Disappearing Act

By: Kimbriell Kelly It’s 55 degrees outside Robert Jamieson’s Humboldt Park three-flat apartment. It’s even colder inside, where the 69-year-old uses the oven to heat the place. There’s a hole in the living room wall of the firstfloor apartment, where he lives. The smell of urine haunts the halls on the second and third floor where the pale discharge pools in the toilets after the plumbing was disconnected.

Wearing a turtleneck and plaid shirt tucked into a pair of denim Rustlers, Jamieson sniffs in cadence as he walks around the home. His once-white Nikes have a gap in the toes where the leather once met the soles. Jamieson bought his property there 30 years ago for $23,000. Before he refinanced last April to get cash for repairs,

Jamieson was paying $500 a month for his mortgage and an additional $100 for a second mortgage. Now, his monthly mortgage payment is about $2,500, far greater than his $600 in monthly Social Security payments. It’s his only income since he can’t rent the two upstairs units in their current condition. Jamieson hasn’t worked as a substitute teacher in two years. He’d like to return to it, but he says he’s been too occupied with repairs to his property.

Yet, that hasn’t kept the scavengers away.

Jamieson’s phone rings off the hook—about every 10 minutes in his estimation— from people wanting to buy his home.

Jamieson gets up from the green faux leather couch he bought 25 years ago and grabs a plastic grocery bag where he keeps the most interesting—and obscene— solicitations from realtors, financers and developers.

He pulls out an unstamped white envelope that had been hand-delivered to his front door last spring: “I still haven’t heard from you!!!” the letter reads. “But I guess you’re like the many homeowners who ignore the warnings and end up waking one day to find the Sheriff outside their door… Not to mention, the bank will come after you personally and sue the pants off you!!! ... You have a golden opportunity to sell your home to me.”

Jamieson is biding his time. But when the cash from his refinance runs out, so will his options. “I don’t think I have a choice,” he said.

Ill-equipped to handle rising repair costs or escalating property taxes and often targeted by aggressive speculators looking to buy their property, many seniors like Jamieson are losing their homes, according to housing experts.

In addition, an analysis by The Chicago Reporter shows that seniors in Chicago—particularly those living in gentrifying neighborhoods like Washington Park, Rogers Park, Woodlawn and Grand Boulevard—have disappeared from their homes in recent years more often than their counterparts elsewhere in the region.

The Reporter found that:

* Chicago lost an estimated 50,000 seniors from 1990 to 2006, a decline of about 15 percent. However, the number of seniors in suburban Cook County increased by nearly 11 percent during that span. Also, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties saw increases in seniors ranging from 36 percent to 71 percent during that span.

* Rapid condo development occurred in seven of the 10 community areas where the highest percentages of seniors moved between 2000 and 2007.

The statistics are troubling, says Lori Clark, executive director of the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, a grassroots nonprofit that addresses quality of life issues for senior citizens.

“Seniors add value to the communities. They are mentors to young children. They’re the most active volunteers in a community. They’re your good neighbors, your quiet neighbors, the people who care about keeping the community in good condition,” Clark said. “The people who helped build the city of Chicago shouldn’t be thrown away.”

Clark said the number of affordable apartments and homes is shrinking, and government funds for affordable housing are lacking. According to the U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of Local Government Finances for 2002-2003, Chicago ranked 22nd nationwide in per capita spending for affordable housing. New York City’s per capita spending was about 4.6 times more than Chicago’s, according to the Census report.

Joyce Gallagher, commissioner of the city’s Department of Senior Services, said the city is beginning the third year of its five-year plan to provide affordable senior housing in or near each of the city’s 77 community areas.

“We are being proactive in allowing seniors to age in their communities,” Gallagher said. The city’s five-year plan calls for 4,000 new affordable units for seniors.

Right now, the demand for affordable senior housing is greater than the supply, said Clark. “For every unit we build, we lose two units of affordable housing. The seniors are aging. They’re living longer. They’re staying in their communities and they’re struggling to do that.”

Clark noted that many seniors are “very, very poor,” particularly women who raised children during an age when most women didn’t work or they worked jobs without pensions and adequate pay. “For a lot of women, they’re either relying on their husband’s Social Security or they’re living on [Supplemental Security Income payments],” she said.

According to a Reporter analysis of 2006 Census data, among seniors in Chicago, almost 60 percent of men earned below $20,000. More than 76 percent of women earned below $20,000.

Social Security or Supplemental Security Income, known as SSI, were the only sources of income for more than 34 percent of senior men and more than 42 percent of senior women in Chicago, according the Reporter’s analysis. The average annual income for those individuals was $9,186.52.



Jamieson is not the only senior being pressured. In some cases, realtors and developers have used the might of government offices to apply pressure on seniors to sell their property. When rebuffed by seniors to sell their homes, some said realtors have filed numerous property maintenance code violations against senior homeowners and then returned, with cash in hand, offering to buy their homes.

In 2003, the office of 26th Ward Alderman Billy Ocasio fielded several calls from panicked seniors who had rebuffed realtors pressuring them to sell their homes in the 1700 block of North Spaulding Avenue, where Jamieson lives. Soon after they had city inspectors responding to 311 calls at their houses logging a lengthy list of repairs costing thousands to fix, in most cases between $22,000 and $30,000, Ocasio said.

