagged gateways.

Those who track housing trends are watching Humboldt Park with interest. But they wonder whether all the activity will be enough to help poorer residents stay.

As happens in most cities, Chicago’s neighborhoods have often changed hands as those in residence--such as the Poles and Russian Jews who made up most of Humboldt Park’s population until the 1970s and ‘80s--move on to better housing.

“A neighborhood changing is nothing new,” says Rob Paral, a Chicago-based demographer who tracks low-income populations. “But in neighborhoods like Humboldt Park, they’re telling you, ‘I don’t want to leave here; I’m being pushed.’ That’s different.”

Data released this year by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development show the nation is losing low-income housing units at an escalating rate--400,000 units in 1993-97, a four-year period, compared with 425,000 in 1985-93, a span of eight years.

And most of the lost units were in cities.

“So where are low-income people supposed to go for decent housing now?” Paral asks. “That’s the big crunch.”

And that’s what people want to know in Humboldt Park, where even the name of a main artery tells of dueling personalities. On the west side of Division Street are Lopez’s bakery, a dentist’s office, a Christian bookstore and several mom-and-pop restaurants known for their comida criolla, traditional Puerto Rican food. Grocery stores are stocked with plantains, mangoes and piles of yucca, a root vegetable.

In warmer months, older men play dominoes on tables in front of the bakery’s vintage maroon-and-yellow tile facade. Salsa music occasionally blares from passing cars.

Until the last year or two, this side of town looked much like the far side of Division, a neighborhood known historically as West Town. Now it’s more commonly known as Wicker Park, and each month seems to bring something new.

One by one, grungy corner liquor stores and vacant storefronts are transformed into sushi joints and nouveau Latin restaurants. A walk north into quieter side streets finds renovated brownstones and new condominiums--with two-bedroom units and lofts selling in the $350,000 range. Five years ago, pioneering entrepreneurs were paying that for entire three-story buildings.

Violent crime is fading on this side of Division, say police who patrol both neighborhoods. But the influx of wealthier residents has brought more home burglaries, and rashes of graffiti, drug dealing and occasional gunfire persist.

Nicole Nelson and Bill Brooks learned that the hard way one October night when someone sprayed gunfire through their Wicker Park neighborhood. The next morning, they discovered that one 9mm bullet had hit a few inches under a front window before bouncing off the sidewalk, and two others had lodged in an overhang and a railing support.

With half a dozen neighbors, they attended a monthly meeting with beat cops to find out what they could do. Without a witness, it turned out, not much.

Brooks and Nelson say the incident was frightening, the police response frustrating. But it has not deterred the couple, who bought their house last summer and remain sure crime rates will keep dropping and property values rising.

Those rising values are also driving up property taxes. Last year’s levy on the house they bought was about $4,000; this year, they paid almost $6,000. They figure the higher taxes are helping drive off criminals, though not without cost.

“It’s affecting the drug dealers --which is good. But what about the older couple or the families who’ve lived here for years?” asks Nelson, a legal investigator for the Chicago Park District. “That’s something I feel really terrible about.”

It’s a common discussion among neighbors--but one they say rarely ends with solutions.

When a 43-year-old financial professional who’s lived six years on the same block with Nelson and Brooks is approached by a reporter, he asks first that his name not be used. Then he tells of the woman who came to his door asking him to sign a petition supporting a property tax freeze for his lower-income neighbors.

He refused.

“I was thinking purely selfish reasons,” he says with a shrug. “Real estate values.”

A stronger tax base that fuels neighborhood rejuvenation--better schools, lower crime, vibrant businesses--is exactly what Chicago officials will tell you they are aiming for.

And they insist everyone can have a piece of it.

The solution, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley says, is “mixed-income” housing--in which housing for the poorest Chicagoans is sprinkled amid housing owned by and rented to people who make more money. The idea is to rid the city of large pockets of bleak poverty and decay.

Large blocks of high-rise public housing have already been demolished in Chicago, and city-subsidized developers are slowly replacing them with tidy brownstones, some of which are sold to poor residents at a reduced rate.

But so far, public-housing apartments aren’t being replaced one for one. And waiting lists are long for rental assistance in private, market-rate apartments.

“There’s a sense that mixed-income housing is benefiting only one side of the equation--the wealthier side,” says Sid Mohn, president of the nonprofit Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights, a Chicago-based anti-poverty group.

Mark Moynihan moved to Humboldt Park this year from a trendy downtown neighborhood, in part because he wanted to live among more trees and more families. He comes to Lopez’s bakery several mornings a week for her strong Puerto Rican coffee, cinnamon rolls and pastries filled with things like guayaba and cheese.

“For me, this is really living in a community--people know each other, they’ve lived here for a long time,” he says. “I want to be a part of that.”

Moynihan is what Lopez calls a “progressive white,” and she says she has no problem with people like him moving in.

“You know, there’s a difference,” she says. “Some respect the neighborhood for what it is, and some just want us to go away.”

When asked what they could do to help maintain their new neighborhood’s diversity, Brooks and Nelson are at a loss.

“When it comes down to it, we just want an affordable house with a backyard in a safe neighborhood,” says Brooks, a fund-raising consultant for nonprofit groups. “It’s the American dream. But I guess that’s everybody’s dream, isn’t it?”

It’s the dream of Jeanette Rodriguez, who grew up in Humboldt Park and now lives with her two children in a three-bedroom apartment. Certain her $700-a-month rent will soon go up, she’s scrambling to scrape together a down payment on a house while she can still afford one.

“Who wants to pay $1,000 or more for rent?” says Rodriguez, who teaches sex education for Planned Parenthood. “I just want a house--to stay in my community.”

Neighborhood organizers say longtime residents with similar frustrations are beginning to realize the power in numbers--with dozens more showing up at community meetings and voting booths to choose sympathetic representatives.

“We’re making it very clear that this is it,” Lopez says, arms folded. “This is our last trench--our last stand.”