June 2002
Looking for Home
One Chicagoan's quest for connection and community
by Mark Harris
What an amazing stroke of luck! I was standing on the sidewalk in front of an Evanston apartment I had just toured, explaining to the owner that I was looking for a quiet place to rent. Being a writer and often working from home, quiet was very important. But thanks to the loud, party animal-type guy who had moved into the apartment below me in the last year, quiet had become a tenuous commodity in my life.
As it turned out, I had apparently stumbled upon "the...quietest...building...in...all...of...Evanston," as the rental agent informed me, pausing between each word for appropriate effect. In fact, he said solemnly, this was "probably the quietest building I would ever find. No quieter building anywhere!" He pronounced this with a definitive sweep of his hand. Okay, well, maybe a little subtlety here might go a bit further, I found myself thinking. I took another glance back at the building’s cheesy, faded light-brown façade, thought about the dirty carpeting in the hallway. The apartment itself wasn’t that bad, but for $845 a month, I thought I could do better. I thanked the man for his time, got in my car, and drove away.
I was getting discouraged. This was the sixth apartment I had looked at in the Evanston area in a week. For the money, not one was worth getting excited about. That old real estate maxim, "location, location, location," was about all any of them had going for them. Yet this could not override the other nagging chorus in my mind, the one shouting "rip-off, rip-off, rip-off."
After six years of living in the same lakefront apartment, however, I knew it was time to move. The old place was unfortunately feeling more and more like exactly what it was — an old place. I had originally sub-let it when I moved back to the Chicago area from San Francisco, and at the time and for a long while the old courtyard building next to the lake had felt great. But the space was now in serious need of renovation. It had been years since it had seen any significant upkeep or improvements. The bathroom was in need of major repair. And the kitchen’s 1940s-era quaintness had worn itself out. I had long ago disengaged the unvented gas stove, because of my environmental sensitivities, relying mostly on a small electric broiler I had purchased. There was no counter space because there were no counters. I suppose I could have remedied some of the inconveniences, but I am a serious procrastinator, at least where anything involving tools and paint and such things are concerned. Even when the procrastination just involves asking someone else to get busy.
And then there was the noise factor. God, the noise! I had come in recent weeks to assign it true spiritual significance, a sign from the universe, such as it were, which also just happened to be the only way to make myself heed its message to get myself out of this damned place. Only two weeks before I had finally called the police after the neighbor below had stomped home with a gang of friends at midnight to crank up the music. Being a rather quiet, unobtrusive person, I had largely put up with the insults from below for far longer than I should have, or I suspect others would tolerate. I had months ago politely complained in a note, and only recently the property manager had done the same. But what could I expect? This was not a person with a boom box but a booming sound system. A person who adorned the wall just inside his back porch door with a giant velvet flag for a German beer.
And so began my search for a new home.
I have three chairs in my house;
the first for solitude,
the second for friendship, and the third for society.
— Henry David Thoreau
Defining Home
As I scoured ads and placed phone calls, drove through neighborhoods and asked friends for leads on possible apartments, I found myself pondering the question of what I was really looking for. I didn’t think so much about square feet or whether parking was included, as about what kind of place would feel like a place to breath, emotionally and spiritually. A place to live.
What did "home" really mean to me?
I wasn’t sure at first. Initially, my decision to move was prompted more by the realization of what my current home was not: it was not nurturing or inviting, not a refuge or setting in which to relax and restore. There was a brittle, often frazzled energy at work in the place, especially when the soundtrack to that brittle energy rumbled through the floorboards from below. The past winter had equated more with fits of claustrophobia than coziness.
A friend studying Feng Shui, the Chinese art of energy flow and space, had recently offered to help redesign the apartment. Living as she does in a modest but tasteful Andersonville apartment, I knew my friend Mimi could help. The space she and her partner shared was a thoughtful testament to light, comfort, and organization, and included even a "prosperity corner" in an area of the dining room, complete with a small fountain that their old cat liked to drink from.
But I had resisted my friend’s good intentions. Unless she knew something akin to the atomic version of Feng Shui, I told her, forget it, it was hopeless. The couch had to go. The chipped paint in the bathroom had to go. Mostly, I had to go. Apparently, the feeling of home had gradually and quietly slipped away in the night, without my notice. And now I had to track it down again.
