Two Gated Communities: Will the Lathrop Homes be drowned in a River of Gentrification?

Gated Community  One.  "Take a stroll through Picardy Place and feel the essence of San Francisco.  This West Lakeview townhome community features near luxury homes wrapped in a variety of pastels – blue, grey, and peach stucco – nestled along brick paver streets." The gates protect it from the rabble on Diversey Avenue.

Gated Community Two, only blocks away from Picardy Place, the Julia C. Lathrop Homes.  The gates make sure no one actually lives there.  The Chicago Housing Authority gets the same HUD subsidy - reportedly over $11,000 per unit - whether the units are occupied or not, so it has no real incentive to find tenants, although it has a waiting list of 40,000 people.

Architect Robert S. De Golyer made his reputation building housing for Chicago's affluent in the teens and 1920's, including luxury highrises at 1120, 1242, 3500 and 3750 North Lake Shore Drive, the Powhatan Apartments on the South Side, and, next to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the palazzo-styled 200 East Pearson, where Ludwig Mies van der Rohe made his home for the last two decades of his life.

Landmarks Illinois, Antunovich Associates

In 1937, De Golyer tackled a very different project.  Working with a team that included Hugh Garden, Thomas Tallmadge, Hubert Burnham, and landscape architect Jens Jensen, De Golyer transformed 35 acres of riverfront property north and south of Diversey into the Julia C. Lathrop Homes, among the very first examples of federally funded public housing.  According to Preservation Chicago . . .

The design owes much to the earlier 19th century industrial towns (Saltaire, New Lanark, Pullman) as well as to the Garden City tradition started by Ebenezer Howard in England -- naturalistic setting, brick construction, low-rise buildings, curving walks and streets, informal siting of buildings, ample open/green space, and simple ornamentation.

Initially maintained as a whites-only development, the complex slowly began to be integrated, getting its first black residents in 1956.  According to Landmarks Illinois, Lathrop was a popular destination for returning veterans after World War II.  Later decades saw increasing problems with gangs and narcotics.  As part of its "Plan for Transformation" from 2000, to be completed within a decade,  the Chicago Housing Authority announced its intention in 2006 to demolish the Lathrop Homes for new development, resulting in protests from both residents and preservationists. With the project achieving a listing on the National Register of Historic Places earlier this year, the scorched earth approach has been put on hold.

Walking the complex today, its charms are evident.  The buildings are simple but elegant,  The grounds are handsome, with plenty of mature trees.  There's a nature trail along the river, although it's now cut off from the river with chain link fencing and overgrowth.

In 2011, the CHA moved out all residents in the northern half of Lathrop.  Although rehabilitation has taken place, there have been no move-ins.  According to Curtis Black's story at Community Media Workshop's Newstips site, drawing on stories in the Chicago Reporter and Crain's Chicago Business, 82% of Lathrop's 925 units are now vacant.  Lathrop's remaining residents were stunned to hear CHA staffer Veronica Gonzalez suggest at a June 27th meeting that her agency's long-standing pledge that residents would be able to remain during the project's renovation might be rescinded and the entire project emptied in case of an "emergency".  The resulting outrage caused the CHA to issue a statement that it was still committed to keeping residents in their homes during the rehab, while reserving the right to kick them all out.

Landmarks Illinois, Antunovich Associates

 In 2010, the CHA handed Lathrop's future over to Lathrop Community Partners, a consortium of five firms including Heartland Housing, Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation, and Related Midwest, a firm better known for constructing big residential high-rises.  In 2007 Landmarks Illinois had a preservation plan prepared by Antunovich Associates, which should be the starting point for any redevelopment, but may well not be.

A couple Saturdays ago, residents held a rally/barbeque against the rumored evictions, and to urge the CHA to make the vacant, rehab units available for leasing.  The t-shirt worn by a long-time resident  covered a major concern . . .

"No Market Rate."  The Plan for Transformation formula for redevelopment is one-third market rate, one-third affordable housing, and one-third public housing.  A Related Midwest executive told Curtis Black that at Lathrop market rate, which requires demolition and new construction, is non-negotiable, for two reasons: "to attract retail development, and to qualify for TIF financing."

Landmarks Illinois
Antunovich Associates

This is how the public sector is diluted through privatization. What was once a public asset is carved up into chunks, so that private interests can profit off of public holdings.  Usually with TIF subsidies.  Residents may well be looking closely at Related Midwest's actions at another CHA complex, the ABLA Homes on the near West Side, where Black reports that Related is asking to change the ratio of what was entirely public housing to 80% market rate, 20 per cent public housing, and no affordable housing at all.

Lathrop residents' "No Market Rate" is mirrored by what could said to be the motto of Lathrop's neighbors, "No Poor People Here."  Their voices were heard in comments in a 2010 piece on Lathrop by Dennis Rodkin in Chicago Magazine.  "tear -em down",  "If Lathrop stays  public and opens 600 more units - for me personally it'll mean losing big money and inability to sell my condo, ""rif raf and deadbeats", "'Don't build new public housing units on the site as it will not benefit the neighborhood", "move the people out of there . . .  I would feel much safer.", "crackheads running all over the neighborhood", "Why not turn it in to a large riverfront park?"

This is the way the world works.  Wedged between the Clybourn strip malls to the west and new condo developments to the east, the Lathrop Homes are an affront to upscale development.  To those who have worked their way up to be able to buy a sparkling new home in a trendy neighborhood, the residents of Lathrop are, at best, an embarrassment; at worst, a frightening menace.  To the working poor of Lathrop, those neighbors are the overseers of their future, who have no other interest in them than making them invisible, anywhere but here.

Yet, for a few golden decades, Lathrop, and other projects like it, were successful evocations of the American dream, where working people of different races lived together as they built a better life for themselves, in a setting that proclaimed that finding yourself on the lower end of the income stream didn't mean you forfeited your right to well-designed, decent housing, in a park-like setting.  In the increasing inequality of today's America, is there no longer a place for the idealism and commitment that created the Julia C. Lathrop Homes?