Adrienne White-Faines isn’t a yuppie anymore. That doesn’t seem to bother her because she flippantly refers to herself as a semi-young urban professional, evidence that her life has changed, a little.
She still lives in the city, preferring its hum to the hush of the suburbs. But she is old enough, and successful enough, to have been able to buy, along with her husband, a nice new house in the South Loop’s Dearborn Park neighborhood.
Like a lot of post-yuppie professional women, White-Faines is now also a mother. She thinks the city is a great place to raise her kids, age 1 and 2.
“I can deal with no yard,” she said, figuring her children will be enriched by the neighborhood’s proximity to Chicago’s best museums.
The thing she can’t overcome, however, is the schools.
“I can’t deal with having no good school alternative for my children,” said White-Faines, who won’t send her kids to the local public school, a place with the typical list of inner-city problems.
But as kindergarten looms like an unwelcome math test, White-Faines studies the options: Should her family stay put and pay private school tuition, or move to the suburbs where public schools are a viable choice?
“We are checking the real estate sections,” she said, explaining that she and her neighbors with small children are considering a move to towns like Oak Park or River Forest. “We have to look at alternatives, or bite the bullet and pay for a private school.”
Every year, the same decision faces countless families. Many remain in the city and make the financial sacrifice to send their kids to private schools. Many more, however, opt to move to the suburbs where there remains at least the promise of a good, and free, education.
Parents say they would keep their families in the city if there were a good local public school. They also say any reforms being made by the Chicago Public Schools aren’t coming fast enough for their pre-schoolers, already knocking on the grade-school door.
The problem of middle-class family flight could be solved by education-driven development, supporters of the idea say. The concept, a new approach to neighborhood planning, pairs real estate developers and educators in an effort to make sure new city residential projects include access to a good, and preferably public, school. That way, middle-class families who want to stay in the city, will.
Robert O’Neill is a passionate advocate of education-driven development. He is executive director of Urban Assets Inc., a Chicago-based non-profit economic development group that has helped revitalize parts of the West Side neighborhood near the University of Illinois Chicago.
“We are able to plant trees and renovate parks. That helps with real estate (values),” O’Neill said. “But it comes to the point where not much else will move forward unless new tax dollars come into the city by getting good schools.”
The idea that underpins education-driven development isn’t really a new one. As any real estate agent knows, families want houses in neighborhoods with good schools.
City developers admit schools rarely figure in their plans. They argue that suburban builders can pick home sites where good public schools will help attract families. Urban builders don’t have that luxury.
Instead, city developers put their projects in neighborhoods near downtown or the lake, places preferred by singles and young married couples without children.
As a result, the houses that get built generally are condominiums, lofts and townhomes–dwellings usually suitable for no more than two people.
Developers contend they are simply building houses that meet the needs of the marketplace.
“If we could ever solve the school situation in Chicago, I think it would be a tremendous boom to the economy and especially real estate,” said John Mullen, president of Chicago Urban Properties Inc., which builds city townhouses, lofts and condominiums. “People in my business favor anything that can improve the school system.”
For now, Mullen says he’ll continue to build the kind of houses that sell, small units in places like Bucktown and River North. But like a lot of developers, he says if the schools were improved, he would construct more single-family residences and three-bedroom townhomes.
“We can build (houses with) more space, more bedrooms and more amenities. That we can address. What we can’t address is families picking up and moving out,” Mullen said.
Urban Assets hopes to address the issue with an education-driven development program. It is using, as a prototype, Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood, where hundreds of residential units have been built over the last several years.
“There are about 100 acres in the South Loop that are not developed. We want to stimulate residential development there,” said O’Neill.
With financial backing from local developers, Urban Assets recently proposed a new charter school for the neighborhood. Charter schools are designed to be free of bureaucratic meddling and Urban Assets felt such a proposal was the fastest way to get a good school for the neighborhood.
When the Chicago school board in late January announced 10 new charter schools (a total of 15 charters can be awarded), the proposal from Urban Assets wasn’t approved. The school could get the go-ahead at a later date, a Chicago public schools official says.
