A New Generation of Live Work Space on Halsted

On the outside, this building looks like a lot of the mystery buildings on Halsted Street, like someone has forgotten they own it, or like they’ve inherited it from their grandparents and they aren’t sure if it’s worth anything yet.

But if Halsted’s other mystery buildings are, in fact, anything like this one, that’s good news for the near term fortunes of the street, because this one has been humming with plans for several years.  Visible progress was slowed by structural problems and hurdles in the Chicago codes, but now they’re cleared, and behind the frontier-town façade the building’s insides are being rapidly rebuilt from the basement floor to the rafters.

When renovations are finished in July, there will be 2 second floor apartments, a maker of traditional Italian sausage in the basement, and a giant live work space on the first floor.

Kevin Sheehan and Bobby Lyons were both born and raised in Bridgeport. So were their parents -- Bobby’s family were cops, Kevin’s were tavern keepers. They have been close friends since grade school, they lived their wild youths together, though they’ve both settled down a lot since then.

A few years ago they started tossing around the idea of buying a building together.  They considered buying a bar out in Mount Greenwood, which seemed like a good source of easy profits, but the potential for easy profit gave way to other considerations, and if this project has one defining characteristic, it is something more like a long term view.

A Sticker Appearing Around Halsted Street

The building they finally bought, in 2011, was the first bar Kevin’s family owned in Bridgeport.  His grandfather’s brother opened it before Prohibition.  It’s across the street from Schaller’s, which holds the oldest active liquor license issued in Chicago, and a few doors south of the 11^th ward office.

Kevin’s father ran his own tavern on Union and 38^th Street, kitty corner to where the Shinnick’s tavern still operates today. Kevin’s cousin Jack Sheehan, who married a Schaller, still operates his tavern near 35^th Street on Halsted – next to the former site of Bridgeport Tattoo, whose owner once talked admiringly about wanting to tie his business in to a traditional neighborhood like Bridgeport, though he’d lived a more itinerate life himself and he’s since shuttered the shop.

One of Kevin’s uncles ran the bar at 3707 S Halsted when Kevin was a kid – he’d lived in the apartment over the bar his entire life.  After he died, the family sold it to Richard Mossman, a bricklayer they knew, who rezoned the parcel to accommodate plans for a lofty 4 story condominium development he hadn’t got around to building before the market crashed in 2006.

By 2011 Mossman had a For Sale sign in the window, and Kevin and Bobby called him up to inquire.  They knew if they bought it they would have to put time and money into it -- the building had settled and shifted over the years, the whole frame tilted to the side.  But it’s in the same corner of Bridgeport where they have anchored their lives, and it has sentimental significance. Kevin’s says his father, who has passed away, had thought about buying it, and he would have been glad to know the old building was back in the family.

Once they owned it, they went back and forth a couple times about how to proceed.  At first they got permits to renovate it, they thought they could take down a couple exterior walls and salvage the others.  For awhile it looked like they might have to tear the whole thing down and start from the ground as a new construction project.  City codes would have required them to move the structure back 15 feet from the sidewalk, and from its original foundation, which they were willing to do, but they needed a new set of permits, and the permit process dragged on through the fall of 2013. 

By December they decided to go ahead with the renovation, which they already had permits for.  They tore the insides out, down to the exterior walls; their contractor looped chains around the top beam in the north wall of the frame, and workers on the ground in the lot just south of the building pulled the whole thing straight with come-alongs.  They nailed in some reinforcing carpentry and let it stand for a month to make sure it stayed straight, then they built the interior framing that will help hold it in place over time.

Meanwhile, one of the most brutal winters in memory blasted the structure with freezes and thaws and eventually caused the foundation, exposed when they took out the floors, to crack. At this point, other investors might have turned, snarling, on each other and sued their contractor; Bobby and Kevin made parallels to the metaphorical significance of building a life on a strong foundation, and their contractor, whom they’ve known for years, proposed to split the cost of the repair.

When it’s all finished, the building will have a pretty new masonry façade facing Halsted Street.  Bobby will move out into one of the apartment on the second floor, and Mike Botica, another friend from the neighborhood, whom they’ve known for years, will rent the basement to make sopressata, a dry cured Italian sausage.

Mike makes sopressata using old family recipes he learned from his wife’s Grandma Theresa.  He says they used to hang their sausage in a spare bedroom, leaving the windows open so it could cure in the cold.  He first started helping out when he and his wife were still dating.  When Grandma Theresa saw he had an interest, she sat him down and taught him her recipe, and handed over her grinder and her press, which he still uses – they’re each over 100 years old.

Right now, Mike makes his sopressata for friends and family as a hobby, but it’s “a hobby on steroids” --- last year he made 1,200 pounds of it in a 3 day operation that brought up to 30 people to his house at a time.  Setting up all the tables and equipment is a project in itself: moving it all out from his garage into the basement at South Halsted will allow him to make the set up permanent, and also to install a walk in cooler and de-humidifier.

Eventually he would like to get all his licensing lined up and open a business – he says he’d try selling it mail order first, and if that goes well, he’d like to open a deli on the first floor of Bobby and Kevin’s building.  It would require changing the zoning back to commercial, but he’s already discussed it with Alderman Balcer, and the Alderman was enthusiastic about the idea.  They both remember a time when South Halsted had more storefronts on it – including Granata’s, next door to the Ramova Theater, which Mike describes as something like Conte di Savoia on Taylor Street, not as large, but very successful.

All that would be several years away, come July, the 1^st floor space will be ready for other uses.  Mike says Kevin and Bobby have chosen an ideal location – with the new homes being built out from Donovan Park on the west, and some of the most stable blocks in Bridgeport to the east.  The Halsted renaissance might seem slower to advance than its residential one, individual investments might take time to mature, but the foundations are good.

The Home Borrowers' Progress

By one measure after another, the housing market stuttered back to life in 2012. Home sales sped up, prices rose, new construction re-started, giving the drywall industry a boost. For New Year’s, Trulia’s chief economist observed the glut of unsold homes dropped through 2012, and predicted the question for 2013 will be at what point inventories will hit bottom, so the rebuilding can start in earnest.

Nationwide, a share of those inventories are being sopped up by investors. Frustrated by low interest rates and poor returns on other kinds of investments, they have been buying up foreclosed properties in bulk, at discount, and renting them out. That’s probably good for owners who want to sell, but less good for small buyers with less easy access to financing, and it’s not so great for the neighborhood either.

In the 1970s, financing was so scarce in urban neighborhoods, especially low income and minority ones, that Congress passed the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, requiring banks to report where they were lending, and to whom, in detail. The numbers take awhile to assemble, regulators make them public in fall of the subsequent year, which is too late to show the latest ticks in the housing market. But it still shows how banks impact neighborhoods over time.

The activity of big investment firms won’t show up there – where they buy whole portfolios of foreclosed properties from banks, they aren’t taking out home mortgages to do it. But the HMDA reports show that investors have been buying up individual properties too. In Chicago, loans to non-occupants started to pick up in 2010; they continued their increase through 2011, even as overall mortgage lending continued to decline.

