Mixed Income Housing

[MooCow]

Key developer also trying to rebuild lives

Published July 8, 2004


Here was the plan for utopia on North Halsted Street: Some brave, polite, prosperous people would buy the $400,000 town homes. Some brave, polite, poor people would move into its public-housing units. Then everybody would barbecue and trade life stories while a rainbow shimmered over what were once seven forsaken acres next to Chicago's best-known housing project.

This miracle next to Cabrini-Green would be called North Town Village. Its wizard would be a University of Chicago MBA named Peter Holsten.

And--shazam--like a toad reborn as Ben Affleck, Chicago would cease to be famous for its awful public housing and become a mixed-income model for the nation.

Now, four years after he and Mayor Richard Daley broke ground for the news cameras, here's the wizard's update on how things are going in utopia:

"They said it would be a social experiment."

Peter Holsten threw his hands into the air and laughed. He dropped his hands and sighed.

At 54, Holsten is a frank, friendly man who looks like a cross between a banker and a surfer. On this day in his office he wore a canary-colored Ralph Lauren oxford shirt that almost matched his lanky hair.

Of the eight mixed-income developments to rise so far around Cabrini-Green, his 261-unit North Town Village is the biggest, the most diverse, the closest to Cabrini and the one eyed most by other developers charged with turning Chicago's public housing sites into mixed-income communities. He'll soon start on 721 more homes, the first to be built within Cabrini's borders.

Holsten himself lives with his three kids in suburban Hinsdale. He grew up there, too, in an upper-middle-class Republican family.

"But I didn't like some of the values," he says. "I was concerned about equality issues and people of color."

So in the 1970s, equipped with carpentry skills picked up on summer jobs, he started renovating and living in run-down Chicago walk-ups. He developed a skill for which there was an economic niche: combining real estate and social services to make a building profitable as well as livable for people of different incomes.

When the time came to build the city's most ambitious public-housing replacement project so far, Holsten was the preferred pick, even in some Cabrini circles where "developer" is a synonym for "devil."

This was the deal: He'd build 261 homes, for rent and for sale. Almost a third would be reserved as public housing. Half would go for market rate. The rest would be discounted for working folks of modest means.

As part of the deal, he'd provide such social services as a jobs program to Cabrini transplants. He'd develop lives as well as houses.

It turns out it's tricky to play both Donald Trump and Mother Teresa.

When Holsten embarked on his Cabrini mission, he didn't understand that Cabrini isn't a single place. It's divided into territories as rivalrous as kingdoms. He didn't know that when residents from Cabrini buildings south of Division Street moved next to buildings north of Division, gang tensions would bubble like hot lava.

He hadn't foreseen how many curious, envious, laughing Cabrini kids from next door would drift through North Town Village snapping sapling branches. Tossing potato chip bags. Swinging from surveillance cameras. Or, once, showing up uninvited to an ex-Cabrini kid's birthday party brandishing bats and golf clubs.

"If you're a homeowner and you paid $375,000 and there's mob action," he said, "it's `Oh my God, what did I do?'"

Holsten also hadn't calculated how annoyed "market-rate" residents (typically white singles or couples) would get at the noise of large families (typically black public-housing tenants). He hadn't yet discovered how problems that were fundamentally about boisterous kids could be shaded by race and class.

"Some of the more extreme homeowners think kids should be seen and not heard," he said. "But kids will be kids. I have three kids. Kids are a handful."

As for the nearby public schools? He hadn't believed they'd remain neglected by the city and shunned by the white and well-to-do.

Most critical of all were those next-door Cabrini towers. He'd thought they'd soon be down and property values would zoom up. Along with some very testy buyers, he's still waiting on both counts.

All that said, though, things are going pretty well at North Town Village. Its red-brick homes and specks of lawn sit just down the street from Crate & Barrel and Border's. Skyscrapers parade scenically on the horizon. It's not all that different from nearby Lincoln Park.

Except for those Cabrini buildings. And all the kids. And all the cops who've been ordered to park their cars next to North Town Village while sipping coffee and doing paperwork.

"I don't think anybody's looking for perfection in this," said Holsten. "I'm not embarrassed by my mistakes. You just keep slugging."

He was standing now in a hot breeze that whipped the weeds in a field where a Cabrini high-rise once stood. Eventually, homes will sweep across 18 acres here, and Holsten will have a chance to improve on utopia.

"Tot lots," he said. "By God, we're going to have tot lots."

In North Town Village, the tot lot was killed to make way for a drainage ditch. The splash fountain was axed by marketers who thought such a kid magnet would be bad for sales. Holsten thought kids could play in the park just across the fence--not knowing they'd feel like target practice under the windows of Cabrini's high-rises.

Nor will he do here what he did in North Town--place big family units above smaller ones, so the single guy below goes nuts listening to five rambunctious kids flushing toilets.

Still, he frets over the puzzles that remain, the kind not solved by any blueprint.

Cabrini folks are used to socializing outdoors and popping in and out of one another's homes. Other residents prefer quiet and visitors by appointment only. How to bridge that culture gap?

And how to get ex-Cabrini kids to college? How to get their parents stable enough to pay utilities?

And what exactly do you do for the elderly man from Cabrini who now lives in the nicest home of his life and says he's never been so lonely?

----------

FRIDAY: A longtime Cabrini resident leads the fight to delay demolition. ON THE INTERNET: The Cabrini-Green columns can be found at chicagotribune.com/cabrini


Additional columns and columnist information are available in the online edition of chicagotribune.com. Older columns can be found in our archives.


Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

So saw this in the paper the other day. Interesting idea. Thoughts? Opinions? Can it work? Doomed to failure?

[Daki]

I give this man all the credit in the world for trying, but I honestly don't believe it can work. New buildings are not going to the remove the tensions and underlying problems that have built up of the last decade... particullaryly with Cabrini Green.

Two 400K townhomes will be a tough sell to anyone because there is still a (well-deserved) stigma attached to the area.

Somewhat related note: The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) built these public housing developments (called Projects in the city) on some of the best real estate in the city. Cabrini Green is prime near-north property.

[Chopper]

I think it can work. They are learning as they go. Like how larger families should be below smaller ones. Each attempt will perfect it more. Of course it wont be perfect, but at least lessons are being learned. The model is evolving. Eventually, I think this can work, as long as developers like him don't give up.

I have been near this area before. It is very close to down town, which makes it desireable for commuters. Also this place is in close proximity to all the museums and Lake Michigan, so desireable to families with kids too. As for the schools, well that is a seperate thread.

If squatters can live next to corp wage slaves in Seattle (Seattle is one giant mixed income housing), by god they can make this work.