Larry Evans wants the city skyline, a commute only minutes long, and restaurants and nightlife just footsteps away. To get it, he’ll give up his spacious suburban home, backyard, and in some ways, his privacy and independence.
“It seems to us like it’s time to move to the city,” said Evans, who for 20 years has commuted from Long Grove to his job in Chicago.
A 45-year-old commodity trader, Evans has been looking at properties in River North and Greektown. For now, he is thinking of renting, and taking another six months before he decides on exactly where he wants to live in Chicago. He and his family recently sold their big home.
“We had the pool and the backyard and all the maintenance, and the landscapers, out there cutting the grass for two hours,” he said. “That’s all going to be done.”
Such changes, though, come at a price. For some owners of a single-family home, the move to a condo or townhouse, where they will answer to members of an association, can be traumatic.
Yet many are making such a move. A recent study found that 57 percent of all housing going up in the Chicago area consisted of condos and townhouses.
Evans said one of his biggest problems will be giving up one or two of his cars. The garages in buildings where Evans is considering buying a loft provide spaces for a rent of about $160 a month, or sell them for $25,000 each.
He described that as “disturbing.”
“Think about having three cars, and paying $75,000 to park them,” he added.People more familiar with the transition say that is just one of the adjustments people moving to condominiums or townhouses need to make.
“People have to be prepared if they move into a condo. It’s a tradeoff. You give up privacy for the convenience,” said Jamie Weiner, a licensed clinical psychologist in Chicago.
From giving up treasured furniture or art work that won’t fit in a smaller home to getting used to living in a building with hundreds of other people, there are often more adjustments than people expect.
“People moving from a single-family home to a condominium don’t know the right questions to ask,” said John McIlwain, senior resident fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute (ULI).
“People are just used to taking care of their own homes–they don’t really think about the complexities of living in condominiums.”
The questions that people planning on a move should ask range from finding out how well the building is maintained to the age of most of the residents.
“Moving itself is considered a high stress time,” Weiner said. In a condo, “you’re giving up a certain amount of control to an association. That can become a real issue to people.”
Gayle Siegel, 53, who lives in Highland Park, recently signed up to buy a condominium on the Gold Coast. It won’t be ready for about a year, and she intends to rent in the city while it is completed.
“I really thought that we would end up in a smaller house in the suburbs” after their children left home, Siegel said, but worsening gridlock during the commute has made the suburbs seem less than idyllic.
What’s more, she said, three of her four children “are pretty much Chicago-based.”
Demographic changes have led to more homeowners downsizing.
In the 1950s and 1960s, about half of households had school-age children, while today, with Baby Boomers aging, only about a quarter of households do, McIlwain said.
For Edward and Virginia Fijak, the move to a one-level townhouse in Fox Lake became attractive after Virginia Fijak needed a hip replacement.
After receiving a tip from their son, who lives nearby, they bought a unit at Woodland Green near Grass Lake, which is situated between two golf courses. The homes were developed by Remington Homes of West Dundee.
“The views are spectacular. A golf course is right in front, and we often see as many as four deer in our backyard,” said Edward Fijak.
“One-level living is the answer,” he added.
But golf courses aren’t for everybody.
“The city of Chicago is seeing a significant representation of the older condominium buyer,” said Tracy Cross, a consultant to home builders.
There are more empty-nesters today than just five years ago, Cross said.
Felix Venice, 56, said he and his wife, Annette, have owned 14 houses everywhere from the Taylor Street neighborhood of Chicago to Berwyn and Stickney.
They recently moved to a one-level town home with a basement at Park Place on the Green, a development by Colony Builders in Crest Hill.
“After all that home maintenance, this is the place to be,” said Felix Venice. “There is nothing better than giving up yard work.”
An increase in households that don’t have school-age children, combined with lower urban crime rates and worsening traffic in the suburbs all contribute to an increase in downtown living, said Jack Goodman, chief economist of the National Multi-Housing Council.
“There is definitely something going on in Chicago as well as most of the other big cities,” Goodman said. “Urban places have become more attractive places to live, because there are more things to do.
“There’s also less to worry about thanks to the crime reduction in most major cities.”
For older people whose children are grown, “the key benefit of suburban living, which is high quality schools, is not as important,” said Richard Green, a real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Chicago is a place where this phenomenon is particularly strong.”
The way people adjust to living in a condominium or townhouse may depend on the reasons they are making the move, said Maggie Crowley, a clinical therapist in Chicago.
If people are forced to downsize because of a divorce or because they lost a job, adjustments may be seen more negatively.
“Somebody can view that as a loss of control, a loss of voice, a loss of being able to exert their power to live freely and do as they want,” Crowley said. “People feel that they have more privacy in a home.”
Because many of the people who are considering moving from single-family homes to condos and townhouses are divorcees or parents in their 40s or 50s whose children have left for work or college, moving into a large building often means living with people who are mostly of a different generation.
“You can feel like your lifestyle doesn’t fit in with the condo,” Weiner said.
Jane Tracy, who lived in the suburbs while raising her children, moved to Chicago after they left home. She has lived in the city with her husband now for several years.
“It’s just nice living in a bustling, vibrant metropolis,” Tracy said.
But it’s the little things that have changed in her life since moving to a condo that bother her.
“I think the biggest difficulty we have personally was not being able to just sort of go outdoors,” Tracy said. “We really did miss being able to just go out the back door and sit outside in the sun.”
Adjusting to being ruled by a condo board or community association can be one of the most difficult things for new condo and townhouse residents.
“Condo associations are having a hard time recruiting people” to serve as officers, Green said.
In such associations, people may be forced to come to terms with the idea that their personal habits conflict with their neighbors, even to such questions as hanging out laundry or putting out doormats.
Although Tracy said that having a more public life doesn’t change her life materially, “I guess I just don’t really like other people knowing what I’m doing.”
Even sharing an elevator in the building can feel like an encroachment on one’s privacy.
One of the things that bothered Tracy occurred when she was dressed for a black-tie event.
In the elevator, “If there’s somebody in there that you remotely know, they say, `Oh, where are you off to?'” Tracy said.
“Everybody sees you in all your different states,” she added.
Then there’s “this whole dog question,” said Tracy, who chose her building because it allows canine pets.
Dogs–and where they should be allowed in the building–have been a topic of discussion at her condo association.
“It’s really things like this that make everybody’s life civilized” when living in the same building with hundreds of other people, Tracy said.
Fear of crime, bad schools and bad race relations were the main issues that kept people out of cities in past decades, McIlwain of ULI said.
While those problems have improved in many cities, he noted, “a question very frankly that many of us are looking at is whether or not the fear factor is going to re-emerge as a new trend, because of our new world of terrorism.”
“It’s too early to tell,” he said, but in Paris, Rome and the Middle East, “where there has been terrorism for decades, people really haven’t moved out of the cities.”
The downside of downsizing
While many people are eager to move to a smaller home or condo, some factors hold them back:
– A love of their large home or old neighborhood
– A reluctance to part with cherished furniture or possessions
– Concerns about a loss of privacy and rules set by condo boards or community associations
– Worries about a lack of parking
– Concerns about coping with an urban neighborhood
