Tenants to March for Condo Freeze Newstip Date: 09-28-2006
South Side tenants will march September 30 to highlight issues of displacement and loss of rental housing and to call for a moratorium on condominium conversions.
Led by the Metropolitan Tenants Organization and Concerned Tenants of Hyde Park, tenants will gather at Drexel Fountain, 51st and Drexel Bvd., at 11 a.m. on Saturday, September 30, and march to Harold Washington Park, 53rd and Hyde Park Bvd. for a noon rally.
MTO is getting "three or four times the numbers of calls compared to last year from tenants facing condominium conversions," said executive director John Bartlett. "It's really escalated in the last few months." Most of the calls come from the South Side, he said.
The march was initiated by tenants in two buildings on the 5200 block of Drexel who have organized against rapid condo conversions. They were given 30-day notices when 120 days of notice are required by law, and noise and dust made occupied apartments unlivable when demolition was begun on vacant apartments in the two buildings, said MTO organizer Malik Wornum.
Tenants won work stoppages after calling city inspectors to complain about unpermitted demolition, and in one building they have filed a class action lawsuit, Wornum said. They are also complaining about unsecured apartments, which have attracted criminal activity and vagrants, he said.
MTO generally helps tenants press for more time to move and for relocation assistance in the face of conversions, Bartlett said. "They're basically all low-income renters," he said.
The Drexel tenants will be joined on their march by other South Side tenant groups and by community groups concerned with housing, he said.
They're calling for enforcement of laws governing condo conversions and for preservation of affordable and subsidized housing. And they want the city to enact a moratorium on conversions so that the effects on the housing stock can be studied.
The City Council enacted a moratorium on conversions for several months in 1979.
A recent study by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation found low-income and young Chicago families facing dramatically higher rents as the supply of rental housing diminishes. Over 300,000 local households are considered "rent-burdened," paying more than 30 percent of their income for rent, with 60,000 paying more than 50 percent, according to the Metropolitan Chicago Information Center.