Chicago Tribune

Bronzeville wants city's empty lots
Affordable-housing advocates also seek tax for a trust fund

By Johnathon E. Briggs
Tribune staff reporter
Published November 23, 2006

While residents in many Chicago neighborhoods try to fight gentrification by setting goals for affordable housing, some residents of Bronzeville, dubbed the capital of black America in the 1940s, are taking a different tact.

They want the city to set aside hundreds of vacant lots seized for delinquent taxes when the community hit hard times so that affordable housing can be built on the land. And they want property owners to pay an additional tax to support a housing trust fund to make it happen.

Housing advocates say that Bronzeville, once again a fashionable destination for buttoned-down professionals and bohemians alike, could set a precedent for other neighborhoods on the South and West Sides that are riddled with empty city-owned lots--and ripe for revitalization.

There are 1,156 such lots in Bronzeville, 703 in the 3rd Ward alone, according to an analysis of 2005 city records by Housing Bronzeville, a coalition of renters, property owners and others pushing the trust fund. The properties typically land in the city's hands when owners don't pay taxes and the buildings are abandoned and eventually demolished.

Long-term, the coalition seeks to have 26 percent of those lots set aside at below-market cost to promote home ownership for neighborhood families earning $34,000 to $51,000 a year. Short-term, the coalition is working to establish a Bronzeville housing trust fund supported by a .009 percent increase of all Bronzeville property tax bills.

While campaign organizers are just beginning to tackle the former goal, they've already made traction on the latter.

More than 18,000 voters--nearly 86 percent of all who voted in the four wards that make up historic Bronzeville--supported the concept in a advisory referendum in November 2004.

Housing Bronzeville's next step is to pursue legislation at the city or state level that would allow voters to decide on a binding referendum. Their effort is modeled after a successful referendum in 1988 that created self-taxing districts on the Northwest and Southwest Sides to protect the market values of houses as the neighborhoods became more racially diverse.

With February's aldermanic election on the horizon, Housing Bronzeville volunteers have once again kicked into high gear. They've descended on City Hall demanding information on the status of the neighborhood's vacant lots. They've held meetings at homes and churches to spread the word about the campaign. They've even produced a video titled "Stand Up for Bronzeville!"

"I don't think it's fair that poor and median-class people are getting pushed out," said campaign supporter and 11-year resident Valencia Hardy, who owns an old-style row house.

Organizers say the goal is to get residents involved in neighborhood development and make affordable homeownership a key issue in the upcoming elections in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 20th Wards, which collectively represent historic Bronzeville.

"We want to see if the four aldermen or their opponents will support this," said Cheryl Spivey-Perry, executive director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, a leadership training non-profit founded in 1994 by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sokoni Karanja, president of the nonprofit Center for New Horizons.

Housing Bronzeville, an outgrowth of the Hope Center's 10-week leadership development course, is being watched closely by housing advocates in other South Side neighborhoods.

What binds the group is a sentiment that aldermen have not done enough to prevent working-class and moderate-income residents from being displaced.

During the 1940s, Bronzeville was the "second-largest Negro city in the world," sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote in their seminal work "Black Metropolis." At 7 miles long and 1 1/2 miles wide, the "city within a city" stretched back then from Cermak Road to 63rd Street and between Wentworth and Cottage Grove Avenues.

"Supporting five hundred churches and three hundred doctors, it was the `capital of black America' in the 1940s, supplanting Harlem as the center of black culture and nationalist sentiment," Maren Stange described in "Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941-1943." It was home to such notables as Joe Louis, Mahalia Jackson, congressman William Dawson and Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.

By 1950, Bronzeville was economically diverse with 17 percent high-income residents, 33 percent moderate-income and 49 percent low-income residents, according to census data analyzed by Housing Bronzeville.

The grandeur of the famed mecca for jazz and blues was eroded during the 1970s by commercial disinvestment, unemployment, crime and crowded public housing complexes. In the last decade, Bronzeville has seen a revival as the real estate boom extended southward.

By 2000, the percentage of moderate-income residents dipped to 13 percent, while the number of high-income residents jumped to 23 percent, Housing Bronzeville found.

Campaign supporter Kenneth Williams, a single father raising two teenagers, has lived in Bronzeville for 16 years. He would love to stay rooted in the community, but his $36,000 salary from his job at a nonprofit housing developer puts homeownership out of reach.

"Some of the ridiculous prices make it almost impossible for me to remain here," said Williams, who rents a townhouse. "If folks continue to be pushed out, you won't have that [economic mix] that Bronzeville once shared. You'll have a lot of, excuse the expression, buppies."

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jebriggs@tribune.com

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