Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Mary Nelson
Mary Nelson's father was the pastor of a church in Washington, D.C., which was the first integrated main-line church in the city. Her mother worked with women who were just getting out of prison and many of them spent a few days at their home until they found work. Neslon learned from a young age from her parents not to just "bellyache" about social problems but rather to get busy and do something about them.
Thus it was not out of character for Nelson to join her brother when he became the pastor of an inner-city church on Chicago's west side. Nelson arrived in the West Garfield community of Chicago at the end of the 1960s just as the riots erupted and white flight left the neighborhood destitute as many banks, businesses and investors fled the city. A high percentage of those who moved into the neighborhood were unemployed.
Working out of the Bethel Lutheran Church, Nelson helped local residents build Bethel New Life, the social service arm of the church, which got its start when church members rehabilitated a three flat apartment building in 1979. Since then, Bethel New Life has pioneered in-place development techniques that include the construction of affordable housing, the clean-up of toxic brownfield sites, and efforts to attract commercial development and jobs to the area.
Interview
Steve Lerner (SDL): What was your experience growing up and how did you get to be here doing this work?
Mary Nelson (MN): My dad is a pastor. When I got to first grade he got called to a church in inner-city Washington, DC. It was a Lutheran church on 16th and New Hampshire. It was not an inner-city church at the time. I lived through the Supreme Court decision on segregation so when I was in junior high school we were the pilot model. [After white flight] we had whole floors empty in Roosevelt public high school while Cardoza had double shifts.
Our church was the first mainline church in Washington to integrate because my dad said he couldn't be the pastor of a church if it didn't relate to its neighborhood. And that was before the Supreme Court decision [on desegregating the schools]. My dad got hate phone calls and all the rest of it but he had other people who came and said this is the kind of church I want to be a part of. We ended up with some judges and Congress persons who joined the church because they wanted to be a part of something like that. We did something called Operation One Mile on Sundays after church where two by two we would knock on doors and say the church is here how can we welcome you to come and be part of it. So it was a truly integrated church and the exciting thing about it is that it still is today. So it was not a flash in the pan. The first place for the Head Start program [in Washington] was in our church.
So both in my own school experience at Roosevelt and in my church experience were like that. We lived on Varnum Street off 16th Street and our next door neighbor was the embassy of India and next door was the embassy of Japan so it was not a low income community but it was a very international community. This was in the late forties and fifties. My mother started having Bible study groups out at Occoquan, the women's penitentiary. They would let these women [former inmates] out [of prison] on a Saturday with $50 in their pocket and no job. And where are they going to go but back to the same place they came from. What do you do on a Saturday to get through the weekend to find a job on Monday? So my mother went knocking on the doors of Congress because DC in those days had no government to try to get [money for a] halfway house. And our home became a halfway house. So I grew up in a milieu where you do something about these problems you don't sit back and bellyache. If you have some beliefs you try to live them out.
My brother was called to Bethel Lutheran church as a pastor. I was just coming back from Tanzania. He was a bachelor. I told him I would come help him get settled and decide whatever I was going to do. He always dreamed of an inner-city congregation but first he had been out in country club hills Illinois as a pastor. Three days after we got there [to an inner-city church on the west side of Chicago] the first riot took place in 1965. So the Sunday he was installed as Pastor of Bethel what was left was 35 elderly white people in a neighborhood that had turned all black. The Sunday he was installed the National Guard troops were on the streets, tanks were rumbling by. We like to say that it has been a riot ever since. He just retired last year. It was a start that said you just can't do things the same old way. If this was going to be a church it was going to be a church of the neighborhood. It had to change; it had to be different. It probably was the best thing in the world because we didn't have a lot of baggage.
Bethel New Life came out of the Lutheran Church but it is a faith-based community development corporation. We work with a variety of churches. Bethel New Life is the CDC that the Church launched as its community ministry. And Sunday morning is still the gasoline that fuels this movement. Now our staff goes to many churches and many faith traditions but it is the gasoline that keeps us going at the central core. We see it as God's vision for the human community. Even though you get disappointed and kicked in the behind there is some gasoline to say: God's not done with this yet. So we pick ourselves up and try again. Whether the bank has turned us down or not we can just go again. Hah. It gives you that kind of audacity.
