They live in two different neighborhoods on different sides of town, but the Park Ridge homeowners share a common cause: They are protesting the expansion of group homes.
On the east side of the city, a neighborhood group is trying to block the expansion of the Edison Park Home for sexually and physically abused teenagers.
In the center of town, homeowners are challenging plans to open a single-family house for the mentally retarded in a neighborhood that already has two such residences, with a third under construction.
This type of opposition to non-traditional residences is nothing new nationally, or in the Chicago area. Over the years, it has played out in communities such as Elgin, Palatine, Shorewood and Wheaton.
Steven Polin, general counsel of Oxford House Inc. in Silver Spring,Md.-a sometimes-controversial agency for recovering alcoholics and drug users that has established 475 group homes in 34 states-sees it all the time.
“A lot of the reaction is that we’re all for what you’re doing, but don’t put it my back yard,” Polin said.
What makes the growing controversy in Park Ridge unusual is that the city is dealing with two such disputes at the same time.
For Park Ridge Mayor Ronald Wietecha, the problem has raised larger issues such as social responsibility versus the rights and desires of the city’s residents.
“It creates the impression that Park Ridge has been targeted for all kinds of social agency expansion,” Wietecha said. “That’s the impression for the neighbors and that’s what creates the fear: How far will this go and what is in the future?”
A landmark 1988 amendment to the federal Fair Housing Act permits group homes for the disabled or disadvantaged to locate in residential neighborhoods. But many municipalities have local zoning laws to regulate group homes, which sometimes leads to conflicts.
For example, Oxford House is locked in a court battle with Palatine after opening a group home last year without obtaining a special-use permit as required under the village’s zoning laws.
It is Park Ridge’s zoning laws that are at issue as two social service agencies seek approval for separate group home expansions.
At the Edison Park Home, a compound of colonial-style buildings across Canfield Road from Chicago’s Edison Park neighborhood, 500 neighbors have signed a petition protesting the home’s request to amend the city’s zoning ordinance for its proposed $6 million expansion.
Plans call for construction of five new living units, a gymnasium, a kitchen and an office building. The number of youths living on the property would increase to 56 from 46.
The Edison Park Home, which would have to secure a change in the residential zoning law before formally proposing its construction plans to the city, provides residential treatment services to 30 boys and 16 girls, most of whom have been physically and sexually abused. They are wards of the state who are referred to the home by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. The home is operated by Lutheran Social Services of Illinois.
Dave Helms, the home’s executive director, said the expansion is designed to serve the increasing number of abused and neglected children in Illinois.
“Nobody welcomes a program like ours,” Helms said. “It’s a disappointment to me that people are jumping on the bandwagon right away and opposing it rather than working together to find an acceptable solution.”
Real estate broker Louis Virgilio, the spokesman for the protesting neighbors, who call themselves People Educated About the Campus of Edison (PEACE), said the home’s expansion plan would violate the spirit and intent of the city’s zoning law for residential areas.
Virgilio, 37, and the more than 200 area residents in the group fear that the Edison Park Home will reconstruct its spacious, 92-year-old campus into a complex of buildings that are larger and taller than anything else in the neighborhood. Home officials, however, said that while they have architectural plans, nothing is set in stone.
Under the other group home proposal before the city, the Northwest Suburban Aid to the Retarded, which operates six group homes or supportive apartments in four suburbs, is seeking city approval to operate a group home for five mentally retarded men at 111 N. Chester Ave., said Robert Okazaki, the group’s executive director.
However, neighbors such as Jeff Carlson, 48, a sales representative, said the proposal would violate the city’s zoning law against “clustering” a group home within a quarter mile, or 1,320 feet, of another one.
The organization, which already operates an eight-flat apartment building for 20 residents, is constructing an eight-unit building next door that would house another 20 people and is renting an apartment in a two-flat across the street for four residents-all within 300 to 500 feet of the proposed group home, Carlson said.
Okazaki said his organization is not trying to create a cluster of group homes but is trying to disperse five residents residing in an apartment in the two-flat.
In the meantime, Mayor Wietecha said he will be holding the line on the City Council’s emphasis on preserving the city’s residential character, a statement he reiterated last month in an extraordinary appearance before the Zoning Commission.
