Posted on Mon, May 1, 2017
Of the dozen evictions one four‑deputy squad from the Cook
County sheriff's office set out to enforce on the south side last
Friday, none ended in a screaming match, armed showdown, or hail
of cockroaches from a broken‑down doorjamb. No disgruntled
tenant tried to punch a landlord, no dead bodies were found, nor
any bathtubs full of weed—all things they say they've seen in the
past. None of the deputies had to get deloused or throw out
clothes contaminated with bedbugs; they didn't even need to rub
Vicks under their noses before entering any of the units. It was a
calm day by the deputies' standards—just a handful of muted
tragedies.
Tenants who were home were escorted out in quiet resignation. At
alone were taken to a sergeant's car to wait for their mom while the
maintenance man changed the lock behind them. At the team's last
stop, deputy Christopher Kolosa stared down at a disco ball on the
oor of a child's bedroom. "It's an eviction," he said. "It's an
eviction," echoed deputy Marvin Marin with a shrug. They stuck a
large neon‑green "No Trespassing" sign on the front door, and
marked the job as complete.
Some 30 members of the sheriff's eviction team fan out across
Cook County every day to enforce anywhere from 40 to 80 eviction
orders. The deputies' busiest and most unpredictable days take
place in an area of the south side that includes South Shore—Cook
County's eviction capital.
According to data obtained from the sheriff's oce, no Cook
County zip code has seen more evictions than South Shore, 60649,
since the oce began tracking these numbers in 2011. Last year
the sheriff's oce conducted 382 evictions in the area bounded by
Stony Island Avenue, the lakefront, Jackson Park, and 79th Street—
eight times more than the average. Between 2014 and 2016 the
neighborhood saw about 20 percent more evictions than the
second‑busiest zip code, 60619, which includes parts of Chatham,
Avalon Park, and Greater Grand Crossing.
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PAUL JOHN HIGGINS
This data only presents a partial picture of the the magnitude of
the eviction problem, however, since it doesn't account for what
researchers call "forced moves"—those spurred by sudden spikes in
rent prices and chronic maintenance problems—or for people who
leave on their own after losing eviction cases in court.
South Shore's high concentration of sprawling, multiunit apartment
buildings owned by large property companies and its high poverty
rates appear to explain the neighborhood's dubious distinction.
The area's housing stock consists mostly of multifamily apartment
buildings, and nearly 80 percent of the occupied housing units are
rentals—20 percent more than the proportion of renter‑occupied
housing units in the city as a whole. And according to the 2014
American Community Survey, half of South Shore households live
on less than $25,000 per year.
Development booms at the end of the 19th century and in the
1920s combined with early 20th century white flight to shape
South Shore's built environment. As more African‑Americans
settled in other parts of the south side, middle‑class whites flocked
to the lakefront. This led to the construction of stately apartment
buildings in the neighborhood, especially on South Shore Drive,
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which runs along the water, and in Jackson Park Highlands, the area
between the southern edge of Jackson Park and 71st Street.
Until the 1960s, South Shore was a middle‑class neighborhood and
more than 90 percent white, but by the 1980s the racial balance
had completely reversed: South Shore became 96 percent black,
though it remained middle‑class. In recent years, however, the
median family income in the neighborhood has steadily declined.
These economic realities have presented challenges for South Shore
residents as rent prices in the area have climbed. According to a
recent report by the DePaul Institute for Housing Studies, South
Shore has one of the largest gaps between the supply and demand
of affordable housing in the city. And, according to data analyzed
by Chicago magazine, though the median rent price in the
neighborhood is below $1,250 per month, some 64 percent of
South Shore's 22,700 households are rent burdened, or paying
more than 30 percent of their monthly income for rent. Even
though more than 5,000 South Shore households have Section 8
vouchers, which provide a federally funded housing subsidy, the
need for rental assistance doesn't come close to being met.
"The issue is unemployment, and lack of investment by the city and
by companies," says alderman Leslie Hairston, whose Fifth Ward
includes parts of northern South Shore. Though she says she
doesn't hear much about evictions from her constituents, she
wasn't surprised to learn about the higher‑than‑average eviction
rate in South Shore. "You look at the number of people working
two, three jobs just to try to make ends meet—it's challenging," she
says.
But John Bartlett, executive director of Metropolitan Tenants
Organization, says he hears plenty about evictions in the
neighborhood. His group runs a hotline for tenants needing help
with evictions, and gets more calls from South Shore than from
almost anywhere else in the city. The highest volume of evictionrelated
calls comes from Hairston's ward. "There definitely appears
to be a crisis happening there," Bartlett says.