I don't give sermons. I am a lay person in the church. But once in awhile in other places I will do sermons. But as a CDC our board of directors is drawn from community people. Now that Bethel New Life is 21 years old many of our board members are now the sons and daughters of the original founding members. These are folks who grew up in this community, went off to get their professional training, and now are back. It is exciting to have a new generation of folks involved. I am 60. We have a strong leadership board so decisions sometimes go through a long process of evolving.
SDL: Angela Blackwell told us a story about what it was like when all the white people left. Here you are in a community that is what, largely black?
MN: West Garfield is 96% black; Austin is 90% black. [The two communities Bethel New Life straddles.]
SDL: So you didn't have personal experience of white flight because you came here in 1965 when it had already happened.
MN: It had just happened here between 1960 and 1965. Some 35,000 white people moved out and 60,000 black people moved in.
SDL: So this neighborhood was on the way down economically.
MN: The banks had stopped doing loans. From about 1962 on you couldn't get a loan [because of redlining]. Bethel was one of the initiators, along with Gail Sincata and National People's Action, for the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) challenge to the banks [that took on the practice of redlining in which banks refused to make housing loans in low-income, heavily minority communities]. The first long term [CRA] deals were done here in Chicago. I was on the negotiating team of the Community Reinvestment Act and the first big commitments came out of that act.
SDL: And you were protesting redlining and demanding that local banks make loans in the community in which they were located.
MN: And we had to get the banks to admit it. A group like Woodstock Institute used the Home Mortgage Disclosure data and verified that redlining was happening. And then we had to sit month after month with the bank saying we have to do something. What came out of it were five year commitments to do $100 million investment in our low income targeted neighborhoods. It is now called Bank One. And they found out that it was such good business that they not only renewed but they doubled their commitment. It worked despite everybody's fears. But in the beginnings they threatened us saying we would never get a loan from the bank if we were part of this rebel rousing group. So it took some courage to say no, this is the only way that our neighborhood is going to stand a chance.
SDL: Was there a recognizable low point that you are recovering from.
MN: The riots in 1965 and 1969. There were five riots in those four years. We marched with MLK in 1967. Bethel New Life bands were part of that experience. I'd say 1969 was the low point after these riots so the 1970s were rebuilding and there was a sense that the only place we could go was up. In the early 1990s drugs hit big time with the advent of crack. It pushed us on a downward spiral from a point where we were really making progress. It just decimated families and young people and now they are stuck with prison records. We did a take back the streets. The police would do stings and arrest two hundred people at one time. The house across the street from Bethel Church was a big drug house that did $35,000 a day in drug business. The house is torn down now. We took to the streets and did all kinds of creative things. We had lemonade stands on drug corners. We got a lot of press. We wrote down license plates of people coming in and when they did the stings 68% of the buyers were from the suburbs. So we did a march with a destination point out in the 'burbs with big signs that said: "Stay out of our community." We were singing and informed the police we were coming and the mayor. It got great press. We wanted our streets drug free. So drugs have gone down a little bit but just now we saw one going on right here [in front of the church.].
SDL: When did you get into the real estate business?
MN: Fairly early we started Bethel Housing. Our motto is development without displacement. We did sweat equity coops, brought in Habitat for Humanity, and we were the first big deal doing the new low-income tax credit [for affordable housing]. It was a 114 unit building. At that point the low-income rental market here was saturated. With the low-income housing tax credit no more than 30 percent of your income that goes to your rent. And yet there are all these caps on how much income you can have to be eligible to live in a low-income housing tax credit building. So there was such a narrow window of who was eligible we said: no, we think we have hit the saturation point [for low-income housing] and we can't manage any more. So we financed the first new home ownership construction in the city because the banks wouldn't do it. To do that we got a subsidy out of the Nehemiah opportunity grants, a HUD category, based on the Bronx experience. We got all 14 churches on the West Side together. We all went down, including the clergy with their collars, and we went down to city hall because we had to get city council support. We had to get a resolution through so that the city would give us the land in order for us to meet the matching requirements for the federal dollars. What has been interesting since that is that a lot of other churches have gotten into housing. And we opened the door by getting them all together and many of them are using the builder that we helped to bring in. We called it the Isaiah Plan.
