In order to best provide a referral, training or technical assistance, please fill out a brief survey, answering the questions that are applicable to whether you live in shared ownership or want to going forward. All responses and your personal information will be kept confidential. Thank you for your interest and providing information about your condo/coop. The survey can be found here: Request for Assistance Survey — Coop, Condominium, and Townhomes 2022 (surveymonkey.com)
If you have any questions please email info.cso@chicagorehab.org.
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London Towne Houses Cooperative is a gem in the West Pullman community. This 803-unit housing cooperative received its articles of incorporation in 1965 and members starting acquiring limited equity shares and moving in 1966. As the housing cooperative approaches 60 years old, it consists of 120 buildings with approximately 1.9 million square feet of space. Of the more than 800 cooperative housing units, 8 serve as rental units as they were initially used as model housing.
London Towne Houses Cooperative is located adjacent to one of the largest indoor track and field center in the Midwest and to Chicago State University, and is in close proximity to the recently designated Pullman National Monument.
The cooperative is governed by a 5-member Board of Directors, all of whom live on the property. Two of the five members of the Board of Directors are original member-owners. Nicole Redding works as the General Manager of the property. She spends time strengthening external partnerships with Alderman Harris and other community partners in the 8th Ward. She also is charged with continuing to provide education on cooperative living and legislation, ensuring adherence to fair housing guidelines and assisting with board governance.
During the COVID pandemic, Ms. Redding saw property insurance increase by as much as $70K annually as a result of macroeconomic conditions. Inner City Underwriting, a local and Black owned insurance brokerage, was able to secure updated property insurance for London Town Houses Cooperative amidst the refusal of traditional carriers to renew insurance policies. Labor shortages have impacted vendor services and materials costs, and pose some challenges for the cooperative, which takes on gut/rehab work as unit membership transitions from own owner to another.
A recent physical needs assessment identified opportunities to improve existing infrastructure, exterior work, sidewalks, pumping stations, and siding upgrades. With 120 buildings, siding and roofing pose some of the most significant capital improvement and maintenance challenges and opportunities for Ms. Redding. Roof replacements occurred about 15 years ago, while window replacements occurred about 10 years ago. Siding costs range between $19K-$40K per building. Ms. Redding is continually searching for grants and other resources for London Towne Houses Cooperative to perform this work to avoid incurring additional indebtedness and balance the need to increase carrying costs while maintaining high levels of affordability. A recent partnership with Elevate Energy to upgrade new LED lighting and new furnaces are one way that Ms. Redding has been successful in keeping utility and maintenance costs sustainable.
Ms. Redding shared that demand has remained stable and high for cooperative member shares at London Towne Houses Cooperative. She has managed to balance affordable carrying charges have with the ongoing sustainability of the property and buildings.
]]>An innovative new housing cooperative may be a solution for residents to combat Pilsen’s gentrification
| JULY 12, 2018
Raquel Garcia, her husband, and their four-year old daughter moved to Pilsen in 2012 to be closer to their jobs at local elementary schools. They were in search of an affordable place to live, but more importantly, a place they could put down roots and be surrounded by a like-minded community. “This is the first time we have stayed anywhere for more than two or three years…I had moved around the city so much growing up,” she said in an interview. “Coming to Pilsen, for the first time, I felt in community. It’s been like coming home.”
But after just a few years in the community, the couple began to notice a significant shift happening, both in their rent burden and in the community at large. As an elementary school teacher at Whittier Elementary, a neighborhood school serving families in southwestern Pilsen, Garcia began to notice that she no longer saw her students at the local laundromat, and would frequently hear about students transferring or moving out of the neighborhood. It alarmed her. “I would run into kids and ask, ‘Have you seen so-and-so?’. The answer is always, ‘Oh, they transferred’,” she said. The community Garcia had moved to Pilsen for, and fell in love with, was breaking apart.
