With a hazy timeline that could extend several more years, Lathrop residents are at unease about the future of what they see as a low-income oasis. Even if the Chicago Housing Authority assured public housing residents that they will have a place at the North Side site in the future, the agency says it will share that space with those who are willing to pay market rates.
While that approach has been applied to the agency’s redevelopments in poorer neighborhoods, Lathrop is surrounded by comparatively more expensive homes. Many residents and public housing advocates worry that the agency’s approach would further marginalize the poor.
“It’s clear to me we don’t need market-rate housing here anymore,” said Robert Davidson, president of the Lathrop Homes local advisory council and a 20-year resident of the site. “This isn’t going to be designed for the residents who are here.”
Davidson has a vision to restore Lathrop’s former stature and hopes to keep half the site public housing while devoting the rest to other affordable housing, both rent-based and home ownership programs. He and other community activists have presented the plan to the CHA.
Though few details are finalized, the new Lathrop likely won’t fit that ideal. The city has capped the share of public-housing at no more than one third of the proposed 1,200 units. That’s not exactly approach it has taken with other redevelopment projects, where it has split housing equally between public, affordable and market-rate types.
Since the CHA’s Plan for Transformation campaign to remake various public housing communities across the city began in 2000, the agency has redeveloped most of its sites to include all three types of housing. While that approach has been seen as a good approach in less gentrified parts of the city, that might not be the best approach for Lathrop, said Roosevelt University professor D. Bradford Hunt.
“Lathrop is essentially surrounded by highly valuable market rate homes,” Hunt said. “Places such as the Lathrop Homes should be renovated with the bottom two groups (affordable and public housing) in mind.”
Built in 1938, Lathrop borders the well-to-do Lincoln Park and North Center neighborhoods. Located at the intersection of Diversey Parkway and Clybourn Avenue, it differs from the behemoth, isolated high rises that once composed much of the city’s public housing stock. Low-rise apartments and townhouses occupy a 37-acre stretch along the Chicago River with the buildings separated by courtyards where residents interacted.
“We sit outside, bring out different food and we talk to our neighbors,” said 26-year resident Cynthia Scott. “It’s like living in Kentucky, the southern hospitality thing.”
The CHA has touted Lathrop as an ethnically diverse family public housing development. But it remains a low-income island surrounded by an increasingly wealthy section of the city.
As of 2010, household income at Lathrop averaged below $6,000 with only one in seven head of households being employed. Meanwhile, a two-bedroom condo across the street from Lathrop is on the market for $279,000. A few blocks east of Lathrop are similarly apportioned units priced at a little less than $400,000.
Over the years, the complex fell into disrepair following the beginning of the Plan for Transformation in 2010 as the CHA, chose not to re-lease vacated apartments. By the beginning of 2011, only about a fifth of the development’s 925 units were occupied. Boarded up doorways had long replaced the complex’s arched walkways as the most distinguishable aesthetic feature.
The next major change came in January when 88 tenants who lived north of Diversey were told to move within six months to make way for the project that has yet to have a finalized plan.
Residents had six months to decide where to wait out a process that will take an as yet undecided number of years. Before the deadline, 84 tenants were moved to Lathrop’s south end, which is slated for redevelopment in a second phase and is seen as the less-desirable side of the complex.
“I like it here. Everybody gets along. We try to look out for each other,” said James Carlisle, a lifelong resident of Lathrop of 52 years. “I was afraid if I did take my options to go somewhere else, they would go back on their word and make it difficult for me if I ever wanted to come back.”
Jadine Chou, who oversees all of CHA’s traditional public housing properties, says the agency knows that uncertainty over the site has increased residents’ anxieties.
“Residents wonder how long will it take for development and how long will the process will move forward. We were trying in good efforts to keep them in the community,” Ms. Chou said. “Anytime you make a move or change a home, it is human nature to wonder what to expect in their own home.”
Meanwhile, the CHA assured the residents who were required to move that they would be able to return to their neighborhood at the end of development, however long that takes. The agency also plans to fence off vacant units on the north end while keeping two youth-oriented centers on the north end open: the Boys and Girls Club and the Mary Crane Center.
Residents will have a chance to provide input during the as-yet started community planning process, originally expected to begin during the summer. The residents’ decisions to stay may have some bearing on the process.
“The residents should be fighting for as many apartments as possible,” Mr. Hunt said. “The more people drift away the less likely it is that residents will achieve their goals.”
The uncertainty of the site also has the attention of other area stakeholders.
“One of the problems that the city or people have is that these processes get very elongated,” said Joe Quartana, a real estate agent with Koenig & Strey who has sold property in the surrounding area. “Redevelopment is going to have a positive effect. It will undoubtedly increase the prices around the site. But the project remains an enigma.”
While Lathrop residents have questioned recent CHA decisions, most notably why the agency will make people move before development plans are in place, Ms. Chou said they were made with resident interests in mind.
Not all residents are pessimistic about a new, mixed-income Lathrop. Derrick Day, a 25-year resident of Lathrop’s north end, had no issues with moving south across Diversey in April.
“Of course, we want to stay here. It’s a nice and beautiful place. No one wants to start again in a new community that they don’t know,” Day said. “If the city can work with the people here and create something good for everybody, I’m okay with it.”