SDL: So now is the income range is wider?
MN: Ideally a community should have some mixed income. We don't have any illusions that anybody with wealth is going to move in but you need a range. You don't need all very low income people in a healthy community. So the notion of adding home ownership opportunities to the mix is a really important one. We found that because of the drug problem, it doesn't work if you do a couple of homes here and a couple homes there. The article I gave you is called focused area development. That is what we do here.
SDL: Some of those sell for $147,000.
MN: Yeah, but our early ones were $70,000. So we were able to open up the price range. The highest ones we have done now are $147,000. Those are the ones looking out on the park. They are the ones that can support the higher prices. The internal ones are $87,000 homes. And then we bring in some subsidy on top of that. So even in that place we will have a variety of incomes. There was a lot of vacant land and we had the city set aside for us as much of that land as humanely possible. So we built all the new homes and a pocket park. And that caused some neighbors to rehabilitate their own homes [when they say improvements happening in the neighborhood.] Both of these two focused areas are transit related: they are in walking distance of the transit stop so they are eligible for Location Efficient Mortgages. And they are energy efficient. We guaranteed that the energy bill would not exceed $200 a year. Our builder is nationally famous for that.
So what we are trying to do is put our values into practice. We are not just building homes, but we are trying to build energy efficient, location efficient homes. We are trying to green each of these areas so there are trees, pocket parks, and shade. We want these places to be environmentally sound and safe places for kids to play.
We move from building houses and rehabilitating apartments to this notion of a focused area of development. To decide what should be included in the focused area of development we went door to door and involved all of those folks in the plans for that area. We had meeting night after night. We did a charette. The first time we gathered everybody together for the Parkside development we had the alderman and we had the planner and someone from the Chicago Transit authority because they have their barns in the back. All the residents said: "This is a terrible place to live because there are rats and this and that and that building over there is abandoned and they are raping girls in there. And you at the time it was easy to just be overcome by the negatives. What happened was the Alderman listened and so the next week he sent out the city inspectors who did the rat poisoning. Then a crew of prisoners came out and cut down all the grass. Then we found out when the court date hearing about the vacant building where someone had been raped. We got a van and everybody and took a bunch of residents to court and we got the judge to make a quick order of demolition because the building was in bad shape.
So when we had the next meeting it was an opening to talk about what residents wanted in place of what they didn't want. They did the eyeball survey of the neighborhood and then the architect planner put it all up on big boards and the next meetings we had all the maps there about where the vacant land was. Then he showed them slides of what people had done with land like this and we saw pictures of traffic calming circles. And they would point and say, oh yeah, we want that. It was one of these wonderful stories. And it can happen again if you hang through the process. The architect was Doug Faar from Faar and Associates. The nice thing is that he is gentle. Some architects know it all and that doesn't work in a community setting. He was always asking: "Well, what do you think?" And then he would show them a slide so it got everybody involved.
SDL: Do you think this can become a mixed-income community?
MN: I think the problem that blows Myron Orfield's theory is gentrification. It is a major dilemma. It hasn't happened here [yet] but it is rolling to our neighborhood in the next five years. It will be a big problem. I have seen it in the community just east of us. The question becomes: Do we stay here and serve rich folks or do we move our efforts to where poor people are? Or do we try to get a balanced community? And our goal is a balanced community. We want some of both. We are trying to get control of as much land as humanly possible [to preserve it for affordable housing once gentrification raises property values]. And we are trying to do a variety of things with a variety of price ranges for our houses in order to ensure some sense of variety.
SDL: The idea is that when gentrification comes in you will already have control of a bunch of land.
MN: And we sold these properties to people. Now the thing that mitigates against it is the property taxes.
SDL: If property values go up the people you sold the places to for reasonable rates are going to be able to sell them for a profit.
MN: They could. We have done a number of limited equity coops. That means that the equity stays with the building. Home buyers get a 6% appreciation a year on their initial investment but they put in limited dollars. So the equity stays with the building. That is a way to ensure that it was always affordable. We did three of those multi-family buildings. That is one mechanism to keep some affordable housing. And obviously the low-income tax credit buildings you have to be eligible to live in those.
