Does anyone else feel like every day is Groundhog Day in Illinois?

When the Inclusionary Housing Task Force first began their work in December 2019, no one could have guessed how profoundly the city and the world were about to change. The Task Force had just barely gotten started when the pandemic hit.

Inclusionary zoning has gotten a lot of attention in Chicago over this past year! A related article in this Newsletter looks at the recently released Inclusionary Housing Task Force Staff Report, issued by the City’s Department of Housing in September. The Staff Report contains a range of recommendations, some of which our industry will likely support, and others that range from intriguing to downright scary.

The results are in! And the answer is?

Residences at 1233 W Pratt Rendering

Developer is Encouraged by Productive Discussions with 49th Ward Office.

For years, the middle of the 1200 block of West Pratt Avenue sat vacant and unused. Formally a Synagogue, the site has been vacant since the early 2000s when a plan to redevelop it with a mix of apartments and a new Synagogue fell apart. In the years since, we have experienced a major recession featuring a ruinous housing market crash in Rogers Park, and now a global pandemic.

Katrina Bilella never wanted to be the poster child for small property owners struggling with deadbeat tenants during the COVID-19 pandemic. But that is exactly what she became in the wake of the eviction moratorium, first enacted by Governor Pritzker in March, with no end in sight.

Over the past three decades, RPBG Director Doug Imber has grown Essex Realty Group, Inc. from a fledgling brokerage business into one of the region’s premier mid-market investment sales companies. Then as now, Essex Realty has always had a strong focus on apartment product, particularly the small to medium sized buildings that can be found in nearly every Chicago neighborhood and that provide so much of the rental housing where many Chicagoans live.

By:

Mike Glasser, RPBG President
Fall, 2020

By:

Steve Cain
Fall, 2020

I think we can all agree—it’s been a rough year for everyone. But for Chicago, it has been even worse. By most measures, the city had been under-performing its peer—group of other, large American cities for at least a decade — losing population, adding fewer jobs and always in the public eye for all the wrong reasons, including entrenched political corruption and a sky high murder rate.

Verella Osborne, President, Legal Document Management, Inc.

Fall, 2020

Well, I’ve thought long and hard to find any good news for Illinois housing providers and the situation just gets bleaker. Most of you have been advised, ad nauseum, of the Illinois moratorium on filing and enforcing residential evictions now extended through the end of the year, with additional extensions likely.

Over the past decade, Dead on Damen has become a Rogers Park Halloween tradition, growing in size and popularity with each passing year. Its annual displays of Halloween ghouls and ghosts on the east side of the 7500-block of North Damen have delighted locals and visitors alike, and have become an integral part of the Halloween season in the neighborhood.

Rogers Park has never been place where higher-end restaurants can easily take root and prosper. The pandemic has clearly made it even harder for the few that have tried. For Twisted Tapas, the pandemic proved to be one challenge too many. The Spanish eatery is the latest example of an upscale restaurant that tried, but ultimately failed, to find success in the neighborhood.

Several RPBG members with properties on or near Howard Street have noticed a disturbing trend in the general area around the Red Line Station since the beginning of the year – a noticeable increase in loitering, drug dealing and general criminal behavior. This has made life harder for property owners who own buildings in the area. These property owners are hearing from residential and commercial tenants alike who are concerned about safety and the impact this activity has had on their businesses and their concerns about their own personal safety. In at least some cases, tenants are choosing to leave the area due to these concerns.

This year has been challenging in ways that most of us could never have imagined. All the more reason for RPBG to be true to its mission and support our community that has rarely been in greater need of our good works.