“Where do seniors on a fixed income come up with that money to fix these things?” Ocasio said.

When going door-to-door to distinguish community needs, Matthew Rodriguez, a member of the Participatory Democracy Project for the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, said he constantly heard complaints about seniors being pressured to move because developers were interested in buying their property.

“They’re saying … city inspectors are coming, trying to give violations on our home, but there’s nobody out here able to support us,” Rodriguez said. “As a developer has a higher interest in a particular area, they become more aware of who owns the building and what the violations are. People can’t continue to go to court and continue to try to fix everything all at once.”

Philip Nyden, director of the Center for Urban Research and Learning at Loyola University Chicago, heard much of the same during field reporting for his 2006 report on the impact of gentrification on communities in Chicago.

“We heard several stories of the elderly falling victim to unscrupulous developers who try various tactics to force elderly residents to sell their homes,” Nyden said. “A law that’s intended to be protecting homeowners and renters … is being used by unscrupulous developers to pressure people into moving.”

A Reporter analysis of voter records from November 2000 and September 2007 shows that seven of the 10 community areas with the highest percentages of seniors who had changed addresses experienced sharp increases in condo development. The community areas include Washington Park, the Near West Side, the Near South Side, Woodlawn, Lincoln Square, Grand Boulevard and North Center.

In each of those seven community areas, condo units increased between 125 percent and 2,200 percent between 1997 and 2004—far greater than the citywide mark of about 86 percent, according to Nyden’s research.

About 29 percent of seniors who lived in Washington Park in 2000 had moved by 2007 compared with about 14 percent of seniors citywide, according to the Reporter’s analysis. In each of the six other community areas, between 21 percent and 23 percent of seniors moved during that span.



Meagan Downey, director of external affairs for the Emergency Fund, which provides immediate temporary financial assistance to low-income families during crisis, said the organization was allotted $3.2 million last year from the state for homeless prevention. About 11 percent of its clients are seniors. Part of the money goes toward helping with their rent and utilities, though that only solves one problem and not the fact that seniors don’t have the capacity to earn more, she said. She spoke about one client who needed help paying her gas bill. “We could help her get her gas back on but we couldn’t change her income,” Downey said.

Assistance programs for seniors are spread throughout the region, and seniors aren’t always aware of whom to call or trust, Downey said. “There needs to be more outreach in very simple ways to access a whole host of services through one agency.”

Gregary Brown, director of social policy for Metropolitan Family Services, mobilizes services agencies like the Emergency Fund to benefit low-income families and communities.

Brown said that people who are getting pushed out of gentrifying neighborhoods are getting desperate and sometimes accepting extreme hardship to afford housing. In some cases, families are doubling and tripling up to purchase a home or rent an apartment. In other cases people are living in spaces inside apartment buildings that are not approved as apartments. People are living in buildings with public safety hazards. He recalled one story about a tenant who had rats in her stove, but was afraid to report it because she had no where else to live.

“People are not complaining because if they complain, they’re losing the only apartment they can afford,” Brown said.

This year, Brown is working with a 13-member coalition on the campaign “It Takes a Home to Raise a Child” to lobby state lawmakers for support of a bill that would provide more money toward a fund that subsidizes rent for low-income residents. Brown’s hope is that residents in gentrifying neighborhoods, with help from the state, can afford new rents in their neighborhoods.

There are, however, limits to the program. Its $6 million in subsidies would benefit just 5,500 of 250,000 low-income households statewide. Advocates are asking for increased funding, which would happen through an increase in the real estate transfer tax for properties that sell for at least $500,000. The tax would increase from $50 to $150 per property transaction.

In November, Jamiko Rose walked into Cook County housing court to try and convince a judge there that the porches attached to the building at 4431 N. Racine St. in West Town were sound. Inspectors were called to the property after a call through the city’s 311 line. Rose, executive director of the Organization of the Northeast, said Voice of the People, a nonprofit that manages the property, was ordered to fix the porch on the apartment building, which housed seniors and low-income residents.

Rose had been working with Voice of the People because the porch had already passed an inspection by an independent contractor, but the city indicated the porch was still out of compliance. If the court had not ruled in its favor, Rose said Voice of the People was probably prepared to sell the property because repairs, which could exceed $30,000, were not affordable.

“It’s just a clear [indication] of the lengths people will go to to move low-income people out of the neighborhood,” Rose said.

Alderman Walter Burnett Jr., whose 27th ward includes parts of the Near West Side, West Town, Humboldt Park and East Garfield Park community areas, said that he’s brought to the Chicago City Council his concerns about how some of the city’s more stringent codes are insensitive and onerous to senior citizens. In particular, he mentioned the mandate passed in the wake of the 2003 fatal porch collapse to have every porch inspected and brought to code. There should be ways to provide cheaper fixes, Burnett said. “Some of the seniors end up trying to get a loan to refinance their property [to make the repairs].” “They end up getting some of those bad loans, which puts them in a bad position for their property,” Burnett said. “It’s a vicious circle for the senior citizen.”

Contributing: Alden K. Loury