In Greater Bridgeport, the Home Mortgage Disclosures show the impact of lending practices that look like redlining in reverse. The neighborhoods south and west of Bridgeport enjoyed an abundance of loans during the boom. These tracts, spreading through Brighton Park and Back of the Yards, have lower incomes and more minorities than many tracts in the eastern part of the map. They were also the neighborhoods where loans dropped most sharply during the bust.

Of course, lending reached new heights, then plunged, almost everywhere. In the Chicago area, the boom was fueled as much by existing homeowners repositioning themselves, and sometimes cashing out new value from their homes in the process, as by actual property sales.

But after the bust, refinances were still available. They were made less frequently than at the height of the boom, but they did not drop off so sharply as home purchase loans. And they surged in 2009, the year federal, state and county programs to avert foreclosures came on line. Foreclosures mounted anyway, but the ability to refinance probably helped slow foreclosures from mounting faster. Refinances have kept far ahead of foreclosure filings across the region as a whole.

That hasn’t been true everywhere. Among the neighborhoods that surround Bridgeport, New City, the community area that combines Canaryville and Back of the Yards, makes a striking example. New City topped the chart of loans made in the area in 2005. Then it fell to the bottom of the chart.

A closer look at loans made in New City shows that refinances dropped off less sharply than home purchases, but they did less to cushion the crash than elsewhere -- the refinance revival of 2009 didn’t show up in New City at all. Foreclosures overtook home purchases quickly, they peaked in ’08 and were declining by ‘09, but they still surpass home purchase and refinance activity combined.

Something similar happened in Brighton Park – a neighborhood that rivaled New City for loans during the boom. That might make the subsequent abundance of foreclosure look like a natural outcome of excess activity during the boom.

But compare Brighton Park to the progress of the South Loop – whose high-rises stand testament to an hour of fabulous optimism. The Near South Side captures the South Loop south of Roosevelt Road. The Census shows most of its housing units were built after 2000. Home Mortgage Disclosures shows home purchases fell abruptly after 2006, but refinances lurched into the gap. Foreclosures have been on the rise in the South Loop , but they gathered steam slowly, refinances still far surpass them, they have yet to catch up with new home purchase loans.

In comparison, the Lower West Side, which captures Pilsen, south of 18th Street, was a study in moderation. Other indicators may show gentrification, but loans in the Lower West Side were made on a more modest scale than anywhere else in the Bridgeport area. Tracts in the Lower West Side share median incomes and minority populations in line with those of Back of the Yards and Brighton Park. They also share a similar pattern, if not volume, of loans: refinances dried up along with home purchase loans; foreclosures surpass them both.

Access to refinance can help avert foreclosures, so it seems unfair that borrowers in neighborhoods like Back of the Yards and Pilsen are getting fewer of them than borrowers in the South Loop. If a borrower is uncredit worthy, a refinance won’t fix that, but many loans must fall in a gray area, where banks weigh the cost of re-writing a more realistic loan against the cost of holding a foreclosed property as it deteriorates. And you would think investors would prefer to own a passel of properties in the South Loop.

At any rate, a single investor-owned property can wreak havoc on the neighborhood fabric, whether it’s vacant, or leased to tenants whose landlord can’t be reached. That has become clear in Bridgeport, where the tenants of absentee landlords have proved to be a tenacious problem on blocks of Carpenter, Lituanica, Union and Wallace.

And Bridgeport has stayed a moderate course during the boom and bust. Home purchase loans dropped after 2006, but refinances recovered. Foreclosure filings rose, they eventually reached the same rate as those in the Lower West Side, but they’ve done it gradually and then dropped off. A property in Bridgeport is still more likely to be purchased than foreclosed.

Armour Square, Bridgeport’s eastern neighbor, enjoys a similar pattern with even fewer foreclosures. McKinley Park falls somewhere between Bridgeport and Brighton Park: refinances showed some resilience, but foreclosures surpassed home purchases in 2009, and continued to do so through last year.

By 2011, residential lenders clearly favored Bridgeport. Armour Square’s loans were mostly made in Chinatown. Loans were made at a more moderate rate through Canaryville, and out the Archer corridor through McKinley Park and Brighton Park.

But overall, lending activity was still dropping in 2011. There were fewer loans in most places and in most categories than in 2010. The exception is loans to non-occupants -- those have been on the rise across the metro area for 2 years.

In the Bridgeport area, loans to non-occupants are concentrated in a few clusters, including Chinatown, and Bridgeport’s Northwest quadrant. But they are most concentrated in the census tract that falls west of Halsted Street, between 32nd Place and 35th Street -- the heart of Bridgeport’s small landlord district, it has historically had high concentrations of small apartment buildings whose owners live in the building.

Citimortgage and JPMorgan Chase are the community’s top lenders, a position they held on the eve of the financial collapse. Citimortgage made 65 loans in Bridgeport in 2011, JPMorgan Chase made 81. For comparison, locally owned Pacific Global, a Community Development Financial Institution that has ranked among Bridgeport’s top lenders throughout the boom and bust, made 30 loans in Bridgeport in 2011, less than half the volume made by each of the big banks.

They were also making different kinds of loans. The big banks were mostly refinancing loans for existing owners. All but 4 of the loans JPMorgan Chase made in Bridgeport were refinances, for instance, and a quarter of them were made to non-occupants. In fact 10 of Chase’s loans to non-occupants were concentrated in the small landlord tract west of Halsted, between 32nd and 35th. Pacific Global’s 30 loans were all loans for home purchase, they were scattered throughout the neighborhood, and only 3 of them were made to investors who wouldn’t occupy the homes.

Hal Link, Furniture Builder, and Bridgeport Arts and Crafts

Hal Link builds custom furniture and cabinetry from a high-ceilinged basement studio in the Bridgeport Art Center, overlooking the river at 35th Street. Most of Link’s furniture costs from $2-10,000, which is about what you might pay for a hand-made bike. Then, every couple years, he gets a major commission.

One year it was a wall size buffet in the arts and crafts style. When he asked to see the architectural drawings for the house it would fit in, it turned out the client hadn’t commissioned them yet, so he helped them design their house.

This year, he’s building a chair modeled on the English coronation throne – a 13th century masterpiece first commissioned by King Edward I. Hal’s built other thrones, including one with a phoenix rising from the back, which he made from urban wood felled by the Emerald Ash Borer for the “Rising from Ashes” furniture show sponsored by the Chicago Furniture Design Association (CFDA). This one will rest on the backs of hand-carved griffins, finished in gilt.

Hal built this chair 18 years ago and it’s comfortably weathered by a life outdoors. (It is also feathered with sawdust in this picture.) He uses it as a camp chair at the Pennsic War, hosted by the Society for Creative Reenactment every year in Pennsylvania. Centuries ago, Hal says, the seat would have been made of slung leather, which stretches over time, so he used wood instead. It is remarkably comfortable to sit in – what it lacks in upholstery it makes up with ergonomics.

