Bridgeport is a name that for decades has been synonymous with political power and blue-collar, European ethnic culture.
While those factors are still true, the South Side neighborhood of the Daley family has taken on a new identity, one more stereotypically associated with the Loop and the North Side: a booming real estate market.
Why? It depends upon whom you ask, but most see the demand for Bridgeport housing as a product of its location, close to downtown. (36th and Halsted is the same distance from State and Madison as Addison and Halsted.) The rather pricey South Loop is nearby, and prospective buyers there are looking at and moving to Bridgeport for the relatively low prices.
But, it appears a big chunk of the people who are doing the discovering are not North Siders escaping skyrocketing prices, but immigrants with plenty of money for real estate purchases.
Bridgeport’s population, far from being the all-white bastion of yore, is diverse: 41 percent white in the 2000 Census and more than 30 percent Hispanic. It also was more than 26 percent Asian. There’s much evidence that the latter population has grown.
“Bridgeport started to get hot three or four years ago. Property values started going up tremendously three or four years ago,” says Alice Tse, broker and part owner of Landmark Property Group Inc. A vacant lot that sold for $65,000 three to four years ago sells for $160,000 to $200,000 now, she says.
Who are her customers? At least 80 percent are Asian immigrants and most are from China, Tse says.
Students and businesspeople who were in the U.S. in 1989 during the protests and massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing stayed, and some are moving to Chinatown, Bridgeport and surrounding areas, she says. Arriving with good jobs and at least 20 percent down, they can afford the new construction and rising prices of the area, she says.
Another trend in Bridgeport: condominiums. Tse’s firm has listed more than 200 units in Bridgeport and nearby Chinatown in the last two years, she says.
A lot of new projects are about to come on the market in Bridgeport, says Keith Giles, principal at Frankel & Giles, which has developments in the South Loop and Near South Side but not in Bridgeport. He cited a factory that is going to be demolished for town homes.
The neighborhood’s “definitely hot. All the projects that have opened [there] have sold well,” Giles says, especially the Bridgeport Village development by Snitzer Homes. That development, built on former industrial land, offers large single-family homes with prices that in some cases exceed $1 million.
He also said that a loosening of building restrictions, allowing more teardowns of nonresidential structures in Bridgeport, is contributing to the market.
A recent Internet check found only 52 houses for sale in Bridgeport. Five of them — all in the Snitzer development — were for more than $1 million and four were under contract.
Most housing is lower-priced, though much higher than a few years ago. Among the listings were cottages as low as $129,000, though some of them probably are meant to be torn down with listing information saying as much. But there was a good representation of homes from $200,000 through $500,000.
Giles sees Bridgeport’s strength as an outgrowth of the general health of the city real estate market as young people remain in the city to raise families and empty-nesters return from the suburbs. “Single-family homes have been moving very well,” he says. “It’s hard to find them in the city, and [Bridgeport] is desirable” because of the relatively low prices.
Though it’s hard to document, another kind of immigration may be in the offing: from the North Side and folks who once lived in Bridgeport and want to move back.
With prices so high on the North Side, more buyers from there are starting to look at the South Side, says agent Sandra Haswell of Re/Max Exclusive Properties in Old Town, who has a listing on the same block as the Daley family’s house — a 2,800-square-foot rehabbed single-family for $435,000.
And, while Bridgeport will continue to be hot, according to Tse, Giles and Haswell, the surrounding neighborhoods are benefiting as well.
Tse cites growing construction of homes in Canaryville and New City, south of Bridgeport proper, where lots that went for $30,000 three or four years ago now sell for $120,000. She said her firm is involved in a 16-home development now at 42nd Street and Emerald Avenue. Chinese are the primary buyers there, she says, as well as for 40 to 60 new townhouses going up in neighboring McKinley Park and in Brighton Park.
Giles said “big development sites have been announced” in McKinley Park. “There’s a beautiful park there,” Giles said. “It’s a lower-cost alternative to Bridgeport.”
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Wayne Faulkner is editor of Real Estate. You may contact him at wfaulkner@tribune.com.
