J. R. told the couple about the Anti-Eviction Campaign, the group he founded in 2009 with Toussaint Losier, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Chicago and a fellow housing activist. At 40, J. R. possesses the softening bulk of a former running back — he was all-state as a high-school sophomore. A skunklike streak of white runs up the center of his ringleted black dreadlocks. In the past year, he said, the Anti-Eviction Campaign freed up 20 abandoned properties, fixing up the buildings and moving “home-less people into the people-less homes.”
As hard as the foreclosure crisis hit Chicago, its force has been felt with an unevenness that can seem fiendishly unjust. The U.S. Postal Service, which tracks these numbers, reported that 62,000 properties in Chicago were vacant at the end of last year, with two-thirds of them clustered as if to form a sinkhole in just a few black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Currently about 40 percent of all homeowners in these communities owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, and countywide 80,000 foreclosures are wending their way through circuit court. Last spring, a nine-month study conducted by the National Fair Housing Alliance revealed what everyone in these neighborhoods already knew: After forcing out families in foreclosure, banks failed to properly market, maintain and secure the vacated homes. Thieves subsequently entered many of the properties and stripped them of copper and anything else that could be trafficked. J. R. couldn’t reconcile the idea that homes were being allowed to turn into wrecks with the fact that the city had a shortage of 120,000 units of affordable housing and some 100,000 people sleeping in shelters or on the street each year. Chicago didn’t have just a housing crisis, he offered, it had a moral crisis.
The Anti-Eviction Campaign always canvassed a neighborhood before acting, J. R. explained to the young parents. He asked if they would support a takeover of either of the empty houses that sandwiched theirs or of any of the abandoned homes on their block. A family that moved in, he said, most likely wouldn’t pay rent or a mortgage, but wasn’t that preferable to a vacant property further deteriorating, becoming a haven for gangbangers or drug users?
“Hell, yeah,” the woman said, without hesitation, from her lawn chair.
“That’s what we need, uh-huh, exactly,” the man added.
Over the last few years, J. R. has been inside more than a hundred abandoned properties, each one a variation on the same theme of despair. He has stumbled upon drugs and whatever paraphernalia people needed to use or make them, along with the gathered sheets and worn-down mattresses of so-called trick houses. He has seen the carcasses of dogs and cats and rats and possums and raccoons. And yet J. R. proves surprisingly upbeat when talking about the efforts of the Anti-Eviction Campaign. At a Y.M.C.A. in Bronzeville, on the South Side, as people crowded into the basement for a screening of “Inside Job” — the 2010 documentary that essentially detailed the depressing back story of their own foreclosure plight — J .R. told them that he had seen the film 19 times and hoped to see it 150 more. It inspired him. “The government failed us. The market failed us. Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago failed us. Our government — the government — doesn’t belong to us. Forget them; they forgot us. We need to solve our problems ourselves.”
It’s not that the City of Chicago and its public and private partners don’t care about the areas gutted by foreclosures; it’s just that as investments, the numbers on these blocks simply don’t add up, and no amount of good intentions is going to change that any time soon. Since 2009, the city has funneled $168 million from the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program into the purchase of 862 vacant foreclosures, fixing up 804 of them, at an average cost of $110,000. It sank $350,000 into the repairs of one home, but even at the asking price of $105,000, no buyers could be found. So far only 91 of the units have sold. Although the real estate market has rebounded elsewhere in Chicago, with construction starts and prices both on the rise, many of the blocks surrounding these renovated homes are still studded with unsellable hulls. Of all the properties the city wanted to purchase under the program, it found it could get title on only about 10 percent of the buildings. To dodge fees, banks often weren’t registering their foreclosures, or they didn’t complete the foreclosure process to avoid the tax burden and responsibility of the unmovable real estate. Thousands of other bad mortgages were bundled in private securitization trusts, frequently with the trusts technically owning the loans and the evicted homeowners owning the property.
Ben Austen is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. He is working on a book about the history of the Cabrini-Green housing project.
Editor: Joel Lovell
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/magazine/how-chicagos-housing-crisis-ignited-a-new-form-of-activism.html?partner=rss&emc=rss