The board did give some credence to the linkage of housing and schools, however, when it awarded a charter to the North River High School on Chicago’s Northwest Side. The local community had argued that it needed a high school because a lot of families there move to the suburbs when their kids graduate from eighth grade.
O’Neill of Urban Assets thinks the need is far greater for families with young children.
“The demographics show that families tend to move out by the time children are school age,” he says.
Dearborn Park resident Sheila Goins has an 18-month-old son and expects another baby soon. She says there are lots of toddlers around the neighborhood, but not many older kids.
She adds: “We are worried about our property values.”
Other parents in the South Loop are discouraged.
“I used to say the school is coming. I was so optimistic,” said resident White-Faines, who has worked with a number of community groups to bring a public school alternative to the neighborhood.
“After three years, I’m not optimistic. I don’t know the solution.”
O’Neill admits it was a setback for his organization when the school charter wasn’t approved. But, he says, he’s not giving up, at least not yet.
“We are not backing down. We are committed to this idea,” said O’Neill, a crusader who hasn’t drawn a salary for a year.
Despite the obstacles ahead, real estate developers generally think education-driven residential construction shows promise.
Gerald Fogelson, developer of the South Loop’s Central Station, where more than 500 residential units have been built over the last several years, has wanted a new school there for some time.
In 1991, Fogelson’s company underwrote a study to determine whether there was a need for another school in the South Loop. The study confirmed the need, but plans for a school, which was meant to be private, never went forward.
Fogelson’s company also donated seed money to help Urban Assets put together its charter school proposal.
Several years ago, South Loop developers welcomed the addition of the Honey Tree Child Care Center. (Four of its empty classrooms were to be used for the proposed charter school.) They figured the center would help keep some families in the neighborhood.
“It was our hope that our school would feed right into the charter school,” said Sara Bode, part owner of Honey Tree and past president of the Greater State Street Council.
Developer Dan McLean, president of MCL Companies, Chicago, also sees the need for better schools to help keep middle-class families in the city. His company has built about 500 homes in the South Loop’s Dearborn Park.
“We need an overall approach that includes education. That only enhances what we build,” said McLean, who supported Urban Assets’ proposal for a charter school.
On the North Side, MCL plans to build 200 houses and a shopping center near the Cabrini-Green public housing complex. McLean thinks plans will include an alternative school for what he hopes will become a stable, middle-class community.
Meanwhile, Urban Assets is trying to find a way to open a public school in the South Loop.
O’Neill says any new proposals will include input from the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois Chicago, which had been selected to develop the curriculum for Urban Assets’ charter school.
The Small Schools Workshop creates schools usually with no more than about 150 children. It currently has projects in about 60 public schools.
“We have found that school size is the most significant factor in determining how students do,” said Michael Klonsky, director of the Small Schools Workshop. “Chicago kids need to be known as part of a community where teachers know them and they know their teachers.”
O’Neill also believes a new school will not attract middle-class families unless low-income enrollment is no more than 30 percent. He says studies show that student performance drops when schools are dominated by low-income groups.
“I’m not an elitist. We have to have integration. But isolating low-income groups has failed,” O’Neill added.
An example is South Loop Elementary, a relatively new school built just eight years ago at Roosevelt Road and State Street, which sits squarely in the middle of the emerging South Loop neighborhood.
The school was designed to serve a mixed-income, multi-ethnic population and, at the time it was built, was thought to be the answer to many of the same concerns now posed by O’Neill and others.
But the school and its enrollment base became a political football, of sorts, underscoring the difficulties communities often have when the Chicago school system’s bureaucracy is in charge.
According to local residents, low-income groups lobbied to have their children admitted to the new school because of overcrowding at other schools. When students from low-income families became the majority, middle-class parents pulled out their kids.
“We would not consider the public school in this neighborhood,” said Gayle Randall, who lives in a two-story townhouse in the Central Station development and has a 4-year-old daughter now attending a private pre-school.
If a new school were opened, Randall wouldn’t mind the presence of kids from low-income families.
She said: “We want a multi-racial, multi-economic mixture in the school. But every parent has to be committed to the school. We’ve got to give a new school a chance.”