As the shifts continued, so did the Garcias’ rent—increasing twice in two years. The Garcias moved quickly to explore their options of purchasing a home in Pilsen, as to avoid being priced out—only to find this was an impossibility for them. “We thought we had more time, and then when we started to look we realized we could not afford any of these places,” she said. In just the last five years, the average price of a 1,500 square foot home in the neighborhood rose from $126,000 to a staggering $330,000, a nearly 161 percent increase. To compare, homes in neighboring Bridgeport have only seen an increase of about fifty-one percent in the past five years.
Much of this increase can be attributed to developers coming into the community, purchasing with cash and demolishing older homes in favor of luxury housing. According to a Weekly review of city data compiled by Chicago Cityscape, in just the last three years, twelve single-family homes have been demolished and turned into new housing, raising property taxes and rents for the surrounding homes. And while groups in the neighborhood have led efforts to bring more affordable housing to the neighborhood in the form of large apartment buildings, or by attempting to convince developers to provide more affordable housing than is required by city ordinance, there are no groups seeking to save the two- and four-flats that dominate Pilsen’s housing stock, and which are a major source of rising rents and home prices, due to developers swooping in and purchasing them at a low cost.
That is, until the Pilsen Housing Cooperative—a new multi-building limited-equity housing co-op—decided to make some of its founders’ vision of creating an affordable co-op in Pilsen a reality. The project, which is still in planning stages, is currently led by a steering committee of six longtime community members, including WBEZ reporter-muralist couple Linda Lutton and Hector Duarte, fellow reporter Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, artist Gabriel Villa, web designer Carlyn So, and Amanda Cortés, an activist who grew up in the neighborhood. “We have known each other for twenty years at least. Linda and Hector wanted to do a co-op years ago, but it was a different Pilsen back then,” Villa said in an interview. “A few years back, when we had a reunion, we started to think about doing a co-op with the intention of serving long-term residents and artists that have been living here for years and are being pushed out.”
The cooperative, which targets families like the Garcias, hopes to make home ownership a possibility for those who wish to stay. “On my block a couple years ago, it was packed with children and a lot of lively families, which I enjoy,” Villa said, adding that he hopes the cooperative would draw some families who may have left back to the community.
The cooperative, known affectionately as PIHCO, will be the first limited-equity housing cooperative in Pilsen, and one of roughly thirty in the city. A limited-equity cooperative is a form of affordable housing where all members of the co-op will purchase a share, which comes with the right to occupy a unit within the co-op’s property, and agree up front to a long-term cap on the resale value of each share. The cost of each share will only increase by a set rate, not the market value—ensuring that future residents will have the ability to purchase their own shares at a cost that they can afford
PIHCO’s founders intend for their cooperative to be “scattered-site,” incorporating several buildings currently owned by community members into the project. “We want PIHCO to have as many buildings as possible in Pilsen—taking them permanently off-line for speculative developers,” their website reads. The founders see PIHCO as filling a specific and currently unmet need in the community. Some nonprofits developers focus on “building large buildings for a lot of people, but they aren’t paying attention to small houses,” Villa explained to the Weekly.
And while most owners of homes, condos, and high-end co-ops usually hope to see substantial profits from the value and equity in their homes—particularly in areas that are seeing rapid gentrification—residents of limited equity co-ops are willing to give up that profit in exchange for the benefits of stabilized housing costs and maintained residency in their communities. PIHCO organizers stress that while co-op members who are willing to sell their homes would forgo high profit margins, they would also safeguard themselves against displacement due to increased taxes. In Cook County, co-ops can receive some specific exemptions on their property values, and PIHCO founders say they hope to be taxed at the re-sale value of the property, not the market rate. Residents will be able to sell their property to PIHCO, and split the cost of owning that home with all cooperative members. The mission is to pool everyone’s resources and make stabilization a reality for everyone.
Raquel Garcia attended one of the group’s first meetings in fall 2017: a potluck dinner intended to introduce community members to the concept. She was struck at how communal and open the gathering was. “It’s very accessible. They always describe the information in a way that the wider community can understand, including complicated elements like the bylaws… There’s always translation,” she said.
