Everybody in the neighborhood knows them–like a bad thought that sticks in the brain and won’t go away.
Their doors hang open, their windows are broken, their concrete steps are half rubble, their trash is all over, their walls are cracking, their outside lights are smashed. Strangers to the neighborhood go in and out frequently and gangs hang around on the sidewalk in front.
They are the apartment buildings that spread poison for blocks around. They are not just eyesores, they are cancers, spreading crime and fear.
“Bad guys are always holed up in a building where nobody’s paying attention so it becomes a nest of people that wreaks havoc on a community,” said Ken Brucks, executive director of the Edgewater Community Council. Brucks calls bad buildings the single biggest public safety issue in the city.
The connection between blighted buildings and street fear is something that most people know intuitively, but has rarely been recognized in the way city governments approach crime. Police departments and building departments have not traditionally gone hand-in-glove.
“City agencies were categorical, and police didn’t have anything to do with buildings and the causes of crime,” said Warren Friedman, executive director of the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety, a group that has been pushing for more effective city crime-fighting since the early 1980s.
Now, in Chicago and elsewhere, that is changing dramatically. Through a combination of factors ranging from the rise in political strength and savvy of neighborhood groups to more sophisticated crime mapping technology, bad buildings are being targeted the way surgeons target malignant tumors.
In at least one Chicago district, police are going after buildings the way they have traditionally gone after felons–collecting evidence, taking photos and talking to witnesses.
The crucial element in Chicago`s war on cancerous buildings is community policing. Since starting as a pilot program in 1993 and going city-wide the following year, it has brought together police and neighborhood residents for monthly meetings to identify local problems and how to deal with them.
And likely as not, people will be talking about buildings, according to Ted O’Keefe, who directs the City Hall side of community policing, known as CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy).
“Many of the concerns people articulated weren’t the murders, but more the conditions that can foster crime, the quality-of-life issues,” O’Keefe said. “People identified buildings as a serious problem.”
Some problem buildings cited were abandoned–home to squatters, drug dealers and prostitutes. Others had tenants but were neglected by landlords who only came to collect rent.
“One bad building can destroy a block,” O’Keefe said.
The complaints by residents were borne out in some cases by a new computerized crime mapping program that started in 1994, which showed police going back to the same addresses again and again.
Crime “tends to accumulate around areas of opportunity, and those are very often declining properties with negligent landlords who don’t screen (their tenants),” Friedman said.
The City Hall bureaucracy has been shaken up significantly to get quick action on the bad buildings and other neighborhood nuisances as community policing has evolved.
Police can now request quick action from city departments to address conditions that pose safety problems; a strategic inspections task force including the building, fire, revenue and health departments can be dispatched to a suspect property; and community groups have been encouraged to track and attend court cases of special concern.
In addition, the 1996 city gang and drug house ordinance allows the city to hold landlords responsible for criminal activity occurring in and even around their buildings. To complement that, the building department has a new training program for landlords on how to keep their buildings free of drugs and gangs.
For instance, the owner of the building at 5874-84 N. Ridge Ave. in Edgewater, which had been targeted last summer as a source of blight and a den of crime, was required to attend such training.
The owner, who has other troubled properties in Chicago and Evanston, was also required to attend CAPS beat meetings as well as take various measures to clean up his property under threat of fines and jail time.
The Chicago Housing Authority also got into the act, canceling $618,000 in annual federal Section 8 rent subsidy contracts with the owner for that and other properties, another forceful weapon in the growing armory against building blight.
A further innovation in a pilot stage is the sending of staff attorneys from the city law department out to police districts to advise and train officers on problems that might be covered by city ordinances with which most police are unfamiliar. They also work with police so that case files can be prepared to be prosecuted successfully.
“This really works well on housing issues,” said Pat Holmes, chief assistant corporation counsel, who is in charge of the program.
Police who have trouble catching drug dealers in the act in a particular building can call on the attorneys to help them work up a case against the landlord, she noted.