Research by Harvard sociologist (and recent Pulitzer Prize winner)
Matthew Desmond has shown that evictions aren't just a symptom
of poverty, but a cause. Among other things, evictions lead to job
loss, greater difficulty finding a new home, declining mental health,
particularly for mothers, and school performance problems for
kids.
South Shore's sometimes half‑block long multistory courtyard
apartment buildings are typically owned by large companies—forprofit
entities pulling in as much as tens of millions of dollars in
annual revenues—who deal with thousands of tenants across the
city. These companies have dedicated crews to handle property
maintenance, online rent payment systems, and attorneys on
retainer or on staff to efficiently navigate eviction court. And if
South Shore is Chicago's eviction capital, Pangea Properties is its
undisputed mayor.
Pangea owns and manages some 8,000 rental units in Chicago and
the suburbs, making it one of the largest landlords in the region.
The company has regularly appeared on Crain's annual list of
Chicago's 50 fastest‑growing companies, and has grown by more
than 1,000 percent in the last five years. Pangea is also the Chicago
Housing Authority's largest contractor housing families with
Section 8 vouchers, collecting more than $1 million per month in
rent from those tenants alone, a Sun‑Times investigation found last
year.
Last year, Pangea filed more than 1,000 eviction cases, usually also
seeking back rent, and won about 60 percent of them, according to
the data we obtained from the clerk of the circuit court. Other
cases were either dismissed or are still pending. Pangea's eviction
case‑filing rate—one for every eight units the company owns—
appears to be high even when measured against those of other
large real estate companies. By comparison, Kass Management
Services, a property‑management company with 5,000 units and
South Shore's second‑largest evictor, filed one eviction last year for
every 25 units in its portfolio.
Pangea owns about 1,500 units in South Shore—more than it owns
in any other neighborhood. In 2016, 27 of the 382 evictions
performed by the sheriff's office in South Shore, or 7 percent, were
at Pangea properties. In comparison, properties managed by Kass
saw 16 evictions, or 4 percent.
It's not clear why Pangea evicts so many more people than its
competitors. The Reader repeatedly contacted Pangea and the
company's primary eviction‑court attorney, Jennifer Dean, but they
didn't respond to multiple attempts to reach them via phone, email,
and in writing.
But some sources believe that the company's high eviction rate
stems from its overall growth and acquisition habits—buying up
distressed and foreclosed buildings, clearing them of existing
tenants, then renovating them and re‑leasing to low‑income
households who fit their screening criteria.
In an interview with the Sun‑Times last year, Pangea's CEO Steve
Joung explained that the company likes to buy up distressed
buildings by the block, saying the company's mission is "to provide
investment in underserved neighborhoods." The company has won
several "Good Neighbor" awards from the Chicago Association of
Realtors for its rehab and redevelopment of large apartment
buildings, and several sources say that the company seems to be
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focused on rehabbing troubled buildings and renting units at
somewhat affordable prices—the company's current listings in
South Shore offer two‑bedroom apartments for between $775 and
$1,025 per month.
But the company's high rate of acquisitions troubles some
observers.
"If you want to know Pangea's ambitions, they named themselves
after the ancient supercontinent," says Mark Swartz, director of the
Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing. "They are buying up the
south side."
Swartz's group, which provides free legal aid to about 1 percent of
tenants going through eviction court, has represented a handful of
Pangea's residents. Swartz says he's observed that "Pangea clears
out a lot of buildings to do work on them, or if the current tenants
don't meet Pangea's standards."
Willie "J.R." Fleming, director of the South Shore‑based Chicago
Anti‑Eviction Campaign, has noticed a similar trend. He thinks
Pangea, whose investors, according to the Sun‑Times investigation,
include Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, is buying buildings in South
Shore in anticipation of property values getting a boost from glitzy
new projects like the Tiger Woods golf course planned for Jackson
Park.
"Pangea definitely has their eye on South Shore," Fleming says.
It's hard to say what the long‑term consequences of Pangea's
property acquisitions—and subsequent evictions—will be for South
Shore. But Desmond's research suggests that evictions provoke not
only long‑term instability for individual tenants and families, but
for entire neighborhoods. A constant turnover of residents may
exacerbate crime—something South Shore, with its rising violent
crime rate, can scarcely afford. But long‑term tenants have a
stabilizing effect on a community, even if they're struggling to pay
rent.
"I would hope that investors that take over buildings try to be
sensitive to the fact that residents may have been living in them for
a long time," says Swartz. "Many of these buildings are
communities. People have to live somewhere."
Tags: evictions, South Shore, south side, Pangea Properties, eviction court, Cook County sheriff’s office,
Jennifer Dean, Anti‑Eviction Campaign, Willie "J.R." Fleming, Kass Management Services, Mark Swartz,
Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing, Matthew Desmond, Evicted, Image
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