SDL: So there is a certain level of security that there will continue to be a stock of low income buildings.
MN: But it is difficult because everything mitigates against it. People are going to get priced out because of property taxes even if they own their home now. Taxes will go way up as these houses appreciate in value.
SDL: You sound quite confident that gentrification is going to come to this neighborhood.
MN: It probably seems like a far stretch to you. As I go around the country I see what is happening. We are close in to the city, conveniently located, and gentrification has happened to all the communities east of us.
SDL: Where does that leave you about efforts to open up affordable housing in the suburbs? Should that be a high priority?
MN: We are still a placed based organization so our commitment is to this place. However, we are a local organization with a national perspective. I spend a good deal of my time in national organizations working on policies and the things that make a difference and on the regional issue. For example, we are hosting the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission Regional Blue Print meeting here this week. And we are also involved in the State Agenda for Community Economic Development so we are involved in state issues and lobby the state.
SDL: If gentrification does come to this neighborhood, and if you have locked up some land for affordable housing, then theoretically you would end up with a truly mixed- income neighborhood.
MN: That would be great. We spend our time working with the schools because when people think about buying a home they look at how good are the schools. We try to help find resources for them.
SDL: Was there some effort to shut down the El [elevated train] stop?
MN: They were trying to shut down the whole Green Line that goes through all the low-income black areas of the city along the south and west side. They threatened to close it down because the ridership had gone down both because of abandonment and demolition of so many units of housing. But it was the life line for people getting to work. In low-income communities more people use public transportation.
SDL: So that became a big focus point for you...to keep that open.
MN: Yes, and that is when we learned about transit oriented development. We learned about the environmental stuff when Greenpeace when some of its members climbed the incinerator chimney near here. That opened our eyes to the brownfields issue and some of the air quality issues.
SDL: You are doing infill development and the commercial development next to the elevated train stop. There is also another area where you are talking about more industrial development. So do you feel that this is an area that is going to retain its industrial component? I could imagine an effort to get industry out of here so you would have fewer trucks and less air pollution.
MN: Yeah, but our job is to bring more jobs into the area. We have a three pronged economic development strategy. We have an employment center which places people in existing jobs and many of them are out in the suburbs. Our second one is to create as many living wage jobs in the community as humanly possible. Our in-home care service for the elderly employs 200 every day. So part of the criteria we use in terms of who we sell to have to do with how many jobs the buyer will create.
SDL: Will a certain kind of industrial development not scare off retail and residential development. Is that a consideration?
MN: The industrial development is already there. We have brownfield sites. It is a part of the scene. It's massive. So it really is an opportunity.
SDL: Is most of the housing you do for sale or for rent?
MN: We have done about 1,000 units of housing in all. About 200 are elderly housing rental units; we've done 100 for sale. Now we are focusing on sale because we hit the saturation point with the rental. And we are not good at managing it. When the drug stuff hit it made managing really difficult. Now we are trying to help the ma and pa business people do more housing construction. A lot of them are young people who grew up in the neighborhood and now want to do some development. We are trying to help them do one or two houses here. SDL: So you are working with local people to get them into the construction and real state business.
MN: It gets them to be stakeholders.
SDL: How did you become involved with metro-regional issues?
MN: By being involved with the Northeast Illinois Planning Commission. We are church- based and there are a lot of suburban churches we are involved with so we have a wonderful opportunity [to cooperate on regional issues]. There were two experiences that brought us into the regional thinking. The Ford Foundation helped me go to a conference, which was early on, where Myron Orfield spoke about these issues and that opened us up to this. But of the two experiences, the first was about the Green Line. In a sense public transportation is a great unifier. We didn't begin to make progress on saving the Green Line until we went out into the suburbs and got the mayors of the seven suburbs that related to that line together. And we held hearings out in the burbs about the line and what the closing would mean to all of us.
Then they [suburban representatives and residents] came down to the Chicago Transit Authority meetings with us in their suits and button-downs; and we came with our little signs and ragtag groups. When we came together around saving the Green Line here was a common thing we all needed.