But I was torn. Though a feeling of home was no longer within these four walls, I had definitely rooted myself in the north suburb where I lived. Only a couple of years back I realized I had been in Evanston long enough that it was no longer unusual to run into a friend or acquaintance on a walk along the lakefront or shopping downtown. To have the clerk at the market know me by name, or to smile in mutual recognition at the woman I passed on summer days near the lakefront fountain. To attend community events at a local church or the nearby university, comfortable in feeling a part of the local life.
Evanston offered a unique blend of suburban "niceness" in an atmosphere that also felt diverse and lively. Yet all around I also saw prices rising and "charming" used as code for old buildings that were really just kind of run down. The only development seemed to be in luxury, price-inflated condos, while affordable, quality housing was at an increasing premium.
Unfortunately, a trek into Chicago’s north side wasn’t much better. Prices everywhere seemed to have escalated. Once funky now gentrifying neighborhoods were being hijacked by chain stores, condo conversions, and a cost of living steadily edging past the reach of many regular folks."In" neighborhoods could mean "out" for long-term residents on fixed incomes. Real estate developers were at the wheel of a de facto housing policy that saw nothing but the dollar signs in catering to the upscale market.
For a brief moment, I thought about moving outside the city. Theoretically, I could still do my work from Kenosha or Sycamore, and the cost of living was much less. But I feared isolation and didn’t linger long on the idea. As luck and having so many friends on the grapevine would have it, I found a new place within another two weeks. A better, cheaper, more modern, and likely quieter place in Lincoln Square. Already, I was imagining the short walk to the Old Town School of Folk Music.
I was fortunate. But the experience of searching for new living quarters also left me wondering about the future of our city and region, and even more curious about the ways we have come to think about home not only in our personal lives, but as an expression of our community and the broader world.
The Big Squeeze
To satisfy my journalistic curiosity, I did some research on housing in the Chicago area. I also contacted the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), a local non-profit organization concerned with regional coordination of housing, travel, and work issues. What I learned was not exactly encouraging. Hundreds of thousands of area families today find themselves hard-pressed to locate affordable mortgages or rents. The MPC calls it the "Great Millennium Housing Squeeze."
The Chicago area’s population has been growing — by 830,000 over the last decade. That’s an 11.4 percent increase. Yet the supply of affordable rental housing grew by less than one percent, according to MPC. Apparently, housing prices in high job-growth areas where people would like to live, or in up-and-coming city neighborhoods, have escalated beyond the reach of most working families. But where housing is more affordable, there are also fewer jobs. Consequently, a lot of people are paying a lot more now on housing than they should, or can really afford. They’re also making longer commutes from their homes to their jobs.
The thought occurs to me that if the concept of Feng Shui speaks to the energetic art of space and arrangement, then social policy in housing has been more like an amateur’s karate kick to the body of what constitutes metropolitan livability. With more than 270 municipalities in the Chicago region, decisions about land use and zoning remain largely fragmented and uncoordinated. Developers, of course, are inclined to go where the profits are, generating housing trends and needs inherently vulnerable to the vagaries of a largely unregulated market. As citizens and as a community, housing is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.
Chicago remains a city of architecture and artistry. It’s edgy and entertaining, infuriating and enjoyable, and ever insistent upon our vigilance. It’s imposing and impressive in the sweep of its power and an untidy mess of failed potential. The city has gotten shamefully used to the enduring reality of homelessness, but it is not Calcutta. I know many middle-income friends who live in nice, comfortable homes, who’ve been paying mortgages for years and are doing okay. If we have the money, the options about where and how we live are probably as open-ended as any on earth.
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The Working Homeless |
Yet I am struck by how isolating our urban settings can be. It is not only that home is so far from work and few people even walk to the places where they play. It is built into the structure of the way we live. In the apartment buildings I’ve lived in, most people come and go every couple years or so. Little if any sense of community exists. Most people seem to just want to be left alone. We Americans have developed a culture that fetishizes an ideal of home as a personal expression of "the good life." But as a civil society, we neglect or too frequently close our eyes to what’s going on right outside our front doors: pollution, homelessness, gang violence, urban sprawl, poverty — but also social opportunities, unfulfilled potential, the possibility of community.
Home is Where the (Heart) Connection Is
I happen to be one of those Americans who has spent his life on the move. I’ve lived all over the country, from New York to California to southern Illinois and beyond. I’ve traversed other boundaries as well. I’ve lived in upper-middle class, five-bedroom homes and had the privilege of periodic retreats to a central California ocean-front beach house. I’ve also been poor and worried about next month’s rent.