Limited equity co-ops have been around Chicago since at least the early 1960s—and housing cooperatives at large since the early twentieth century, with roots in the labor movement and the fight for housing equity. Just before the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, a group of Black Chicagoans formed the famed London Towne Houses Cooperative in Pullman—one of the first in Chicago—in an attempt to combat the discrimination against homeownership they had historically faced. JoAnn Kenner, president of the board and a resident of the cooperative since 1967, told the Tribune in April, “Even if you were able to get a mortgage, the neighborhood was not going to be welcoming. [London was like] a breath of fresh air.” Creating their own cooperative allowed residents to own their homes, and not be fearful of white neighbors forcing them out.
According to Hilary Silver, chair of the department of sociology at George Washington University, where she studies inclusive housing and homelessness, cooperatives have long been used by marginalized groups who wanted control over their homes and properties. “The idea was, let’s cooperate and we’ll cut the landlord, who [is] living off of our rents. It was like quasi-ownership. It was like creating a workers’ republic, almost. Let’s cut out the capitalists,” she told the Tribune.
PIHCO’s founders have not strayed far from this vision, explaining in a recent interview that by purchasing multiple buildings in the community, and turning them all into limited-equity buildings, they hope to directly compete with private developers, who currently have few obstacles in the neighborhood. “Residents of Pilsen who are interested in this co-op are not interested in making money [like developers],” said Garcia. “They are interested in the guarantee of a home, and a home for their children.”
Co-ops are rather sparse; according to a 2004 report from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement and the Chicago Mutual Housing Network found that co-ops are “an underutilized and misunderstood housing option”—about 17,000 of the three million housing units in the Chicago area are co-ops, and roughly one-third of these are limited-equity, according to the report. Limited-equity cooperatives should not be confused with communes or communal living arrangements; while the purpose is to maintain existing community members, everyone owns their own unit and is responsible for their own space. Limited-equity co-ops have the explicit purpose of maintaining affordability and longevity in the community. As small as these numbers are, limited-equity co-ops have been instrumental in maintaining affordability in some communities, retaining residents who would have otherwise been priced out.
An example is the Logan Square Cooperative (LSC), where the cost of each share in its sole building has largely been frozen since 2001, and some longer-term community members have been able to stay in the neighborhood—now one of the priciest housing markets in the city. “Limited-equity co-ops help keep housing affordable in [Logan Square] by keeping prices below market value by encouraging people to think of housing not as a profit-making investment, but an investment in the community,“ wrote members Alex and Emily, who declined to provide last names, in an email. Shares sell for between $75,000 to $115,000 for apartments ranging from a studio to a three-bedroom unit; the average price for a 3-bedroom home in Logan Square sells for about $387,000, according to real estate website Trulia.
Like most limited-equity co-ops, including LSC, PIHCO is a nonprofit that will be run under a set of legal bylaws. These bylaws are the basis of the cooperative, outlining all details on how to buy into the cooperative, how ownership is transferred when an individual dies, and the voting rights of all co-op members. The cooperative is a collaborative effort by nature; as a result, it will be run by a member-run and member-selected board of directors, which will oversee new member applications, member terminations, property renovations, and handle the monthly dues. Dues will cover individual shares of operating expenses including mortgage payments, property taxes, maintenance of the building(s), insurance, and a reserve of money for emergencies and modifications. PIHCO is largely modeling their bylaws after those of LSC, with the assistance of the University of Chicago Law School’s Housing Initiative Clinic.
This type of housing initiative would be impossible without the assistance of organizations such as the Housing Initiative Clinic and, in some cases, affordable housing funding. “The [state] government can, and should, support limited-equity co-ops for low income residents in the same way they support other kinds of affordable housing,” said Jeff Leslie, director of the clinic. “By giving below-market rate loans for purchasing and renovations of the properties, low interest rates, and sometimes tax credits.” Making low rates available to limited-equity cooperatives allows them to have a considerably lower monthly mortgage payment than their surrounding neighbors, ensuring affordability in the long-term. Groups such as the clinic work with cooperatives to create legally binding paperwork including bylaws, ensuring long-term affordability. But because public funding for affordable housing, including low income co-ops, is so scarce, co-ops such as Logan Square and PIHCO look for creative ways to serve residents without relying on subsidy.
