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Heartland, Church Open Hotel-Turned-Apartments

National Real Estate Investor Online

 

April 14, 2013

 

 

From National Real Estate Investor Online:

CHICAGO—City officials celebrated Friday the $22.3 million renovation of the Harvest Commons apartments at 1519 W. Warren Boulevard.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel joined Near West Side community leaders and site developers today for the formal re-opening of the complex, a designated City landmark that was converted into 89 low-income studios with on-site social services. Heartland Housing and First Baptist Congregational Church completed the project.

“Chicago’s neighborhoods are its backbone, and this affordable apartment project will allow those who love their community to stay in their community with affordable housing options and social services,” Mayor Emanuel said. “I will continue to work with community and private partners in the Eisenhower Corridor and throughout the city’s neighborhoods as we are all invested together in these projects that will allow a better quality of life for Chicagoans and their families.”

The redevelopment was made possible through $3.9 million in Tax Increment Financing (TIF) assistance and $1.2 million in donated tax credits. The city previously owned the building, valued at $2.3 million, and provided it to the developer for $1 through an RFP process.

Built in 1930 as the Union Park residential hotel and renamed The Viceroy in 1963, the six-story building primarily catered to itinerant guests before closing in 2006, when it was purchased by the city. The City Council designated the Art Deco structure as an official landmark in 2010.

“At Harvest Commons, nearly 90 Chicagoans will have a safe place to live and restart their lives,” said Michael Goldberg, executive director of Heartland Housing, a division of the anti-poverty organization Heartland Alliance. “These renovated apartments along with on-site supportive services will help those who are the most vulnerable gain stability, improve their health, and develop job skills needed to improve their quality of life.”

In addition to this project, more than $160 million in new development is moving forward within the Eisenhower Corridor, according to city officials. Priority city-assisted projects include the redevelopment of the Blue Line transit station at 430 S. Damen Avenue, new streetscape projects on portions of Damen and Fulton Street, a new bike station for commuters near the new Morgan Street Green Line transit station and improvements to Union Park.

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Low-income apartment project reopens in Chicago – Heartland Alliance

 

The Southern Illinoisan

 

April 13, 2013

 

 

From The Southern Illinoisan:

CHICAGO — Chicago community leaders are celebrating the reopening of an 89-unit apartment complex on the city’s Near West Side.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Friday announced the reopening of Harvest Commons apartments. The project is part of a nearly $3 billion investment in housing and economic development programs around Chicago.

Emanuel says the renovation of the complex, which can house about 90 people, cost $22 million.

Emanuel says this apartment project will give families access to affordable housing and various on-site social services, including job readiness training, mental health and drug abuse counseling.

The building has been designated a city landmark. The six-story, Art Deco structure was built in 1930 and operated as a hotel until the city purchased it in 2006.

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Viceroy Hotel Reopens as Harvest Commons, Part of Neighborhood Revamp Plan

 

DNA Info

 

April 12, 2013

 

 

From DNA Info:

NEAR WEST SIDE — Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s promise to revitalize seven Chicago neighborhoods with $2.9 billion in strategic investments hit a concrete landmark Friday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new Harvest Commons, an affordable-housing apartment complex in what used to be the Viceroy Hotel.

The 89-unit building, at 1519 W. Warren Blvd., was  redeveloped by Heartland Housing in conjunction with the adjacent First Baptist Congregational Church and is one ingredient in the mayor’s “Neighborhoods Now” initiative.

Emanuel told DNAinfo.com Chicago that while the Harvest Commons project isn’t the flashiest on the list of Near West Side investments that include new streets, updates to the Damen “L” stop and renovations at Union Park, it’s an important component in making sure current residents aren’t left behind as the neighborhood develops.

“I think what’s great about this objective for the Chicago neighborhoods is that everybody is gonna advance together,” Emanuel said. “Sometimes, in advancing the entertainment district, and education options, the least fortunate were left behind, and priced out. That’s not what we’re doing here.”

Critics of the hotel renovation plan when it was first introduced questioned whether the $22.3 million investment was worthwhile, since it could impact fewer than 100 Chicagoans.

The finished development unveiled Friday also includes on-site job training, case management, mental health and substance abuse counseling, an Internet cafe on the first floor, and an urban farm on adjacent land for resident use.

Emanuel noted that the impact of the investment in Harvest Commons will be amplified by additional improvement projects launching simultaneously on the Near West Side.

Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th) said he was grateful for the new development, but wasted little time pressuring the mayor for future projects.

“There’s a lot of great things happening over here, a lot of momentum. We’re trying to get the mayor to let us get that entertainment center that the United Center wanted to build over here, get rid of some of these parking lots,” he joked. “I know that’s a complicated thing.”

“But you just thought you’d throw it out there,” Emanuel interrupted, smiling.

The mayor also had news Friday for nearby Fulton Market, announcing a $100,000 planning study to set gears in motion for a year-round public market in the area.

