By many measures, the effort to convert old elevated railway on Chicago’s Northwest Side into a signature park has been a smashing success.
The 2.7-mile recreation trail, known as The 606, built on old Chicago & Pacific Railroad line has been praised as a model use of public space since it opened two years ago. It's regularly packed with bikers, joggers and walkers.
Art installations and eclectic programming — including evening star gazing sessions, Afro-Latin music and dance demonstrations and puppet shows —have helped make the linear park a destination that draws visitors from beyond the four neighborhoods the trail bisects. Volunteers of the park have even picked fruit grown from the Serviceberry shrubs along the trail and turned them over to a popular Italian ice shop to make treats for a fundraiser for the trail.
The 606's charms notwithstanding, some residents along the western portion of the trail say the recreational space has been both a blessing and curse. It brought much-needed green space in a part of Chicago that lacked it, but is also driving up property values and rent prices in their once affordable neighborhood.
“I miss my neighborhood, I miss my neighbors, I miss my local stores,” said Alicia Avila, who had rented near the western edge of the trail for 11 years but moved to a cheaper Chicago suburb this month as a result of the rising housing costs that have followed the trail, which takes its name from the Chicago zip code prefix.
“I know gentrification is going to happen, but it should happen in a responsible way so that people who have been here for many years can co-inhabit the same space.”
Call it the greening neighborhood conundrum. The paradox that Chicago faces with its new-ish gem to its park system is one playing out in other big cities around the U.S. that are also finding it’s difficult to add marquee park space on derelict tracks and bridges in low-income areas while also keeping housing prices in check for longtime residents.
Now, designers and city officials seeking to create recreational space on abandoned industrial eyesores are increasingly recognizing—some albeit belatedly— that they have a chicken-and-egg quandary on their hands: How do you add green space in lower-income areas without inevitably setting those populations up to be displaced by more well-heeled neighbors looking to enjoy the amenities?
“This issue calls for cross-sector collaboration,” said Adrian Benepe, director of city park development at The Trust for Public Land, the San Francisco-based nonprofit group that worked with Chicago officials on developing The 606. "It’s not enough to say you’re going to build a park and stick your head in the sand and say, ‘We only care about the park. We don’t care what else might be going on.’”
Atlanta’s Mayor Kasim Reed announced plans for a new fund in April to help residents living near parts of Atlanta’s Beltline pay their rising tax bills in the area that has seen a rejuvenation during a years-long plan to rebuild old railway into a multi-use trail.
In Bozeman, Mont., the city of about 41,000 has set aside five acres for development of affordable housing adjacent to a more its forthcoming signature Story Mill Park, Benepe noted. The city is set to break ground on construction for the project on Saturday.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., organizers of the 11th Street Bridge Park, a $45 million proposal that would transform a dormant bridge into recreational space, have drawn up an “equitable development plan” that sets goals for affordable housing and job creation for residents in a low-income neighborhood that would be impacted by the project. The non-profit Local Initiatives Support Corp. has committed to spend $50 million to support groups providing affordable housing, early childhood education, food support and other services in area around the park.
The founders of the High Line in New York City—the much ballyhooed 1.45 mile trail built on abandoned railway on the lower West Side that was the forerunner to the 606 and similar “rails to trail” projects springing up throughout the U.S. and beyond—last year launched the High Line Network, a consortium that includes representatives from 19 adaptive reuse park projects across North America to help more easily share lessons learned.
The High Line which opened in 2009, saw property values spike 103% for real estate within a five-minute walk from the trail between 2003 and 2011, according to NYC government data.
The dazzling park, which has drawn more than 20 million visitors as ofJuly 2014, has been criticized for becoming a tourist magnet rather than a neighborhood amenity. A 2016 study by Queens College political scientist Alex Reichl also found that fewer than 7% of High Line users were black or Latino—a striking observation considering the trail was built near two public housing complexes with large black and Latino populations.
“I want to make sure other people don’t make the mistakes we did, and learn how to deal with these issues,” Robert Hammond, co-founder of the High Line, told the website City Lab earlier this year. “We certainly don’t have all the answers.”
In Chicago, three city council members last month proposed a pilot ordinance that would require developers to pay as much as a $650,000 fee if they want to demolish and replace habitable housing near parts of the 606 trail that have seen property values increase by 48% since 2013.