Hal’s specialty in medieval furniture and his other specialty, in arts and crafts style, are complementary, in a historical sense. John Ruskin, father of the English Arts and Crafts movement, was a champion of the gothic aesthetic. He thought its rude vigor reflected the rugged character of the Northern landscape, and he thought its abundance of fanciful detail reflected the vitality of the craftsmen who carved it.

Greek buildings were all smooth surfaces for reflecting the “peacefulness” of Mediterranean light. Ruskin thought their rational lines and repetition reflected the enslavement of the Mediterranean craftsman, “for the perfection of his execution can only be reached by exercising him in doing one thing, and giving him nothing else to do.”

The Arts and Crafts movement he helped inspire had the same complaint about factory production, where each worker was reduced to repeating one task over and over again. It promoted objects that were fashioned by craftsmen rather than assembled by pieceworkers. But the movement had natural limits – only so many workers could find employment supplying their cult of craft, because craft-made objects cost too much for the workers themselves to afford.

If that ever changes, global supply chains may help it along. They allow us to meet our basic needs with a superabundance of very cheap goods, so that even people with modest incomes can save to invest in a few very good things, if they’re inclined to do it. And the blogosphere hums with people who are. The dress-like-a-gentleman-movement and the fewer-better-things crowd – they’re informed by a densely cross-linked world of discovery agents, searching out tradition and craft in objects from knives to watches to well made shoes.

Their influence hasn’t necessarily shown up in employment stats yet – the number of small manufacturing companies has not shown a steady increase as far I can tell. But it does show up in the streetscape, where buildings abandoned by big industry have been steadily reclaimed for small ones, even when the rest of the real estate market held its breath.

Before Hal had a workshop in the Bridgeport Arts Building, he was in the Spice Factory on Cermak, just north of the river. This was in the late 1990s. The building was buzzing with artists, but it was also always getting pasted with liens and notices that utilities would be shut off. The owner had a reputation for promoting live-work space. Tenants would move in, then get evicted when she got caught. Link never lived in his workshop, but a poorly plumbed shower for people who lived upstairs used to leak into his space, ruining expensive materials, until he finally shut the water off and walled it off himself.

By 2001 he was looking for new space. John Edel had just bought the building that would be Bubbly Dynamics in the Central Manufacturing District east of the river, and Rick Price was renovating the Iron Studios to the west. Hal looked at both of them, but neither was quite ready to rent. He took a space in the former Spiegel ware house at 1300 W. 35th Street. It had just changed owners a couple years before. A large portion of it was still used for document storage. A teddy bear factory occupied the entire 2nd floor -- the American Bear Company still warehouses their stuffed animals there today.

Hal moved into the basement, sharing 2,800 square feet with Richard Zagorski, a pattern maker who was almost ready to retire. Eleven years later, they still share the space, Richard enjoys taking on small jobs. He makes patterns for decorative metal grills, or custom parts for old machine tools.

In 2006, when developers were still making big plans, the Metroplitan Planning Council and the Urban Land Institute published a proposal for a “creative industries district” on Cermak Road. It would incorporate the Spice Building with 2 of its neighbors to renovate a combined 800,000 square feet of studio and office space for artists, craftsmen and architects. It would cost $103 million to build, including a proposed $36 million in TIF subsidies.

Since then, something like that, but more sprawling, has continued to evolve organically in Bridgeport.

The building at 1200 West 35th Street, with 500,000 square feet, has steadily transformed itself from the East Bank Storage building to the Bridgeport Art Center. Hal was just the 2nd artist there when he moved in, in 2001. Today, over 40 artists occupy the 3rd and 4th floors. This year, the building launched a new Fashion Design Center, with studios, a shared cutting table, and an 18,000 square foot event space for fashion shows and other events. It has stunning skyline views; Hal laid its parquet floor.

The Zhou Brothers have housed artists at their 87,000 square foot building on 35th Street since 2004 – it boasts about 50 resident artists today. Ed Marszewski opened Co-Prosperity Sphere, a 5,000 square foot showroom and project launch pad in 2006. This spring, they launched SMALL, the Small Manufacturing Alliance, to showcase Chicago made goods.

John Edel renovated Bubbly Dynamics gradually, over 8 years, accumulating tenants in as he built the space out. It has 24,000 square feet of space and he calls it the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center now. John bought his second building, a 90,000 square foot plant in The Stockyards, in early 2010.

Every 3rd Friday of the month, the Artists of the East Bank coordinate an open studio night with the Zhou Brothers building down the street. Just last week-end, the Bridgeport Arts Center hosted a launch party for Chicago Artist’s Month, together with SMALL, and Ed’s other new venture, Mash Tun, a magazine and craft beer festival.

This year, Chicago Artists Month aims to showcase how Chicago artists can serve as “essential building blocks in the development of vibrant and livable neighborhoods.” Bridgeport’s arts spaces demonstrate how the reverse is also true - neighborhoods can make room where artisans like Hal Link can build their business in stable, affordable space, and in concert with a community of peers.

A Turn in the Local Waste Stream

Coming Soon to The Plant: A Brave New Day for Municipal Waste


Bridgeport might soon find itself in the near vicinity of not just 1 but 2 anaerobic digesters. They will transform tons of raw garbage into heat and power, with a by-product of potent soil enhancements, and they may change the local landscape for waste.

One of them, under development at The Plant, an adaptive reuse project in the Stockyards, would take in 32 tons of food waste per day, and fuel the generation of up to 500 KW of electricity per hour – mainly to power food processing, beverage brewing, and an aquaponic farm, all located on site. The Plant’s developer, John Edel, says he expects to break ground within a month, and complete construction within 8 months. Growing Power’s Iron Street Farm plans to develop a digester that would eventually consume 100 tons of food waste per day, though they are still working out the details, including where it will be located and how it will be financed.

Anaerobic digestion is a proven technology. European digesters consume a full spectrum of farm, industrial and municipal waste, often in some combination at co-digestion plants. Their use in the US is limited almost exclusively to waste water treatment plants, and to commercial farms where they are deployed mitigating the polluting power of oceans of manure. Building an urban digester, that will consume municipal solids, is still a tricky process. The contractors who build them vary widely in expertise, and the financing must be knit together from subsidies and tax credits, since biogas is still on the margins of our power grid.

But that’s not because the plants are not potentially lucrative. In fact, profits from the heat and power generated by burning biogas could be secondary to the profits to be had from consuming huge volumes of garbage.


In the US, anaerobic digestion is mainly a waste treatment process, much of the methane produced is simply flared. That’s especially true at waste water treatment plants – there are over 3,500 digesters in operation at such plants in the US, but just over 100 of them burn the gas to produce power. There are only 191 digesters at commercial livestock farms, but 186 of them use gas in combined heat and power plants. Illinois has 3 farm based digesters, with capacity to produce 2,243 MW of power. Wisconsin’s huge population of dairy cows lead the nation in farm-based generation, with 29 anaerobic digesters with 120,982 MW of electric generation capacity.