The PIHCO steering committee also intends to use their long-standing connections to the community to locate a two-, three-, or four-flat building owner who may be willing to sell their home for under market rate, or a possible foreclosure in the neighborhood. The group has continued hosting potluck dinners during which residents are encouraged to break bread, listen, and give suggestions for how PIHCO should go about acquiring its first property. “I think people are really going to step up and help,” said Villa. “This neighborhood has a whole history of creating organizations and institutions just at the moment where things are not working right. This falls so clearly within what Pilsen is about.”
PIHCO follows a long legacy of Pilsen residents fighting for community resources. “Everything we have here has been fought for. The library, the [expansion of Harrison] Park. I think with this, people are going to step up and help,” said Hector Duarte. The cooperative is a system that empowers neighborhood residents, like the Garcias, to fight back, and take hold of the community they have long invested in.
“You think you understand displacement thoughtfully, but you don’t really understand it until it happens to you,” Villa said. “PIHCO is something to use to fight. First of all, I want it to succeed, but I also want it to be seen as, ‘Look at these guys, they are just neighborhood people. They are coming together and putting their minds together and they are fighting.’”
The next informational session will be held at La Catrina Cafe, 1011 W. 18th St., on July 14 at 10am. It is open to all interested community members. pilsenhousingcoop.org
Updated 7/12/18 and 7/13/18: This story was updated to reflect minor changes regarding PIHCO’s genesis and founders, and to clarify facts regarding co-ops and their tax status.
Bridget Newsham is a managing editor at the Weekly and is based out of Pilsen. She loves covering new and creative housing initiatives, education, and local artists. In her free time she enjoys a good swim (when it’s not too cold!), biking, and building sculptures. She last wrote for the Weekly about singer-songwriter Tatiana Hazel in April.
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John Griffin knew he wasn’t safe. Not in South Holland. Not in 1967.
As the then-20-year-old, who is black, navigated his car though the southwest suburb, folks stared. They were wary, he said, wondering what on earth he was doing in the majority-white neighborhood.
Here’s what: He was looking for a home.
“I drove around South Holland and I decided that I wasn’t going to put my family through that,” Griffin, now 72, said. “The hostility was there. You knew that you were going to have a problem.”
His instinct wasn’t wrong. One of his co-workers, also black, did go on to buy a house there.
“They burnt his house down,” Griffin said.
It’s no secret that Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the nation, has an ugly history of housing discrimination. Before the federal Fair Housing Act passed in April 1968 — 50 years ago — people of color were frequently, and flagrantly, prohibited from renting, buying or financing homes in areas where the population was mostly white.
Right before the act’s passage, some black Chicagoans found homes, and refuge, in a housing cooperative on the city’s South Side. Griffin moved into London Towne Houses Cooperative, in the Pullman community area, in 1967.
JoAnn Kenner, 73, current president of London Towne Houses, also has lived in the community since ’67. In the years before fair housing laws, the mentality around integrated communities, Kenner said, was as in the play “A Raisin in the Sun” — “Even if you were able to get a mortgage” and someone would sell you a house, if you were nonwhite, “the neighborhood was not going to be welcoming.”
London was “like a breath of fresh air, it was like living in the suburbs,” she said. “Like a little bedroom community.” This was a tremendous source of pride for residents, Kenner said, “people were begging to get in.”
The Fair Housing Act, which passed into law April 11, 1968, exactly one week after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, has over the last half century been challenged and amended. The federal act now bans housing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, religion, familial status and disability. And while some experts say that the law and its enforcement aren’t perfect, black Americans like Griffin and Kenner have legal protections that were absent before April 1968.
But neither Griffin nor Kenner intends to leave the cooperative they’ve long called home. They were welcomed into London before the law said they had to be considered, and over the last 50 years of fair housing progress, they have seen little reason to leave.
Co-ops: Communities with a purpose
Co-ops hold a unique place in the history of combating housing discrimination and, for that matter, in the history of the United States too. According to professor Hilary Silver, chair of the department of sociology at George Washington University, the history of American housing cooperatives is rooted in the labor movement.
