Hugh McGhee lives just off North Lake Shore Drive in a high-rise apartment complex whose location makes it ripe for condo conversion.
According to tenants, Voice (or LTPC) did a good job of managing the property, pumping in about $7 million worth of renovations over the years. During the LTPC reign, the towers came to symbolize the surrounding Uptown community–an amalgam of races and religions that included refugees and immigrants from Africa, eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as U.S.-born blacks, whites, and Hispanics. “It’s a real melting pot here,” says McGhee.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Down through the years, residents had talked about buying Lakeview Towers. “It was always a dream of tenants here to own the buildings,” says McGhee, who’s a retired CTA bus driver. “It’s not that Voice was doing a bad job running it. We just felt we could do a better job because we have so much at stake, living here and all. We talked to the local officials about it, particularly Alderman Helen Shiller. People knew what we wanted.” In the fall of 2000, McGhee and Santucci were selected by their fellow tenants to fill two vacancies on the LTPC board. “I was eager to join the board because I wanted to do what I could to help us buy the building,” says McGhee.
Under the terms of the sales agreement, Habitat would have been obliged to keep the complex affordable until 2009. After that, however, they, or whoever owned the buildings then, would have been free to do what they wanted with the property, including converting it to condominiums. “Converting the towers to condos is a scary thought,” says Santucci. “We have a lot of seniors in that building. Where would they go?”
By the end of January, the tenants had announced their intentions to buy the buildings. It wasn’t going to be easy. They would have to raise over $50,000 in earnest money by March. “To get the money we turned to all of our friends,” says Santucci. “One of the first groups we went to was the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. All I can say is, thank God for the Jewish Council.”
Now comes the hard work for the tenants. “We have to worry about the leaking roof, we have to deal with disputes between tenants, and we have all the problems of management,” says Santucci. “So we have some headaches. So what? We got what we wanted. We can’t wait to get to work.”
In the last few months the two sides have waged a protracted public relations battle, with free-market ideologues backing the investors and Alinsky-style rabble-rousers sticking up for the residents. A few weeks ago, activists for the Lakeview Action Coalition began telling reporters about an “unbelievable” discovery: a letter from a heretofore unknown member of Baskin’s consortium that, as one organizer put it, “is so greedy it will blow your mind.”
