Sledgehammer in hand and hard hat atop his head, Chicago Housing Authority Chairman Vince Lane confidently predicted that the first few town homes in his model attempt at mixed-income housing would be ready for viewing in a few short months.
That was July. Nearly a year later, no units are ready for viewing on the site, on Clybourn Avenue just north of the Cabrini-Green public housing complex.
But there is a hole in the ground and poured foundations-concrete evidence of the challenges and miscues that had to be overcome to even start construction on the first 10 of the project’s 81 units.
Still to come will be the challenge of getting middle-class renters to sign leases for town homes that sit at the crossroads of the yuppie stores and homes in southern Lincoln Park and one of America’s most notorious housing projects.
The project, called the Orchard Park Townhomes, also faces critics who say the development, while billed as a wonder of the free market, requires taxpayer money to keep the rents artificially low. And, they say, it is destined for financial trouble.
But the CHA is pressing ahead, knowing the high stakes. In cities around the country-from Atlanta to Chicago to St. Louis-thousands of public housing units will be razed this summer and replaced with mixed-income developments.
Together, they will show the potential for success, or failure, of building communities where public housing residents live alongside the middle class. And the lessons will apply not only to urban areas.
“If we can do it successfully in the inner city, then it demonstrates to suburban communities how they could successfully replicate it” in their struggle to create more affordable housing, said Christine Oliver, president of Chicago Dwellings Association, the private, non-profit firm leading the Orchard Park development team.
The project is innovative partly because it involves privately developed public housing with construction of the market-rate units subsidizing the cost of the units for low-income families.
“All around the country, we are in the process of taking down the worst public housing high-rises and providing alternatives,” said HUD’s top official in the Midwest, Edwin Eisendrath. “This kind of mixed-income alternative is in its infancy, and every model of success will be important.”
The basic idea is to break up public housing’s traditional clusters of poverty by bringing in middle-income families who might provide role models-and house them all in apartments with the same look and amenities.
At Orchard Park, three-fourths of the attractive red-brick units will go to market-rate tenants, who would pay from $975 a month for two bedrooms to $1,300 for three bedrooms with a garage. The rest would go to CHA tenants displaced by the planned redevelopment of nearby Cabrini-Green. Their rent will be subsidized by the federal government.
Last week, CHA spokesman Steve Canty said that as part of Cabrini’s redevelopment the first of three vacant high-rises slated for demolition could face the wrecking ball in “mid- to late summer.”
Cabrini residents who get into Orchard Park must agree to remain crime- and drug-free, participate in job training and keep their children in school. Those residents who are screened out will get housing elsewhere in Cabrini and other CHA developments or given rent-subsidy vouchers for private housing.
Still, the question remains: Why the nearly yearlong delay at Orchard Park? Oliver said HUD regulations are largely to blame.
“HUD was trying to facilitate it, but it involved things that had not been done before,” said Oliver, who previously held positions at CHA and HUD. “We were ready to go with construction last fall; we had the architectural plans and the financing set up.”
Yet it took until late March for HUD, which monitors the CHA, to clear the way to begin building, she said.
That’s not the entire story, though. At least one delay resulted from the development team’s initially neglecting to give CHA residents in adjacent buildings a chance to purchase the land, which is one of the HUD regulations designed to protect residents.
More significantly, critics say, the project was delayed because the CHA’s team significantly underestimated the per-unit cost of the plan. Though he doesn’t think CHA will have any trouble finding enough interested market-rate renters, Tem Horwitz contends that the proposed rents aren’t high enough to support the development’s construction and operation costs.
“At best, it seems to me this is not economical,” said Horwitz, whose firm has developed higher-end town homes nearby. “The bottom line is it would be cheaper for the public if, long term, they just gave the money away at the corner of North and Clybourn.”
Oliver disputed contentions that Orchard Park is financially unworkable. She pointed out that the project benefits from lower costs for land, most of which the CHA owns. And the developers hope to get a property-tax abatement and use tax-exempt bonds.
She doesn’t apologize for the package of subsidies that will keep the rents affordable. “There have to be incentives for middle-income people to live there,” Oliver said, adding that the project’s typical market-rate tenant would be making about $50,000.
The next major step is to convince those people to move in; the first 10 units being built could be occupied by fall. Of approximately 400 inquiries so far, “about 30 to 40 percent are market-rate renters,” Oliver said.
A market survey done for Orchard Park showed that about 20,000 renters in the surrounding area could afford renting the town homes, which have amenities, including garages and washers and dryers.
Sensitive to the challenge of marketing the units, Orchard Park’s developers insist on downplaying its tie to public housing.
“This is not urban pioneering,” Oliver said, noting that the median town home price in the surrounding area is $453,000, according to their market survey. “This is not housing for poor people. This is housing that poor people can live in along with working, moderate-to-middle-income families.”
If Orchard Park succeeds, CHA will seek to replicate the model in other developments. But some of those similar efforts already are running into trouble.
Since September 1993, St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church in the South Side Washington Park neighborhood has been talking with CHA officials about acquiring and rehabbing nearly 60 units near the church into mixed-income housing.
But in recent months the authority has made long-neglected repairs and moved new families into previously vacant units.
“With no concrete plan approved by CHA, if those are good units, you’ve got to use them,” said Canty, the authority’s spokesman.
The whole drawn-out experience with CHA has left the church’s community development staff exasperated, said Rev. Richard Tolliver, St. Edmund’s rector.
“There’s all this talk about making public housing mixed-income,” Tolliver said. “Here you have a credible group. We have the vision. We have the capacity. They encouraged us to do this.
“But we can’t seem to get the support we need to make it happen.”