The monies collected for the proposed Chicago program would go into an affordable housing trust, which would help homeowners pay for property taxes and needed home repairs. The ordinance appears to face an uphill battle of passing.
“One of the issues that the city government and funders should have foreseen is the accelerated gentrification, the accelerated increases in property values and taxes that we could have programmed for at the time,” said Juan Carlos Linares, executive director of LUCHA, a Chicago affordable housing group that has backed the proposed ordinance.
While real estate values in the neighborhoods around the trail have been rising for years, housing prices have risen sharply along the western segment of the trail that cuts through Humboldt Park and Logan Square neighborhoods—areas that historically have had large Latino populations, and until recent years, plenty of reasonable-priced housing.
The 606 has had more modest impact on the already-gentrified neighborhoods on its eastern edge, but real estate prices on the once affordable western side have skyrocketed by 48.2% since ground was broken on the trail in 2013 and by 9.4% during the first year the trail was open, according to a November 2016 report from the Institute of Housing Studies at DePaul University.
In the six years prior to the 606 opening, between 15% and 19% of single-family home sales went to investors and developers. In 2015, the year the trail opened, the figure reached 21%, and in the first quarter of 2016, it was almost 31%, the study found.
“It’s much more difficult to take action retroactively now that the market forces have already started to take force and gain momentum,” said Geoff Smith, the lead author of the DePaul study. “It’s a lot more expensive and complicated to intervene after the fact.”
Aides to Mayor Rahm Emanuel say that his administration has worked to maintain affordable housing along the 606 corridor and help keep longtime residents in the neighborhood.
The city in 2016 created a $1 million forgivable loan program for lower-income home-owners on the western edge of the 606 to help them pay for needed exterior repairs as well as electrical, plumbing heating fixes on their homes. The city has also created 33 affordable housing units near the 606 through an ordinance that requires new developments with 10 or more units to include affordable units on site.
“We make sure that new developments, projects and resources, like the 606 trail, take into account the needs of the local community,” Emanuel said in a statement to USA TODAY. “And in this case that meant ensuring we had affordable housing options along the trail’s length through financial assistance, land sales, policy provisions, and other measures.”
In the blocks surrounding the western edge of the trail, as century-old homes and multi-unit buildings are purchased and converted to pricy single-family homes or torn down for multi-unit condos, many longtime residents are mulling over whether it’s practical to stay.
Lalo Drummond, a mechanic who has been living on disability after he was diagnosed with cancer several years ago, said he plans to put the house he’s owned for 22 years on the market and move to Des Moines where he said it won’t take “mucho money” to get by on his fixed income.
A couple of doors down, Cesar Serrano, 49, said he and his father are continually having conversations about whether the neighborhood is reaching a tipping point on affordability.
On one hand, Serrano said the trail, which he uses frequently for biking and walks, has improved his quality life.
But with each new rehabbed single-family home and tear-down turned luxury condo that’s built to attract higher-income buyers that want to live near the 606, his family’s anxiety about whether they’ll be able to keep up with the already rising property taxes grows.
“What happens when all these things are sold off?” said Serrano, whose family bought their property located less than a block from the trail in 1989. “What’s going to happen to us?”
Around the corner, neighbor John Graham, 57, has mixed feelings about the changes that have come with the trail.
Graham, a plumber, bought his home for $50,000 a stone’s throw from the freight train track-turned-recreation trail in 1991—a time when the area was overwhelmed by violent gang-fueled crime and he struggled to find a bank that would write him a mortgage because of concerns about the neighborhood.
These days Graham finds himself concerned about the density of some of the new developments being built, such as the recently completed eight-town home development across the street from him that is advertising units with 4 bedrooms, 3.5 baths and chef kitchens at a cost 10 times what he paid for his home.
At the same time, he chafes at the city council pilot proposal that could effectively stop such projects through hefty demolition fees. One of the aldermen sponsoring the proposal made a tidy profit selling land for such a development before joining the city council, according to news reports.
Why should the council now block him and his neighbors from trying to cash out, Graham argued, if they could now also get a deal to their liking?
Yet, Graham sounded doubtful he would pursue such a deal if he could get one.
“I had talked to my wife about selling our house to a developer or even going in on a deal where we would develop it ourselves and be partners,” recalled Graham, of the conversation he had with his spouse prior to the trail being built. “My wife’s reaction was shock and horror. She said, ‘How could you even think about doing that to our neighbors?’”
Graham said he’s come around to his wife’s way of thinking.