“It was kind of a semisocialist movement,” Silver said. “The idea was, let’s cooperate and we’ll cut out the landlord, who was living off of our rents. It was like quasi-ownership. It was like creating a workers’ republic, almost. Let’s cut out the capitalists.”
This initial American push for housing co-ops was centered in New York in the 1920s, Silver said. But Chicago’s history with co-ops dates back just as far, according to a landmark 2004 report by Chicago Mutual Housing Network and University of Illinois at Chicago.
Still, it wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s, when the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development developed programs that helped subsidize low-income housing, that co-ops in Chicago really took off. According to that 2004 report, “Developments funded through these HUD programs also provided an effective mechanism to address the crisis in African-Americans accessing decent housing. … This occurred during a period when housing discrimination was still persistent.”
That report even names London Towne Houses as one example of housing that helped African-Americans, and thrived by doing so. “Demand for the initial phase of the development was so strong” at London Towne Houses, “that the co-op was completely sold out in 18 months by 1967.”
London Towne Houses, which has 803 units, welcomed its first residents around 1965 and ’66. Griffin and Kenner joined in 1967, one year before the federal Fair Housing Act was adopted. According to a 1965 Chicago Tribune article, the housing development was built by Kaufman & Broad Homes and spans 50 acres. The boundaries are Interstate 94 to the north and east, Cottage Grove to the west, and Gately Park and industrial property to the south.
So, what’s a co-op?
Cooperatives are corporations, and members own a share. The many different types of housing cooperatives can be difficult to parse — market-rate versus limited-equity versus leasing cooperatives versus group equity, et cetera. London Towne Houses falls under the umbrella of limited-equity co-ops.
“Here’s the thing that makes it limited-equity,” said Silver: “If you move out, you get to take what you put in and that’s it.”
To join a co-op, a person can purchase a share from the co-op corporation, which can buy back shares from members who leave, or from an exiting member directly, though this transfer must be approved and overseen by the co-op board. For a limited-equity co-op, buyers must meet income requirements.
A member who leaves a co-op walks away with the value of his or her share. The value of a share can appreciate slightly over time, but equity growth is far more modest than in a traditional home.
In exchange for limited equity growth, members in a co-op like London Towne Houses enjoy low monthly costs. Co-op residents — often referred to as member-owners — pay monthly fees called carrying charges. These include their share of the joint mortgage, taxes, insurance and operating costs like landscaping and trash pickup. Essentially, members divide the costs of owning and maintaining the property.
Similar to other forms of community living, like condominium associations, co-op members enjoy mowed lawns and maintenance assistance.
“We call it having a house without the hassle,” Kenner said, and members pay less than traditional homeowners would.
“We’re below market rate,” she said. “It’s attractive to people that, you know, want to save money on housing. But we don’t just want people that are moving in because it’s cheaper; we want people that have that sense of community.”
In the general population, there’s some confusion surrounding cooperatives, which means this housing option isn’t usually top of mind for those seeking a home.
“If given the choice, people are going to opt for a condo. Primarily because they know what it is,” said Charles Daas, principal at the consulting practice City Solutions and chief editor of the aforementioned 2004 report on Chicago co-ops.
By the late 1980s in Chicago, Daas said, the “condo craze” was in full swing, and cooperatives faded in the background. “Condos really eclipsed cooperatives.”
But, he noted, small cooperative developments are cropping up again “in neighborhoods that are appreciating,” such as Uptown, Edgewater, Rogers Park, Pilsen, Wicker Park, Logan Square and the eastern side of Humboldt Park.
‘That’s the beauty of London’
The strength of the social fabric at London, residents say, is no small part of its enduring charm.
“If you were to move into London Towne, somebody’s going to come and greet you,” said Griffin, a retired cop. “We’re close enough that we know our neighbors. One of my neighbors has a key to my house in case of emergencies, I have a key to his house. I have the keys to three of the single ladies’ homes in case of an emergency.”
When Griffin moved into London Towne Houses in 1967, he joined Kenner, a former classmate.