By contrast, municipal solid waste remains largely untapped. There are about 250 million tons of it generated every year, according to the EPA. Undigested food waste in particular has much more power potential than manure, which has already been depleted once. And municipal solids are a reverse commodity – there’s great value to be realized by taking it off people’s hands.

That’s been more true ever since the passage of the Resource Conservation Recovery Act in 1976. Prior to that, municipal waste was mostly disposed in open dumps, left to leak contaminants into ground water, and seep methane into the air. The Act didn’t eliminate the old city dump, but it did prohibit the opening of new ones. It established criteria for the location, design and operation of landfills, and linked federal assistance to resource recovery and sanitary practices.

Regulation made waste disposal a more capital intensive endeavor. Substandard local dumps gradually filled and closed over the years. They were replaced by large scale, state of the art, regional facilities – and a more elaborate supply chain of recycling centers and transfer stations, where waste is aggregated for long haul shipping.

A 20th Century Waste Transfer Station, also in the Stockyards


In 1988 there were 8,000 landfills in the US. By 2006, three were just 1,750. On average, they each handled four times the waste. Waste haulers underwent a parallel process of consolidation – today the biggest operate their own landfills to retain revenue from gate tipping fees.

In 1985, it cost $8, on average, to deposit a ton of waste at a landfill; by 2004, it cost $34, and the US waste disposal business was a $40 billion industry. Since then, consumption may have slowed with the recession, but tipping fees have continued to climb, to a national average of $49 per ton in 2011.

Organic waste buried in landfills already decays anaerobically – in the absence of oxygen, it produces methane gas, and less of the carbon dioxide exhaled in open air rot. Methane is more effective at creating atmospheric greenhouse conditions than carbon dioxide, so the new, reformed landfills use pumps to capture it. Some of it is simply flared, but it can also be pumped to co-generation plants.

Land and Lakes of Park Ridge is a typical new generation landfill operator. Founded as an excavation company in 1966, they are vertically integrated, operating a fleet of waste hauling trucks and transfer stations, recycling centers and landfills.

Land and Lakes reclaims methane from its landfills to generate power – it boasts that it sends enough to supply 52,000 households into the ComEd grid. It also boasts the first “bioreactor” landfill permitted in Illinois, at its River Bend Prairie landfill in Dolton. The biogreactor manipulates moisture levels to accelerate the decomposition process, and produce more methane faster.

Anaerobic digestion takes that process steps further. Digesters vary in configuration -- some farm based digesters are big, covered pits of slurry, brewing microbial reactions. Digesting solids is a more complex process. The digester at The Plant is engineered like a complete gastro-intestinal tract.

The solids, including food waste, brewers grains and possibly fats from rendering plants, will be fed through a mascerator to chew large pieces into smaller ones. The chewed solids will pass into the primary digester, a 100 foot horizontal tube, where bacteria will start a series of chemical reactions, as paddles gradually churn it through the tube over the course of a month.

Coming out the other end, digested solids will be separated from liquids with a screw press. The solids will pass out of the system into a covered pile, and eventually sold as rich organic fertilizer. The liquid will continue into the second digester, a 54 foot tank with a membrane roof. The membrane will expand as methane collects, some of it pumped in from the primary digester, and some of it exuded by the liquid digestate. The spent liquid can also be sold as soil amendment.

From there, the methane gas will be piped into the building where it will fuel a combined heat and power system. The Plant will consume both the heat and the power on site, the system is sized to meet the building’s needs. These are estimated to average 300KW per hour under normal conditions, but the system will be capable of generating up to 500KW. It will be used to power commercial food processing, breweries, and the grow lights for the aquaponic farm, all of which generate their own heat -- industrial buildings often have to be cooled off all year round. So the heat generated from The Plant’s combined heat and power system will be run through an absorption chiller to produce cooling power. They are adapting the existing, extremely well built ammonia cooling system the building came with to run cold water instead.

Every aspect of The Plant has a full-cycle logic like that. The building that was once a mass production meat processing plant is being converted to incubate small, sustainable food producers, and the indoor farm. The aquaponic growing system will recycle waste from fish to fertilize plant crops; the digester will fuel generators to make power from garbage. That will make it much more affordable to run grow lights for indoor farming. And it will all work within the regular cycle of carbon exchange that goes on all the time between biotic life and the atmosphere -- as opposed to releasing vast carbon reserves that have been sequestered underground for hundreds of millions of years by burning fossil fuels.

Building it will cost about $2 million. Most of it will be paid for with a Food Scrap Advancement grant (F-SCRAP) from the Illinois Department of Commerce, together with a Recovery Act grant (ARRA) and a loan from the Chicago Community Loan Fund. The Plant has contracted with Eisenmann Corporation to build the digester itself, and with Alcor Energy Solutions to build the combined heat and power system. Eisenmann is a family owned German engineering firm with North American headquarters in Crystal Lake. They have built at least 80 anaerobic digesters in Europe and hundreds of other kinds of facilities in the US. Alcor has also completed numerous combined heat and power systems, but its owner may be more accomplished as an engineer than as a project manager. Alcor is behind on its contract at The Plant, the delays have been costly, time will tell if they are the firm that actually finishes the combined heat and power system at The Plant.

But once it’s all up and running by spring 2013, early estimates show more than half potential revenues coming from tipping charges for accepting waste, and a smaller fraction earned by selling power to tenants. Edel anticipates the tipping fees will be quickly consumed by the cost of operations. The Plant will take on the role of waste hauler itself.

The estimates are also based on tipping charges less than half the national average rate. And there is a sub-trend in the municipal waste market that moves against the long term rise of disposal fees. New, creative users such as organic farmers, bio-fuel producers, and now anaerobic digesters, are creating value for the best organic waste products –a value not earned just by hauling it away. Brewer’s grains are one example.

Iron Street Farm: Possible Site of Greater Bridgeport's Next Anaerobic Digester

Josh Deth of Revolution Brewing says his recently expanded brewing operations generate about 8 tons of spent grains a week – all of which has been claimed as prime compost material by 2 urban farms, including Growing Power and City Farm. Deth says he pays the farms to haul the waste, because they are non profits with a mission he supports and he wants them to succeed, but he says Goose Island brewery is getting paid by farmers who want to use their waste, which can also be added to cow feed. In fact, bulk used cooking oil is already a commodity, its price tracks the price of corn. Aside from its potential use for making bio-fuel, farmers use it as an additive to soy feeds to make them more nutritious when corn costs too much.

Deth says Chicago’s other breweries still pay conventional waste haulers – probably for one of the reasons he pays Growing Power. Deth says as a business owner, he needs to be assured his waste will be hauled away consistently at regular times. But “it’s not garbage,” he says.

