The Carmen-Marine apartment building rises along the lakeshore in Uptown, 27 graceless stories of steel, concrete and windows so leaky that, to protect themselves from rain, the tenants tuck towels along the sills and set their furniture on bricks.
It doesn’t take a developer’s eye, however, to see beyond the cheap facade: In every one of Carmen-Marine’s 300 soggy apartments breathes the soul of a luxury lakeview condo waiting to be born.
It’ll never happen. Not if the pit bulls can help it.
If the pit bulls get their way, Carmen-Marine, a low-rent sanctuary for the working poor, will soon become the nation’s first privately owned HUD building to be bought by its residents.
For the record, not everyone calls them pit bulls. They have names, women’s mostly: Elena, Kathy, Alba, Mary Fran, Joyce, Nesia, Mary Jane, LaVerne, Maria-along with Michael and Pons.
Their many admirers call them one of the most efficient, effective and tenacious tenant groups in Chicago. Those are the very qualities that have infuriated their foes. Like the former building manager who, having figured out that their tenacity probably would prevent him from buying Carmen-Marine for his own, publicly denounced them as pit bulls.
On Wednesday night, the pit bulls gathered in a huge, empty room at Carmen-Marine to prepare for a Thursday night rally. Politicians, officials and tenants would be there to discuss their purchase plan.
“Jocelyn, are you going to bring pencils?” Kathy Osberger, a member of the tenant board, was quizzing her companions. “Elena, you’re going to translate the membership promotion?”
Joyce excused herself to buy the rally’s refreshments. Mary Jane offered to stuff announcements in tenants’ mailboxes.
On the edge of this historic victory, the pit bulls were as dogged as ever about detail.
The pit bulls once were pussycats. Until the day in 1990 that a 40 percent rent increase was posted in the laundry room.
They had put up with falling plaster, moldy walls, leaky faucets, smoke detectors that didn’t work. But a monthly increase of $100 or more? In a building where two-thirds of the families make less than $24,000 a year? Time to fight back.
With strategies learned from the Organization of the NorthEast, a community organization in Uptown, they beat the rent increase down to 11 percent. In the process, they made a discovery.
Carmen-Marine was one of thousands of buildings constructed during the 1960s as public-private experiments of the Great Society. Owners obtained 3 percent mortgages and huge tax breaks in return for providing affordable housing, typically in shoddy buildings.
In the mid-1980s, owners began to take advantage of an obscure clause that allowed them to pay off their 40-year mortgages after 20 years; they could then rehab and convert to market rates. Low-income tenants across the country faced the possibility of having their homes turned into yuppie palaces.
As a result, in 1990, Congress passed a law that said if the owner decides to sell, tenants have the first shot at buying. No one has come as close to succeeding as the tenants at Carmen-Marine.
The pit bulls began knocking on their neighbors’ doors, usually after a hard day’s work, trying to enlist support, which they would need to win backing from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In a building filled with immigrants from more than a dozen countries, they had to leap over language barriers to plead their cause.
“Many people here come from socialist countries and are very suspicious,” says Elena Braniste, one of the building’s many Romanian immigrants. “People would look at me and think, `Why does she want to keep this building affordable?”‘
In the meantime, the pit bulls inherited a couple of fairy godfathers, Herbert Heyman and Howard Landau, retired developers who made their fortunes from suburban shopping malls.
Through the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, they gave the Carmen-Marine tenants a $250,000 loan to pay architects, lawyers and other consultants to help devise a purchase and rehab plan.
In the next two weeks, the building’s owners, a family of doctors from the Downstate town of Effingham, will decide whether to sell to the tenants.
If they do, Carmen-Marine could become a model for the nation. The tenants are structuring a deal that would ensure that the apartments remain affordable for the life of building. In return, the community would get that utopian ideal-a mixed-income building-along with tenants who take responsibility for it.
One of the pit bulls, Alba Fonseca, a 37-year-old housekeeper from Costa Rica who has devoted night after night to stumping for the cause in Carmen-Marine’s hallways, sums up a common sentiment:
“In the beginning, when I used to knock on doors, some tenants tell you you are dreamer,” she said. “I say, everything starts from dream. If you don’t have dream, you never-how you say?-you never get your dream.”