“JoAnn and I went to high school together,” he said. “We both graduated from Hyde Park High School, and there were several of our classmates that lived in London Towne. We developed a community that did things like block parties and barbecues in the summer, and Christmas Eve we’d start on one end of our section and everybody had to have a drink or something to eat. By 6 o’clock in the morning Christmas morning, everybody was stuffed and drunk. But we had a feeling of community, and that’s the beauty of London.”
While some of the community’s original members are now deceased, “we’ve found that people that moved in back in 1966 and 1967, many of them are still here,” said Kenner, a retired teacher who is among that group.
Despite some members’ permanence, there have been shifts. According to Griffin, the co-op is below capacity, and some newer, younger residents aren’t as keen on participating in co-op meetings or launching activities.
“Initially the wave of people that came in here were young families, so there were so many things for kids at that time,” Kenner said. “Little League and scouts and stuff for teenagers, fashion shows. And seniors, they had their clubs and outings, and that kind of thing. It was really active, and that’s fallen off.”
That’s something she’s working to change.
“It’s a different era,” Griffin said.
Staying put
At London, homes sport colorful shutters — some green, others blue, still others yellow — and lawns are kempt. The sprawling co-op, while quiet, isn’t sleepy.
Last July, the cooperative had its 50th anniversary celebration, a daylong outdoor fete featuring yoga classes and live entertainment. Guests ranged from residents to local police officers to the Jesse White Tumblers.
“In the summer,” Griffin said, “it’s beautiful out here.”
Before federal law forbade housing discrimination, Griffin couldn’t buy a home freely. “I feel like the Fair Housing Act was necessary to stop this blatant discrimination,” he said, adding, “I know a lot of people that have benefited from it.” Like his nephew who has “a beautiful house” in Oak Lawn. Like his friends who now reside in South Holland.
But he’s staying put.
“This co-op provided a haven and a home for a lot of people, did a lot of people good,” Griffin said, and “it still has that possibility.”
Moving in, he said, was “the best deal I ever made in my life.”
Nneka McGuire is on staff at the Chicago Tribune and Nicholas Padiak is a freelance writer.
nmcguire@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @nnekamcguire
At this half-day gathering, we will disucss:
- How to Start a Housing Co-op: From organizing and incorporating to acquiring property
- Development Budgets: How to set up a source & uses budget and determine feasibility for a project
- Other Bronzeville Coop opportunities
The afternoon will end with a tour of Qumbya Housing Coop, a case study of a successful housing coop (scheduled from 3-4 PM)
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Voluntary and Open Membership — Cooperatives are voluntary organizations, open to all persons able to use their services and willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, without gender, social, racial, political or religious discrimination.
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Democratic Member Control — Cooperatives are democratic organizations controlled by their members, who actively participate in setting their policies and making decisions. Men and women serving as elected representatives are accountable to the membership. In primary cooperatives, members have equal voting rights (one member, one vote) and cooperatives at other levels are organized in a democratic manner.
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Member Economic Participation — Members contribute equitably to, and democratically control, the capital of their cooperative. At least part of that capital is usually the common property of the cooperative. They usually receive limited compensation, if any, on capital subscribed as a condition of membership. Members allocate surpluses for any or all of the following purposes: developing the cooperative, possibly by setting up reserves, part of which at least would be indivisible; benefiting members in proportion to their transactions with the cooperative; and supporting other activities approved by the membership.
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Autonomy and Independence — Cooperatives are autonomous, self-help organizations controlled by their members. If they enter into agreements with other organizations, including governments, or raise capital from external sources, they do so on terms that ensure democratic control by their members and maintain their cooperative autonomy.
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Education, Training and Information — Cooperatives provide education and training for their members, elected representatives, managers and employees so they can contribute effectively to the development of their cooperatives. They inform the general public — particularly young people and opinion leaders — about the nature and benefits of cooperation.
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Cooperation among Cooperatives — Cooperatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the cooperative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.
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Concern for Community — While focusing on member needs, cooperatives work for the sustainable development of their communities through policies accepted by their members.