Still, the sources of organic waste are numerous, and plenty of producers pay to have it reliably shipped away. Edel says The Plant will offer the same service as the big waste haulers at the same price, “and you also get a gold start next to your name that says all of your waste is going to a sustainable business to make energy and food.”

The Plant is unlikely to face a shortage of fuel anytime soon. Food wastes aren’t the biggest component of municipal solid wastes generated every year, but after all the paper products are recycled, they comprise the biggest portion that goes to landfill. The EPA reports almost 34 million tons of food waste were generated in 2010, and only 3% of it was recycled. The rest could fuel a generation of urban digesters, and also help pay for them.

Variations on the Boom and Bust

Last March, I speculated that Bridgeport had been insulated against the housing bust. That the market here had been less inflated by speculation in the first place, and that when the bubble burst, there was less fallout. Foreclosures haven’t been as frequent, lending didn’t drop off as much. People are still buying houses and banks are still giving them loans to do it.

Then I went around talking to property owners, and some of them are less optimistic.

One acquaintance bought his home in 2002, a new construction single family house on Aberdeen, near where he grew up. By 2006, it had doubled in value; by 2011, it had lost what it gained. And a little bit more than it had gained, he said. Now he finds himself obsessively checking Zillow for comparable sales. He’s not looking to sell, he just wants to know.

I had informal conversations with some small landlords. Some of them fit my ideal description of the good steward, defending the stability of Bridgeport’s housing stock into the future, but not all of them did.

One of them rents to the high end of the rental market. He’s lost a few tenants as they’ve lost jobs, or their circumstances changed, and they’ve left for cheaper apartments. He had a few vacancies when I spoke to him last spring, but he planned to keep his units open until he found tenants who would pay his rents. He acquired his buildings gradually, renovated them down to the bricks, managed the work himself. He didn’t have to rent right away.

One on them targets the lower end of the market. He says it’s more complicated renting to yuppies, they are more demanding, and the building inspectors follow them in. “The money is in slum housing,” he says. It’s easier renting to “murderers and rapists,” if they’ve got a leak, he says “here’s a bucket.”

Or so he claimed anyway, I think he was exaggerating a little to impress. His porches were bright with fresh paint and beds of flowers, and he was sitting outside supervising workers making improvements. He bought his first building 40 years ago, he says he enjoyed doing the work himself. But he’s older now, he wishes he’d sold during the boom when he was getting crazy offers.

He’s still getting offers, he says they never stopped. But they’re crazy low offers. “They’re looking for someone who doesn’t know” (what their building is really worth). Or someone like his neighbor. The building inspectors recently came in and told her she has to make $40,000 in improvements.

“She has the money,” he says, but it rankles with her, because the repairs will cost more than she paid for the building, decades ago.

I met at least one investor on the lookout for owners who don’t know what their building is really worth, or who are getting restless to sell. He lives in the neighborhood, and works in the construction trades, he’s always kept his eye out for opportunities.

He’d just heard that an owner who rejected his offer for a storefront on Halsted a few years ago recently sold it to someone else for a third the price. He’d just made a successful bid for a 6-flat in Bridgeport, and he’d been venturing east into Bronzeville, looking at properties for a few tens of thousands of dollars.

Now he squabbles with the bank though. They want him to spend more of his own money on the purchase. They say “You have the money,” and he says “I know I have the money, but I don’t want to spend it, I want to borrow it.”

Reading Into the Loan Data:
At the end of September, new residential loan data came out for 2010. Theoretically, numbers are an objective check for the stories you hear people tell. There is an actual number for residential loans made in Bridgeport in 2010 for instance. You can compare it to the number of loans made in 2005, or to the number made in other neighborhoods.

But what do you make of that count, once you know what it is? The comparisons invite interpretation.

The portion of residential loans that were made for home purchases, as opposed to loans made to refinance existing loans, proves that property is actually changing hands, which must happen more in hot markets. But loans made to non-occupants in particular seem to measure more speculative investment.

Then again, so might a loan refinance. During the boom it wasn’t unusual for a home buyer to close on his home loan, then refinance it multiple times within a few years. Hopefully, he was trading in for better terms. But some of his friends were sucking equity out from their houses to fuel other kinds of spending – they were speculating on their own property in a sense.

The same loans took on different connotations when the context changed. In the bust, loan refinances suggest the correction of past excess. Or at least the persistence of opportunity to make corrections.

In 2005, at the height of the boom, residential loans in the Chicago metropolitan area were evenly split between single family home purchase loans, and loan refinances, with each representing 47% of residential loans. (The remainder was made up of multi-family and home improvement loans.)

In 2006, residential lending stumbled, and was still falling through 2010. The balance among loans also changed. Home purchase loans, and loans to non-occupants, fell furthest. Refinances dropped the least. By 2010, refinances accounted for 3 in 4 loans made across the MSA. Though in some neighborhoods, loan refinances evaporated too.

Then in 2009, the number of refinances lurched upwards. The lurch was strong enough to make up for the year’s drop in home purchase loans, and to lift the count of residential loans across the metro area by 22%.



Not incidentally, 2009 was the year the federal government’s Making Home Affordable programs went into effect. They were designed to help borrowers who were current on their mortgages refinance loans that were underwater at more favorable terms. Or to help those who’d fallen behind negotiate modifications of their existing loans to avoid foreclosure. The state of Illinois and Cook County both took measures to give borrowers more time and leverage to use those programs.

Many have been frustrated by what the government interventions actually accomplished. By year end 2009, foreclosure filings in the Chicago metro area actually rose to 70,000 from less than 60,000 the year before. The Woodstock Institute, a fair lending advocate, concluded that the government interventions only delayed foreclosures. They clearly hadn’t reduced them.

But the surge in refinances suggests foreclosure filings would have been worse if those programs were not in effect. In some neighborhoods, refinances did not seem to slow foreclosures from increasing, but in others, they may have done just that.

By 2010, loans were dropping again, in the Chicago metro area as a whole. But there was a modest surge in loans to non-occupants – investors were apparently venturing out to pick up bargains. No neighborhood needs more absentee investors. But non-occupants aren’t necessarily absentee owners. And if nothing else, they take up some of the slack in the housing market. Their perking interest might give the homeowner watching Zillow a reason to hope his situation is beginning to improve.

Variations in Lending:
Looking at loans, Bridgeport didn’t escape speculation during the boom and it hasn’t escaped the bust either. But it still looks pretty good in contrast with the metro area.

It also stands out among its neighbors. Communities whose housing stock is similar in age (pre-war) and composition (single family and small apartments), whose populations are similar in occupation (growing numbers of white collar professionals, but persistently high numbers of blue collar trades) and in origin (large numbers of the foreign born, small but growing numbers of blacks).



For all the things they have in common, the neighborhoods in the larger Bridgeport area looked very different from one another in the boom and bust. In general, you might expect the ones that saw high rates of speculative fervor would be the ones that saw a sharp decline in loans, and particularly high rates of foreclosure, in later years. Though the connections aren’t always consistent.