The 24th District, which mainly covers apartment-filled Rogers Park, is not in the pilot program, but already police there are carefully preparing housing cases, approaching bad buildings like wanted criminals, according to District Cmdr. Thomas Byrne.
“When we know we’ve got a bad or borderline building, we make files, go out with evidence technicians, talk to neighbors and make 30 to 50 photos of the whole building,” he said.
In that way, police working with the strategic task force and the corporation counsel’s office have been able to mount attacks on five buildings in the last four months, Byrne said.
And the impact on crime has been dramatic, he added,citing the closing of one building at 1528 W. Morse Ave. in June, which cut crime on the block by a third; and recent vacate orders on two buildings on the 6300 N. Bell Ave. block, which caused street incidents to drop “substantially,” he said.
These actions have raised morale of both police and residents, who are able to see tangible results of their efforts to address problems, he added.
The most recent weapon introduced against bad landlords is the building department’s program of shaming them by posting signs on their buildings. The signs go on properties that have been in court for at least six months, have 10 or more code violations or are considered dangerous and hazardous.
The signs contain the landlord’s name and address and a contact number for court hearing information. The landlords’ names also are published in their local newspapers. And the building department has the power to go into land trusts to identify owners trying to hide.
So far the program, begun in early August, hasn’t been too effective, because most of the signs, which were put on parkways, were ripped out immediately. But a new ordinance will allow affixing of the signs directly to the property, and there are fines for removal.
The newspaper listings may be particularly effective with absentee landlords.
“I had one call from a guy who said I had a lot of nerve letting everybody know that he owned that building,” said city building commissioner Cherryl Thomas about an Englewood property owned by a suburban resident.
All of the new programs “have changed the way we do business,” said Thomas, whose department has gotten 10 more employees and an added $550,000 in the departmental budget just for the strategic inspections task force.
Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University professor who has been evaluating Chicago’s community policing program, gives the assault on bad buildings high marks and calls the shaming strategy “gutsy.”
Skogan, author of a recently published book, “Community Policing, Chicago Style,” said other cities have also stressed building and municipal code enforcement, but haven’t involved the full range of city agencies the way Chicago has.
Still, he said, there is plenty of work remaining–cleaning up bad buildings is a big job that will take a long time. That can be seen from the city’s plan to post 400 buildings during the next year. And each has the potential to become a center for neighborhood disruption.
Take the large multi-unit brick building at 4742 N. Washtenaw Ave. in the Ravenswood area, which is on the nuisance list.
“I know I wouldn’t park my car next to it,” said one resident who didn’t realize it had been targeted by the building department. The resident, a rock musician who didn’t want his name used, said he’d parked there once and found feces on top of his vehicle.
The building, a classic of neglect from its wide open doorways with their side panes broken to the trash cascading from dumpsters and cans at the rear, stands out in a neighborhood of neatly kept apartment buildings and homes.
The building is owned by a man who lives in far north suburban Antioch and has been cited for at least 24 violations and has been in court since last year.
Many of these owners may simply be lazy or ignorant, but in some cases their negligence forms a pattern.
“A lot of building owners in this district are just milking their buildings dry,” said Cmdr. Byrne, whose Rogers Park turf is 60 percent rental.
Many community leaders are heartened by the concerted assault on bad buildings, but they are far from satisfied.
Mary Jane Haggerty, housing organizer for the Rogers Park Community Council, said the housing court process is still too slow and still can allow landlords to make minimal changes without altering the basic way they run buildings.
And she expressed concern over the fate of innocent tenants who have few options when a blighted building is shut down. Rental assistance programs for displaced tenants are cumbersome and involve waiting periods, she added.
The new cooperation among citizens, city agencies and police represents real progress, but the campaign against bad buildings is a long-term effort, she said.
“It’s getting enough block clubs and community policing teams and other people working to attack the problems,” she said. “It’s frustrating that things don’t change overnight.”