The second regional issue came about through looking at healthcare on a district level. [The study] went from Chicago out to the suburbs. And it was clear that health care doesn't know boundaries and that we need to think of a unified system of health care clinics and services delivery in the region. We had a forward thinking commissioner who helped us think in those terms and helped us do some things across the city limits boundary around healthcare. It started out about clinics and then got into the asthma and lead problems and a variety of things. Air Quality doesn't respect any boundaries when you are talking about asthma. So there were some unifying issues. You go from your initial experiences into understanding the unifying issues.
So we are weaving it together from episodic individual initiatives and little programs here and there. It is coming together into a smart growth and urban communities concept around our values of economic security, environmental integrity, and high quality of life for all and public participation in decisions.
SDL: Do you think this is going to evolve into an identifiable movement beyond what it is now? Some advocates of the metro regional approach see the need for there to be some kind of fair growth strategy whereby there is a greater sharing of resources and burdens between the suburbs, inner-city, and inner-ring suburbs. This would require fair growth policies, fair share affordable housing, and better schools in the poor areas. One way of looking at this cluster of issues is that they constitute an opportunity for a new phase the civil rights movement.
MN: Yes, absolutely. There are the evangelicals for fair taxes and they have a set of principles that follows this same line of thinking. A guy named Ron Snyder wrote a book about it.
SDL: Yet around the country continue to build developments where all the houses are for people with roughly the same income. And significant parts of the countryside are being segregated this way and that we should be working on breaking down the exclusionary zoning practices. This stands in contrast to the work you are doing creating mixed-income neighborhoods in the city.
MN: I think you can do both. I don't think it is an either or [proposition]. Ideally what we need is mixed income in a whole variety of places. And obviously there will always be your very high-income, exclusive areas. But mixed income communities would be better for solving the school problem.
SDL: And it would likely change the racial mix as well.
MN: That is going to happen. Just look at the demographics. White people will be in the minority by 2050.
SDL: If you read "Privatopia" by Evan MacKenzie it makes it sound as if large areas are being sowed up [for the affluent] and rules are being written [to exclude the poor] and it will be very hard for low-income people to get in.
MN: Robert Reich wrote an article called "The Secession of the Successful." That was [ten] years ago. Yes, it is happening.
SDL: Tell me how you managed to take over this old hospital building and turn it into a facility that includes day care, geriatric care, and affordable housing for members of the community.
MN: [There were a number of bureaucratic obstacles.] The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] has a program for Housing for the Elderly and Handicapped. So that is where we had our [financial] commitment. But they have all these rules that say you can't have excess space. They are cost containment rules. The rules say that an apartment can't be more than x amount of square feet and that you can't have much common space. The problem was that we were retrofitting an existing building whereas most HUD 202s are new construction. HUD officials said: we can't do this because you have this whole first floor of common space. And then we have a bump-out over the main entrance which was excess space. We explained that we had an existing building and it was still cheaper as adaptive reuse to rehabilitate this than to build new.
[Given this impasse,] we went around the country to look at what were the alternatives. We came back to HUD with examples of two things they could do. One, we could turn this part of this building into a two unit condominium where the first floor would be one unit and floors two thru six would be the second unit. We could own the condo on the first floor and floors two thru six could be the elderly residence corporation. So that was one option and it made the most sense. The other was air rights floors two thru six. It was much more complicated to sell air rights, but for whatever reason HUD chose air rights. You can imagine the survey. We have different tax parcels on floods two through six. We sold the air rights to the HUD residence corporation. We had to sell the rights for the pipes to go thru floors 2-6 to go through our space. And then to decide which part of the landscaped area was a part of the floors 2-6. The lawyers had a field day. But we did it. That is part of what took so long.
When we came to a point a couple of months prior to closing, the attorneys said we can't possibly close on this because when any Catholic institution sells properties there is a restrictive covenant saying you can't do abortions. It is a standard procedure. And HUD said we don't allow any restrictions on anything we are involved in because we have primacy. We went to Washington and said: It is so highly unlikely that any seniors would need an abortion. And they didn't even smile. So we had to go to go through the paper process all the way to the Mother House in Germany of this order to get them to decide to release the restrictive covenant because HUD wouldn't budge.