The South Loop seemed a case study in excess a few years ago, but it exhibits at least one measure of resilience now.

Almost half the neighborhood’s housing stock was constructed in the 2000s. In 2005, the neighborhood was boiling with loans. In the Near South Side, which includes the South Loop from Roosevelt to Cermak, there were 19 loans made for every 100 housing units that year alone.

Neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Logan Square saw 10 and 11 loans per 100 housing units in 2005.



Furthermore, 2 in 3 of the loans in the Near South Side represented property changing hands, which makes sense in a neighborhood so newly constructed, but which stands out in the metro area where home purchase loans were balanced with loan refinances. And a lot more of the Near South loans were made to non-occupants investors.

Considering the speculative fervor, it’s a little surprising to see that loan activity actually held up better in the South Loop than it did everywhere else. The weight of it shifted from home purchase, to refinance, as it did across the metro area. But across the metro area, loan refinances slowed down, they just didn’t slow as much as other kinds of loans. In the Near South Side, loan refinances increased 92%. Even home purchase loans dropped more slowly than they did other places. The South Loop's location advantage hasn't been overwhelmed.



Still, liquidity alone has not been enough to correct for prices the bubble brought, and foreclosure filings have been exceptionally high in the Near South Side. In 2009 there were filings per mortgageable property were almost 1 in 10. And by 2010, as filings have been dropping in some of the hardest hit neighborhoods, filings in the Near South Side were up another 50%.



By contrast, in the Bridgeport area, the neighborhoods where lenders and borrowers were busiest in 2005 saw the sharpest drop in loans in the 5 years to 2010.

New City and Brighton Park are two of those neighborhoods. In 2005, they were the 2 most active residential loan markets in the Bridgeport area, with 13 loans per 100 housing units. Bridgeport, by comparison had 7 loans for every 100 housing units.



They are geographically adjacent, but historically different – they began to resemble each other more over the course of the 2000s.

New City includes Canaryville and the Back of the Yards neighborhoods. It’s traditionally been working class, and dominated by renters. In 2000, Brighton Park had higher incomes, and more homeowners. It started out as an extension of Bridgeport and McKinley Park – families would move down the Archer corridor as they moved up in the world.

In 2005, loans associated with home sales in New City slightly outpaced loan refinances, and almost a quarter of all residential loans were made to non-occupant investors. Brighton Park saw fewer home sales and less speculation of the non-occupant variety, and more homeowners grappling for terms, or for cash.

Both neighborhoods saw some of the steepest drops in loan activity in subsequent years. And the highest rates of foreclosure. Foreclosure filings in New City peaked in 2008, and have been falling since. But there were still 461 of them in 2009, or 57 per 1,000 mortgageable property. And they have contributed to a growing stock of vacant buildings. In 2009, only 3 Chicago neighborhoods -- Austin, Roseland and Englewood -- had more.

Foreclosure filings in Brighton Park have lagged behind New City’s, but there were still more of them, proportionate to mortgageable properties, than in other neighborhoods in the area. And the cycle has corresponded with changing incomes, and home values, that have brought the neighborhood more in line with New City than its old Archer Avenue peers.



The Lower West Side also stands out for its steep drop in loan activity after 2005. But foreclosure filings have remained relatively modest there, maybe because loan activity before 2005 was less intense. Despite rumors of gentrification progressing through Pilsen, loans south of 18th Street remained modest in volume, and also in the portion that involved actual property sales. It is true the Lower West Side is dominated by rental apartments, but no more so than New City, where property sales, and foreclosures, spiked.

The other neighborhood that looked comparably quiet in 2005 was Armour Square. In 2005, both Armour Square and the Lower West Side saw just 5 loans for every 100 housing units. But in Armour Square, that loan activity didn’t disappear. Loans of all kinds were fewer in number by 2010, but they hadn’t dropped off at the same rates they did for the metro area, or for other neighborhoods in greater Bridgeport for that matter.



As in the South Loop, loan refinances in particular were resilient. They were down slightly in 2008 from 2005 (down 13%) but by 2009 there were more than there had been in 2005 (112 vs 107), and in 2010, they were still increasing (to 124). And unlike the South Loop, foreclosure filings have been all but non-existent in Armour Square. There were 4 filings per 1,000 mortgageable properties in 2009.



If there is a single neighborhood in the area that shows where moderation in the housing market helped guard against disaster later on, Armour Square is the one.

But Bridgeport looks a lot like it. Bridgeport wasn’t immune to speculation, at least it attracted a fairly large share of non-occupant investors in 2005. But it saw less lending overall than several of its neighbors, and more of those loans were to existing owners, adjusting their position, rather than property changing hands.

Lending dropped off more in Bridgeport than it did in Armour Square, but it didn’t drop off as much it did in the MSA, or as in most of its neighbors. Foreclosures have been on the rise, but they remain modest as a portion of mortgageable properties.

In a map that shows change in overall lending between 2005 and 2010, Bridgeport stands out, together with Armour Square and the South Loop. But a map of loans made in 2010 shows that actual optimism may be more diffuse.



The South Loop remains particularly rich in loans – of course it also particularly rich in foreclosure filings. Meanwhile, lending activity continues down the Archer Corridor, and into Canaryville, and parts of Back of the Yards. New loans suffuse neighborhoods where other measures have not looked so good. There are lots of loans made in Bridgeport west of Halsted Street, and there’s a cluster of lending between 35th Street and Pershing Road that extends from Normal Avenue to Western.



That cluster shows up again in a map showing where non-occupant loans stepped up between 2009 and 2010. The spurt of non-occupant investment penetrates pockets of New City and Brighton Park.



In fact, Brighton Park, the neighborhood that may have lost the most in the decade of the boom and bust, saw the best news by another measure: in 2010, it is the only community in the area that saw a spurt of new home purchase loans. Some of them may have been loans to non-occupant investors. But since the former outnumber the latter, most of them were not.

Mapping the Territory

A few months ago, I floated some speculations about Bridgeport’s real estate market, hoping to follow up with people who make their living in it, to hear what they thought.

So far, the follow up part has been slow going. (It turns out people don’t want me to profile their real estate holdings on my blog!) I’m not out to embarrass anybody, but I’m still optimistic persistence will pay off.

Lately, I’ve been working up some maps. I’ve been hoping to find patterns that would provide context, and maybe people who don’t want to broadcast their own business will be willing to theorize about cumulative effects (especially good ones).

Also I did a project like this before, and it still shapes how I think of Bridgeport now. That was 9 years ago this summer, I was editing an Affordable Housing Fact Book for the Chicago Rehab Network, a community development advocate, after the 2000 Census had come out.

You may recall, the 2000 Census was a triumphant one for Chicago. The population had grown for the first time in 40 years! The median income had grown significantly faster than inflation, and significantly faster than rents.

People were richer but housing was still cheap – that was a big improvement on CRN’s previous Affordable Housing Fact Book, which found that real incomes had dropped over the 1980s, and rents had doubled.

