Affordable Housing Mini Tour
Affordable Housing tour:
Sites of Struggle, Resistance, and Collective Power
Through the course of this tour we will encounter the recurring theme of poor people’s resistance, made possible through grassroots, coalition-building politics. Each site documents and brings to life different models of organizing, funding, and resistance that have been employed to preserve or expand the neighborhood’s core of low income housing. The movements we highlight have given Uptown its identity as a refuge for the dispossessed and disadvantaged, an identity that is constantly threatened by the forces of development, displacement, and gentrification.
This tour is not an exhaustive list of all sites of the housing struggle in Uptown. Instead, it provides a glimpse into key battles that have characterized the long fight to preserve and expand affordable accommodations in the northside community. This struggle has taken many different shapes as neighborhood change, developer pressure, and government policy have each shifted the playing field over the decades.
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First we look at Lawrence House, tracing the landmark building’s history, from its origins as a ritzy apartment hotel in the 1920s, to its place as a prominent single-room occupancy building in the mid-century, and finally to its purchase and conversion back to luxury market rate units in the 2010s.
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The case of Hank Williams Village illustrates the radical housing vision advanced by Uptown’s poor Appalachian community when facing off with city hall’s late 1960s-urban renewal machine.
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The story of Winthrop Tower, or the 4848, shows the threat that developer prepayment schemes posed to the residents of federally-insured HUD buildings, and how tenants organized to preserve their homes and autonomy.
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Here we look at the development of scattered site housing— the result of the two extremely consequential Gautreaux rulings of 1969 and 1974. The influence of these rulings shaped the future of affordable housing in Uptown and the city at large.
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The next site on our tour is Heiwa Terrace, a low-cost elderly and accessible housing building developed by the Japanese American Service Committee in the years following Congress’ passage of the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act. Heiwa Terrace provides an example of a community pooling its resources to establish needed affordable units.
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The International Homes are a series of 28 townhouses in Uptown that were developed in the early 1990s. These homes represent the culmination of efforts by community organizations and mutual aid groups to provide affordable homeownership opportunities for their members.
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On this stop of the tour, we visit Wilson Yards, a mixed-income residential and commercial development spearheaded by alder Helen Shiller which used controversial TIF funding to build a significant number of low-income units.
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Wilson Men’s Hotel was a cubicle-style SRO that provided housing for Uptown’s poorest residents for almost a century. In 2017, it was sold to a developer, sparking a tenant-led movement that resisted eviction and demanded the new owner comply with Chicago’s new SRO Ordinance. Join us as we explore how Wilson Men’s Hotel residents, with support from ONE Northside and the Shriver Center, adopted unique tactics that forced the press and the city to listen to their cause.
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Finally, our last stop takes us to the viaducts under Lakeshore Drive at Wilson and Lawrence where the unhoused communities that form Uptown Tent City ground our historical examination of the issue of houselessness in the neighborhood since the late-1960s.
This walking tour from beginning to end is approximately 5 miles in length (~8 km)
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