My life’s wanderings have left me a detached observer of the American dream. I’ve never had a plan or goal to buy a house or acquire this or that property. I don’t yearn for the huge tract home in the suburbs, where the trees are all new and the nearest store requires a hop in the SUV. Most suburbs leave me cold, a bland wash of malls and sameness and traffic lights long enough to raise a family before the light turns green. I love the city, though I have a low tolerance for its grittiness and congestion.
Being single these days with the nearest relative 2,000 miles away, I imagine the associations I attach to home take on an emotional color that might be different if I were living as part of a big, long-rooted clan. My own ideal home is ultimately one of sanctuary, familiarity — and belonging. I yearn for a safe haven of calm and privacy, a space where I can be myself and find myself without sacrificing the exhilaration of nature, nearby public space, and the sense of belonging to a rooted community: home as sanctuary but not fortress. No gated heart here.
And despite the fact that modern society breeds isolation, I don’t think I am alone. As a culture we yearn for a harmony in our wider world that is lacking, for an order and sense of belonging and rootedness too frequently elusive. The Chinese art of Feng Shui has perhaps become suddenly popular among Americans just because modern life is so harried and disorderly. For similar reasons, Americans also have made a kind of fetish out of the automobiles they drive. When you have to drive an hour-and-a-half one way to your job, poking along through a gridlock maze, it’s kind of understandable, if misdirected, to try to make the car itself into one of the shelters we all seek, one more refuge from the frenzy and storms of a crazy, noisy, too fast culture.
The Urban Essence of Things
One afternoon last year, a friend of mine was walking home in her north side neighborhood. As she neared her apartment, she saw a young boy about 12 years old picking flowers in the small street divider designed to slow traffic along the residential street. Politely, the woman asked the boy not to pick the flowers, as they were for everyone and belonged where they were.
The boy’s answer was curt, full of a certain harsh city energy we’ve likely all encountered. "Mind your own business, bitch!" he shot back.
When I first heard that story, that moment captured, for me, the beauty, the ugliness, and the humanity of contemporary life all pressed into one dysfunctional moment of the urban experience. At the time, I thought, if only our cities could express the beauty of a Balinese landscape, environmentally clean and spacious and expressive of our most spiritual values and sense of community — and still get us safely to work or home on time! But now I think that if home is where the heart is, as an old Roman scholar once wrote, then perhaps the greater truth lies beneath that story. Perhaps what is true is that, in order to create community, our hearts must all come together in service to and in residence with our shared humanity. It’s obvious that we’re not there yet. But I do know this. I wouldn’t give up on that boy, whatever the guise in which I see him. And I won’t give up on our city. That’s where my heart lies.
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A New Regional Housing Agenda Affordable housing is defined as a rent or mortgage that doesn’t exceed 30 percent of a family’s income. But 36 percent of Chicago renters already pay more than a third of their income on housing, reports the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC). In DuPage County, the figure is 43 percent. As many as 20 percent of Chicago renters pay more than half their income just for the roof over their heads. Many homeowners are equally hard-pressed. "Our analysis of the regional markets," says Robin Synderman, an MPC spokesperson, "shows more people having difficulty finding reasonably priced housing, especially close to where they work. Everyone complains about the traffic congestion and longer commutes, but what’s behind that is the state of the housing market. That’s the larger issue. "The Chicago area is under-producing needed multi-family housing compared to other Midwestern regions," remarks Synderman. "In other markets, rental housing is often close to 22 percent of all housing production. But in the Chicago area, it’s only 2 percent. This is largely due to the challenges mayors face at a community level since there is no state housing policy or other guidelines promoting a full range of quality housing options." But the news on the housing front is not all bad. Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, representing municipalities in the six-county Chicago region, approved a new Housing Action Agenda the MPC describes as "a historic step toward regional cooperation and expanding housing options." The agenda outlines plans for greater regional cooperation in bringing affordable housing and transit stops to high-job-growth areas. Accordingly, the Mayors Caucus has established a Housing Task Force as a venue for local governments and residents to assert more control over housing and economic development in their areas. Visit www.metroplanning.org or contact the Metropolitan Planning Council at 312-922-5616 for more information. — MH |
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