Even so, not all neighborhoods experienced the 1990s in the same way. That summer, I was trying to tease out variations the big picture obscured by mapping changes in population, incomes and housing costs across the city’s 77 community areas. When the Fact Book came out, it showed trends moving across clusters of neighborhoods in a few persistent patterns.

A large cluster of neighborhoods extending northward across the lakefront were booming: with a burst of new housing construction and growing numbers of high income households (and shrinking numbers of low income ones), they were at the center of an expanding ring of rising rents and home values.



At the same time, large swaths of the south and west side were still thinning out. Their populations were dropping, their housing stock was shrinking, and vacancy rates were still high.

Bridgeport and its neighbors, especially those hugging the I&M Canal on the way out to Garfield Heights, fell in a cluster that was virtually bursting.

Their populations were exploding, especially low income households displaced from the booming and thinning communities, or arriving as new immigrants. But the housing stock was not keeping pace, giving rise to various kinds of housing stress – from overcrowding to high housing-cost-burden, a measure of the portion of its income a household spends to keep a roof over its head.



At the time, I thought these were dangerous signs. From what I’d read, the “thinning” communities had been bursting ones, before a combination of housing stress and politics condemned them to the urban renewal ploughs.

But Jack Markowski, who was Housing Commissioner at the time, saw something different in our bursting cluster. He observed that overcrowding was a relative term – it’s often measured as more than 1 person per room, yet our Mayor at the time had grown up in a Bridgeport bungalow with 7 kids. He described the neighborhoods in the bursting cluster as vibrant, dynamic, even exciting places to be.

Now that I live here, of course, I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. My view of the cluster has also expanded, and the questions I’m inclined to ask have changed.




New City shared qualities with “thinning” communities in 2000. But it shares historic ties with Bridgeport. The Lower West Side, which includes Pilsen south of 18th Street, was a bursting community that’s been historically separate from territories below the South Branch, but it’s tied to Bridgeport by patterns of hipster-migration, and shares other characteristics with the Greater Bridgeport area.

The neighbors might not think of themselves as part of Greater Bridgeport, but they would probably recognize we share some broad similarities, especially when compared with the city as a whole.

Our populations include large numbers of the foreign born, and, historically, miniscule numbers of African Americans. Our housing stock is older than that of the city as a whole, and a relatively large portion of it is comprised of small apartment buildings, but very little of it is in buildings with more than 10 units.



Though there are variations within the area too: the Lower West Side and Armour Square outpace everybody in drawing immigrants; Armour Square (whose census tracts extend to State Street) and New City (which includes both Canaryville and Back of the Yards) include respectable numbers of blacks.

In 2000, Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Brighton Park were more similar to each other than the rest of the cluster by almost every measure. Their median incomes were identical for instance, and just below the city median. By comparison the Lower West Side, Armour Square and New City looked like poor relations – more modest in income but sharing a family resemblance.

Communities across the area were built to house workers in Chicago’s manufacturing sectors. And by 2000 it was still true that workers employed by manufacturing industries, or in occupations in Production, Transport and Material Moving, maintained a strong foothold in Greater Bridgeport, even as they lose ground everywhere else.

And that may make Greater Bridgeport a good vantage on Chicago’s ongoing transformation from a manufacturing and logistics hub to whatever has come next – a service economy, a global city, maybe a magnet for the creative class.

Manufacturing jobs once brought masses of Chicagoans to the middle class. What has come next is often said to be have drawn the workforce into 2 tiers: those who provide professional services to corporations -- whose skills and long hours are compensated with high wages -- and the larger mass of those who provide consumer services – who do the housework of life the professionals no longer have time for – at a much lower rate of pay.

After 2000, the bursting cluster looked to me like the line of exodus low wage workers were following out to the inner ring suburbs as the higher wage ones priced them out.

Now, Greater Bridgeport strikes me as a point of confluence, where old and new, high wage and low wage, coexist. It’s not clear if it will last, or if it is just a moment in transition. But in the maps that follow, I hope to make a snapshot of what that looks like now, on a local level.

A Quick Complaint About the Census:
Before I launch in, though, I should acknowledge some limits on what these maps can say for certain about what’s happened since 2000.

It turns out that the detailed information once available through the long form of the decennial census won’t be covered by the census anymore, but by the American Community Survey. The Survey will be updated every year. (And it is still available through the legacy American Factfinder! Up until the 2010 ACS is added, when it will be migrated to the new, less-usable format.)

But the sample is smaller, and the margin of error is greater, especially for smaller geographies like census tracts. Plus, the data available now averages the years between 2005-2009, 4 of the most volatile years in the Chicago housing market.

So the observations that follow will sometimes start with 2000 data, which is more accurate but out of date, and use the 2005-09 figures as general indications of the kind of thing that has probably been going on since then.

After 2000: Some General Indications of What’s Probably Been Going On
To start with, some of the pressure that made Greater Bridgeport seem ready to burst in 2000 has lifted.

Chicago’s population stopped growing and dropped a little over the course of the decade, but its development engines kept running. The city’s housing stock grew by 70,000 units between 2000 and the survey of 2005-09. When the decade started, 10% of Chicago households were overcrowded, and only 6% of rental units were vacant. Now, less than 5% of households are overcrowded, and 9% of rental housing units are vacant.



In the 1990s, Greater Bridgeport’s population grew at rates that surged ahead of the city as a whole, and crowding was more intense here. In the 2000s, population dropped faster in some Greater Bridgeport neighborhoods, though it held steady, or grew, in others. Crowding fell from 2000 highs, like it did for the city as a whole, but it is still higher than the city’s 2000 peak in area neighborhoods, except Bridgeport proper and Armour Square.



The post-war urban-development engine has been more sluggish in Greater Bridgeport than in the city as a whole. The census counts existing housing units by the year they were built, giving some indication of development activity in the past – though some units built in earlier decades will have been demolished by a later census.

In fact, the median year built for housing units in Chicago dropped 3 years between the 2000 census, when it was 1948, and 2009, when it was 1945 (give or take a 1 year margin). The change probably reflects the demolition of thousands of units of postwar high-rise housing, and their replacement with low-density development. But Chicago’s housing stock is still weighted toward the post-war years.



The median year built for housing in Greater Bridgeport is uniformly “pre-1940” (a single category in the census). The area has lower portions of housing units built in each of the post-war decades than Chicago at large. And what units were built in the 1940s, 50s and 60s are weighted toward the southwest. McKinley and Brighton Park are sometimes described as communities of “second settlement” – that is, places the working class moved as they became more established. In the decades after the war, they were still filling in.



That pattern shifted as the decades passed, advancing eastward up the Archer corridor. New structures built in the 1970s and 80s accumulated in Bridgeport’s south and east quadrants. Structures built in the 1990s and 2000s clearly favored Bridgeport and Chinatown.

