Up, Up and Away
Tom Brandt, the self-proclaimed "Superman of Chicago Real Estate," says that if you're going to buy a home, gentrification is an investor's dream. Brandt is a mover and shaker with Coldwell Banker Stanmeyer. Superman's business doubled in 1998 - an asterisk on his career that he attributes to his superheroic marketing strategy. Calling yourself Superman, according to Brandt, lures in buyers in distress. Brandt insists that if you want to build a little nest egg, gentrification is a mighty fine elevator to climb aboard. He reiterates that the revitalization going on around Chicago beautifies an area, helps preserve historical homes, reduces crime and enables investors to make bucks.
"The city is bursting at the seams," says Brandt, "while becoming more and more livable. Gentrification is not always a terrible thing."
Among the areas Brandt sees on the gentrification launch pad is the Pilsen neighborhood. "If you had bought there five years ago," he says, "you'd be looking at the kinds of profits people are seeing in areas like Wicker Park." But even if the Pilsen neighborhood, also known as the Lower West Side, has seen sizable real estate appreciation, it's still a savvy investment. And that hasn't made all the locals happy. Nearly every week, neighborhood groups gather to speak out against the incursion of rehabbers flocking to the area to make a buck.
"This gentrification problem in Pilsen really goes back about thirty years," says Dominic Pacyga, a professor of history at Columbia College and an authority on Chi-town neighborhood lore. "The area along Halsted was developed early for artists connected to UIC." But Pacyga says that the turn around in the area has stalled because of many factors, the opposition of locals being one and the quality of homes another. The housing stock in the area wasn't maintained as well over the years than in neighborhoods such as Wicker Park.
A drive down to Pilsen proves that, indeed, the area is smack dab in the middle of a major metamorphosis. Halsted Street is littered with construction materials. Steel scaffolding stands on one street corner. Everywhere, sidewalks are torn up, ready, primed and prepped for brand-spankin'-new concrete walkways. Ancient mildewed buildings, monuments to when Pilsen was host to Irish and German populations working the nearby lumber mills, are getting intensive facelifts. New windows are being installed. Fresh paint slathered on. New doors hinged. BMWs are parked alongside carcinogenic beaters, a potent contrast that symbolizes the changing of the neighborhood guard.
"[Gentrification] in Pilsen has been going on for a long time now," says Tom Lee, manager of Bic's Hardware Cafe, a popular coffee shop in Pilsen. "But it's been going slowly." Lee points out that public transportation cuts on the CTA Blue Line have made the neighborhood less accessible. Even so, Lee says that gentrification in Pilsen won't stop any time soon. "This area will change whether or not artists and other creative types move in, simply because of where it is. It's very convenient to downtown and all of the major highways."
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
"Gentrification is a double-edged sword," says Christopher Loben, a New York-based gentrification researcher. "While it promises hope for blighted inner-city areas, it reduces the availability of low-income housing close to the central city."
Despite this tussle, however, gentrification seems all but unstoppable. But don't tell that to Khloe Karova, the executive director of the West Town Tenants Union. The organization, which publishes a bimonthly newspaper in Wicker Park, is dedicated to preserving diversity in the area. Ethnic diversity, according to the 35-year-old Karova, is one of the biggest victims of gentrification.
"When you have rapid development," says Karova, "what generally happens is that a group of people comes in all of a sudden who tend not to have that much in common with the existing community interest. In the case of Wicker Park, hyperdevelopment has lead to rapidly rising property taxes and rents. It's just become very expensive for a lot of the long time residents to live there."
As for all the new amenities gentrification tows behind it, Karova isn't impressed. "The new establishments are just trendy bars, trendy restaurants. I don't think that a posh French restaurant qualifies as adding to diversity." Karova also adds that a neighborhood in the middle of an economic upswing spells doom for Ma-and-Pa establishments.
"The Latino grocery stores, the restaurants, laundromats and day-care centers are all threatened when their property taxes go up."
Sandra Reed, who survived the 46th ward primary to challenge powerhouse Alderman Helen Schiller in this week's run-off election, says, ultimately, gentrification, when properly supervised, is A-OK.
"In my ward, there's a lot of diversity. I love that. I don't see the 46th ward as a Lincoln Park. The diversity just needs to be included in the whole economic development process," she says. "I think what has happened in other areas, is that groups have been excluded from the process. You have to work together to come up with a good plan. It can't just be one interest running the show."
Karova says that, primarily, that interest can be easily pegged: "They're yuppies," she says. And, according to Karova, those yuppies are cleansing her neighborhood into a characterless mass.
But while many bemoan the arrival of a Starbucks or a Barnes & Noble (both of which Wicker Park has yet to see) as a symbol of a neighborhood setting a course towards sterility, many of us buy books at B & N and occasionally sip grande lattes. Call us hypocrites. But is the Wal-Martization of main street America, and culturally diverse Chicago, such a bad thing?
"It depends on who is talking," says Dr. John Betancur, a University of Illinois at Chicago assistant professor who studies urban gentrification. "Mayor Daley doesn't like to use the word 'gentrification,'" says Betancur. "He prefers to call it 'mixed income.' Community people identify very much with the word because they see the 'progress' as some kind of aggression. But is gentrification all bad? No."
Reed doesn't like the "g-word," either. "It's too often misused," she says. "It brings with it too many negative connotations."
"If you want to improve a neighborhood," says Anderson, who battled against Reed in the February voting, "you are termed a 'terrible gentrifier.' People look at you and say 'you moved here for the urban fabric and now you're not happy with it.' But is it so unreasonable to want to clean a neighborhood up? No."
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.