Slumlord politics is an age-old issue in Uptown, as we saw in the aftermath of Truman College’s construction. With no incentive to retain low-income tenants, and in the absence of regulation and enforcement, buildings with poor tenants faced unspeakable negligence. Once, a two-year-old baby was killed by the descending elevator car in her building when she looked down the unprotected elevator shaft. As this video shows, other buildings were evicted of their tenants and simply left abandoned without guards, creating dangerous conditions.

HUD refused to sell the building when a developer bid for it in 1983, citing bureaucratic fine points. Some reports at the time attributed this to “bureaucratic stupidity” and, more revealingly, to a million-dollar scam. In the late 1980s, HUD became subject to a congressional investigation for favoritism in granting contracts to private companies. In the case of Winthrop Towers, the developer’s 1983 bid was rumored to have been rejected in favor of a bid made by the private maintenance company hired by HUD to oversee the apartment. The private company’s $1 million per year maintenance fee was dubious considering the condition of the building. All the while, the conditions in Winthrop Towers continued to deteriorate under HUD’s ownership. Life was hell for the tenants who had nowhere else to go, but a turn of events soon created a climate for change.

In the 1980s, landlords discovered a loophole in the HUD mortgage conditions that allowed them to pay off the mortgage (prepayment) and convert the buildings into market-value housing, and they began the procedure to do so. According to a report authored by a research group at Loyola University based on its work with Organization of the North East (ONE), it was this move towards prepayment by private owners that spurred the tenants in many of these buildings to act together to save their homes. Without successful collective action many of these low income tenants would be left homeless.

Winthrop Towers—having been foreclosed on and placed into receivership—did not face the threat of prepayment like other HUD subsidized buildings still owned by private developers. However, the impending sale of the building catalyzed the residents to organize—to try to ensure that they would have a say in how the building was run in the future. Like inside the prepayment buildings, the tenants of Winthrop Towers worked with ONE to look for a suitable buyer who would help them transition to a co-operative model.

In Winthrop Towers, the tenant organization and ONE created the conditions for Century Place Development Corporation (CPDC), a non-profit developer and branch of the social service agency Travellers and Immigrants Aid, to acquire the building in 1993 in order to improve it without displacing the existing tenants. As with other non-profit takeovers, the ultimate aim was to have tenants take over ownership and management of the building—Winthrop Towers tenants would be given the option of buying the building after 5 years of CPDC management.

Initially, the tenants at the 4848 were justifiably wary of CPDC, and each other, after a decade of social breakdown and exploitation by building owners, including HUD. For tenants to work together was not always easy—residents were among the poorest people in the city and tensions could run high in Winthrop Towers. The building housed an extremely diverse group of Black, Native American, and Hispanic families, as well as immigrant families from Southeast Asia, the erstwhile Soviet Union, and Africa. In some cases, inter-communal tensions led to the failure of collective tenant movements—in Winthrop Towers, the diversity of communities was a challenge to be overcome.

CPDC’s investment in improving the building with tenant participation in decision-making, and its careful politics of building trust, eventually won over the reticent group. CPDC’s Larry Pusateri was critical in making the sale and conversion work. Tenants spoke of Pusateri’s commitment to addressing resident’s needs and his transparent dealings with the building’s tenant Union.

Once acquired by CPDC/Travellers and Immigrants Aid, 4848 N Winthrop was incorporated into the agency’s Families Building Communities program, an effort by the group to address homelessness by giving unhoused persons a place to stay and access to intensive services to help get them back on their feet. Travellers and Immigrants Aid invested $5 million into the building and oversaw its transition to tenant ownership. Today, Winthrop Towers is a fully tenant-owned cooperative housing unit. However, co-op organization is not without its challenges.

Listen to 29 year-old Kwame Freeman speak about growing up in “the 4848” in the 1990s. Kwame’s experiences shaped his role as a youth organizer with the Multicultural Youth Project (MCYP) in Uptown.

A rich lineage of tenant-organized movements helps to inform the history of affordable housing in Uptown: JOIN’s tenant unions and successful rent strikes in the late 1960s, the tenant survival committees set up by the ISC during the 1970s, the anti-prepayment struggles in HUD buildings of the 1980s, and the Tent City resistance to homelessness in the 2000s. All of these examples remind us that tenants themselves, rather than representative organizations alone, have been a crucial part of the battle for retaining low and mixed income housing in the Uptown area. That Uptown remains among the most racially diverse neighborhoods in Chicago is testament to the painstaking efforts of several such tenants’ movements.

Wilma Pittman—board member at Northside Action for Justice (NA4J), longtime resident of 4848 N Winthrop, and former United Winthrop Tower Cooperative board member—spoke with us about her experiences in Winthrop Tower since moving there in 2005.

“I had no idea what a co-op was. You pay your first month’s rent—well housing charges, they call it housing charges— and you get your certificate that says you have one share in the co-op. If you move out, you have to sell your one share back to them [the co-op board] and they give it to someone else. You’re thinking ‘Ooo I have one share… this is mine,’ but it really is not. The only difference [from renting] is you have to pay—if I accidentally pull off my refrigerator handle, I have to pay for that.”

On living in a large and diverse building:

“It’s the respect, if you can respect people—even if you’re not speaking the same language you can have a beautiful relationship, so that’s what I have learned.”

Wilma Pittman speaks about the neighborliness she has encountered in the co-op, and the issues that unite members of all backgrounds.

Wilma reflects painfully on the eviction of vulnerable families from the co-op—specifically the memory of a disabled couple with numerous children being put out.

In each of the HUD prepayment struggles, the methods, outcomes, and challenges were different. What these conflicts established, however, was a powerful common moment where tenants incessantly took to task corporate and government housing agencies, using the community resources available to them, and setting an example for tenant movements in the rest of the US. A notable aspect of these movements was that most of them were led by women, many of them single mothers. What this demonstrates is not just that single women-headed households are subject to added vulnerability, but also that their resilience and resourcefulness, born of need, was truly revolutionary.

920 W. Lakeside was one of the first HUD-subsidized buildings to assemble a powerful tenant association, the Lakeside Tenants Organization (LTO). During the mid-1980s, the LTO fought back against ownership’s neglect of the building, and was able to get the owner’s management company fired after years of failing to maintain the property. The next challenge for the LTO was the sale of the building—working with Voice of the People, the LTO established the Chicago Community Development Corporation (CCDC), a non-profit organization through which they hoped to purchase the building from private ownership. Unfortunately, the CDCC was outbid by a Texas- and Louisiana-based real estate group headed by the Barineau family. Once the building was sold, rents jumped between $150-300 for those units which were not Section 8, but which had been paying below “market-rate” rent. Approximately 60 families had to move as a result of this rent hike, and those forced out were largely African American. These vacated units were filled mostly by Russian immigrant families, which contributed to worsening ethnic and racial tensions in the building, and damaged the LTO’s organizing base. Although they were ultimately unsuccessful in securing non-profit or cooperative ownership, the LTO provided a model of organizing to other HUD building residents.

The Carmen-Marine became the first tenant-owned low-income housing project in the country in 1991. Lakeview Towers was acquired by Voice of the People, a community organization, becoming the first former HUD-building owned by a community-based non-profit in Illinois. Racial tensions seriously impeded the tenant organization’s working in Sunnyside Apartments, resulting in only short term gains. In both Sunnyside Apartments and 920 W. Lakeside, the movement for retaining low-income housing is ongoing even today.