[And the South Loop, which I originally included in the maps as a point of contrast. But through 2009, the Near South Side was comprised of just 4 census tracts – Bridgeport is divided into 16 – which makes all counts seem exceptionally large there.]



The 1990s and 2000s were boom years for Chicago as a whole, but new development added fewer housing units than in past decades, which probably reflects a preference for single family houses over big multi-unit buildings. In Bridgeport at least, a blooming of big houses built on multiple lots is visible from the street.



A Neighborhood of Owners and Renters
I had thought of Bridgeport as a neighborhood populated by bungalows and worker’s cottages and the homeowners who inhabit them. That is more true of McKinley Park and Brighton Park; it is less true of Armour Square, New City or the Lower West Side. On average, Bridgeport tracts have owner occupancy rates on par with the city as a whole.



On a census tract level, high rates of owner occupancy trace 2 distinct corridors through Greater Bridgeport: one includes Bridgeport’s northwest quadrant, and follows the Archer and I&M Canal. A second extends from Bridgeport’s southeast quadrant through Canaryville.



The Lower West Side, Armour Square and Back of the Yards are all renter-occupied at rates higher than Chicago overall. In many tracts, 60-80% of households live in apartments. But almost all of them are in small apartment buildings, and many of those small apartment buildings are owner occupied.

Small landlords have sometimes been assumed to be the keepers of an aging, dilapidated housing stock, and to lack access to capital to maintain it. There is a whole literature on the “small landlord problem.” It dates back to the decades of urban flight, when many small landlords probably really were left holding properties they didn’t want, but couldn’t sell, in neighborhoods that seemed to spiral into decline.

But scholars were still opining on the topic as recently as 2006, when Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies published a paper on how small landlords might be bought out by small-property-REITs, which could better leverage them to reinvest. Since then, bundled ownership and more leverage doesn’t necessarily sound like an ideal thing.

In fact, the literature has also consistently acknowledged that small landlords who were also owner occupants are exceptions to the “problem.” Owner occupancy has been the best indicator of good management among the small apartment stock.

Chicago’s population of small apartment buildings has been steadily decimated over decades. But Greater Bridgeport has managed to maintain a dense supply.

Owner occupied small apartment buildings are densest in the vicinity of Lower West Side and Back of the Yards, but Bridgeport also has large numbers in certain tracts, especially the blocks west of Halsted between 32nd and 35th Street. Bridgeport’s small landlord district might prove a good base for maintaining the neighborhood’s income balance in decades to come.




A Solid, Middle-Income Working-Class
Ownership is often associated with stability and prosperity, so it is striking to be reminded it’s not always associated with higher incomes.

Overall, median incomes in Greater Bridgeport are close to, but slightly below, the city median. In 2000, Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Brighton Park had median incomes that were markedly higher than their neighbors in Lower West Side, New City and Armour Square.



On a census tract level, most tracts were just below the city median in 2000, with the exception of Back of the Yards, where median incomes are significantly lower than that.

A few tracts along the Archer / I&M corridor surpass the city median, but the most regular path of higher incomes extends through east Bridgeport and Canaryville.





By 2005-09, those patterns were shifting. Citywide, incomes didn’t keep up with inflation, but in most parts of Greater Bridgeport they did. Most census tracts still show incomes below the city median, however. And the Archer / I&M Corridor is less solidly high income than it was; Brighton Park’s fortunes have fallen in line with the poorer relations in New City and the Lower West Side.



Higher incomes seem to match tracts with new construction, more than high ownership, with a solid corridor of higher income tracts following Normal Avenue corridor into Canaryville.

These tracts also marked the transformation of Greater Bridgeport’s employment base. A transformation most visible by comparing maps of workers employed in Production, Transport and Material Moving occupations with workers in Management and Professional ones.



Citywide, workers employed in Production, Transportation and Movement of Materials are a shrinking crowd – almost twice as many workers are employed in Professional and Managerial occupations. But they are still well represented in Greater Bridgeport, especially in the area’s southern and western parts.



Workers in Management and Professional occupations are represented at lower rates, relative to the city, in most tracts; they are best represented in a visible cluster in Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Canaryville.



Occupations traditionally associated with the region, like Public Administration and Protective Services, show largest portions of workforce on the east corridor. So, surprisingly does Finance Insurance and Real Estate – a sector I’ve never associated with Canaryville before.







Artists are often talked about as an engine of the new economy. The Lower West Side, or Pilsen, shows high rates of workers employed in the arts and entertainment, as you might expect. And those occupations are visibly spreading into Bridgeport.



Artists are also sometimes described as the advance troops of gentrification. And it does appear that in some parts of Greater Bridgeport, home values are more visibly associated with artists than with other factors, like income, or professional employment.

But the scale on these maps is set to show rates higher and lower than those in the city as a whole. The actual rates of workers employed in arts, entertainment and media are significantly lower than those highlighted on the maps of production, or professional workers for instance. So it is hard to draw conclusions with confidence.

The Cost of Housing
Overall, home values in Greater Bridgeport were lower than for the city as a whole. Tracts in lower Pilsen make a notable exception, since the Lower West Side is otherwise a low income, high immigrant, neighborhood of renters.






Bridgeport also stands out for its high home values. Home values are highest around Normal Avenue and north Canaryville, where incomes are also high, and where large portions of the housing stock were built on old industrial land in the last 20 years.

Median rents are highest around Normal Avenue too, along with an improbable stretch of Garfield Boulevard on the northern border of Englewood. (Do these rents reflect section 8 contracts, or just large apartments?)

Rents are low in significant quadrants of Bridgeport proper, even where home values are high. The small landlord section appears to be charging affordable rents. So does the northeast quadrant, which has received some of the new immigrants spreading out from Chinatown.





Looking Back at Vacancy and Crowding
After 2000, the southwest bursting cluster was defined by crowding, even as it was surrounded by neighborhoods that were thinning out.

Since then, Bridgeport’s population has dropped, and its housing stock grew. It has low rates of crowding, and higher rates of vacancy.

But crowding is still relatively common in New City and the Lower West Side. So are vacancies. In fact, the maps of crowding and vacancy are almost the same.





We had heard about rising vacancies in neighborhoods with high rates of crowding after the 2000 census. We wondered if it showed that families were doubling up to pay rent. Rents are not high in these tracts, relative to others. It might also reflect substandard housing that renters won’t occupy, or neighborhoods in transition. Owner occupant landlords might prefer to keep units vacant than to rent to people they do not know.

If I were an affordable housing advocate, these are the areas I’d be focusing my attention now, to better preserve a stock of housing that has given generations of workers a sound foothold in Chicago.

As a citizen of Greater Bridgeport, though, I’ll be most interested to see what happens in 2 very different sections of Bridgeport itself: the Normal Avenue/Canaryville corridor, and the small landlord section west of Halsted. I hope they are both representative of Bridgeport’s future.


(If you have an observation, comment or critique, I am looking for feedback! You can reach me by e-mail at TheHardscrabbler@gmail.com.)