Activism brings options for displaced seniors

By: Kimbriell KellyNonprofit agencies throughout Chicago are scrambling to come up with programs offering cost-effective options for senior citizens to remain in the city—whether that’s lobbying aldermen to turn vacant property into senior housing or encouraging seniors to take in a roommate to help share the bills and cooking.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing offers the HomeSharing program as a way for senior citizens to stay in their homes despite the escalating prices of homes and taxes around them. The program, which began in January 2004, isn’t exclusively for seniors, but has been a program of interest as Chicago neighborhoods gentrify.

“It allows individuals a lot of opportunity to save money,” said Lee Stapleton, HomeSharing Coordinator for the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing.

In some cases, people are seeking a roommate to share in the cost of paying the mortgage or bills. In other cases, the exchange is less about money and more about what service the roommate can provide to the homeowner—such as shoveling snow, driving seniors to appointments, completing minor maintenance repairs around the house or simply offering companionship, Stapleton said.

“It allows individuals the opportunity to stay in the community they were born in,” he said.

The program originally began operating in Hyde Park and later spread to cover Chicago’s South Side, but in September the program began providing HomeSharing opportunities on the city’s West Side. In 2007, the program had more than 90 applications—roughly 80 percent of those were people seeking housing, while the rest were people seeking companionship, Stapleton said.

Leasing agreements aren’t intended to be permanent and are signed only on a month-to-month basis. Some agreements have lasted just a month or two, others have lasted several years, Stapleton said. Not all arrangements work out, he added. That’s why it’s easier to have monthly arrangements that can be altered after 30 or so days.

In the next decade, the demand for the program will likely expand, Stapleton said. “With the low-income, homeless and affordable housing crisis, I envision the program bigger than it is,” he said. “This is an opportunity to help individuals avert homelessness.”

In 1999, a year after her landlord had died, Pat Drennan didn’t know what to do when a developer bought her 13-unit Ravenswood apartment building. Prior to retiring in 1997, she was earning $40,000 as a registered dietician and paying $450 each month in rent for her outdated unit.

Earning just $21,000 annually in pension and social security, Drennan’s rent went up to $700. She wanted to stay in the neighborhood. “It was really getting tough,” Drennan said. “I was thinking ‘I’ve really got to find affordable housing.’“

One summer while exercising at a senior center, she saw an advertisement from the Jane Addams Senior Caucus about affordable senior housing. When she went to see a counselor at the senior center, she was told that the senior housing sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development would have been filled by February.

Drennan attended a Senior Caucus meeting where a dozen or so seniors were hatching plans to convince 47th Ward Alderman Gene Schulter to develop an affordable housing complex at Irving Park Road and Western Avenue. Desperate, Drennan, a former nun, paid her $10 to join the caucus and agreed to visit churches to get congregants to sign petitions. Working with the caucus, the group collected 2,500 signatures. The building was built—one of three—and Drennan moved in two years ago.

She considers herself fortunate.

Her only other options were to relocate to a cheaper neighborhood or live a “very narrow, a very frugal” life, Drennan said. “Ravenswood was just a good solid working man’s neighborhood. But it just got so gentrified.”

Two of her friends weren’t so fortunate. They were evicted from their apartment when the building went condo and ended up in a complex where they say open-air drug deals take place in the hallways.