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This Old Police Station Will Be a Home for LGBTQ Seniors

 

Chicago Magazine

 

April 3, 2013

 

 

From Chicago Magazine:

Construction of an affordable housing development designed to welcome LGBTQ seniors will get underway this month on the site of a historical police station in Lake View.

“There are some of our LGBTQ seniors who probably were arrested and detained there for activism around equality or the AIDS epidemic or funding for people living with HIV,” says Modesto “Tico” Valle, head of the Center on Halsted, an LGBTQ-community support agency that is a partner in the project. “I love the fact that it’s [now] going to honor seniors who paved the way for our rights today.”

The $26 million project entails rehabbing the old Town Hall station on the northwest corner of Addison and Halsted, and building a six-story, 79-unit apartment building north of it, where defunct police garages now stand. It’s a joint effort of the Center on Halsted, whose main facility is at the north end of the same block, and Heartland Housing, a longtime developer of affordable homes.

The yet-unnamed project will be the first built in the Midwest and is in a race of sorts to be the second in the country. First was one in Los Angeles; a similar project in Philadelphia broke ground in November and may open before the Chicago facility’s planned summer 2014 completion.

Click through the images in the article to read more about the project.

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Ending poverty takes all of us

 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

March 28, 2013

 

 

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

By Sid Mohn

I’ve seen a lot of hardship. It’s written on the faces of the nearly 1 million people we serve every year — the hardship of living without a roof, in poor health or hungry. They’re the faces of poverty, and they’re at the center of what seems like an endless debate over how, when — and if — we can offer them the opportunity to lead safe, stable and healthy lives.

Answering the question of “how” is perhaps the thorniest part. We’re a nation divided, with one side advocating for government intervention to resolve the poverty crisis, and the other demanding the poor stabilize their lives on their own. It’s a question of personal responsibility, the latter side says. I couldn’t agree more.

The dedication to fighting poverty is indeed a matter of personal responsibility for every one of us. We have the responsibility to remember that fulfilling basic needs like housing, safety, health and food isn’t a privilege; it’s a right. We have the responsibility to remember that we’re all in this together and that nobody makes it alone. It takes all of us to end poverty, including the government.

Our representatives are the ones we trust to work in our best interests and help us build the kind of country where the American Dream can thrive. It’s also their job to listen to their constituents and create policies that meet the needs of everyone, including those who live in poverty.

That doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Legislators reach out to organizations like Heartland Alliance, relying on our wealth of experience to guide their decisions. We need to work together to build programs, policies and communities that support people as they reach for a way out of poverty.

As we work to identify routes out of poverty, though, I often see us as a nation thinking in terms of transactions, specifically those between the government and those in poverty. We feed people. We give them a home. We give them financial means. Job done. It’s much more complex than that.

Poverty isn’t a set of symptoms. It’s a complicated and interwoven fabric that traps people. Handing people things that meet their needs isn’t enough. We need to offer real opportunities for people to build their own path out of poverty and connect them to the building blocks of a safe, stable, healthy life: housing, health care, jobs and justice. Each person needs to make a plan unique to his or her needs. That’s why government intervention alone isn’t enough to end poverty. It simply cannot work on such a granular level.

Social service agencies can, though. We know what our communities need to escape poverty, and that’s what we offer. The partnership involving government, social services, individuals and communities isn’t one of charity. It’s one of the long-term solutions to long-term problems. It takes us all to create them.

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Working for the Workers

 

Huffington Post

 

February 28, 2013

 

 

From Huffington Post:

During President Obama’s State of the Union address, he delivered an ambitious vision for the future — one in which any American in need of a job can find one, workers are paid a living wage, and new jobs are created every day. It’s an inspiring vision, and one that we at Heartland Alliance, the Midwest’s leading anti-poverty organization, have been making a reality for 125 years. It’s not work we can do alone, though. It’s work that takes investment from all of us to keep our country moving forward.

For those fighting to escape poverty, getting a job isn’t as simple as filling out an application and waiting for a call back. It’s a matter of overcoming huge hurdles that haunt them year after year. For some it’s a term of incarceration. For others, it’s a lack of job skills. Still others are unable to afford the child care or transportation costs they’d incur while working a minimum wage job.

We can’t afford to abandon these workers. If we want to keep the Midwest and America competitive in the global marketplace, our country must invest in building a full and robust workforce. Leading the way on that front is our National Transitional Jobs Network (NTJN), a national coalition that collaborates to create jobs programs that work. For years, NTJN has acted as a “social laboratory,” finding and refining the solutions that create jobs, help end poverty, and fuel economic growth. We know what strategies will fight unemployment:

  1. Job training: Those who experience chronic unemployment, or whose job sectors have been decimated need job training and retraining to become competitive again.
  2. Skill building: Transitional jobs, short-term skill building assignments that train workers for a field while providing them a living wage, help them apply basic job training knowledge and gives them the real world skills that employers look for.
  3. Sharing what works: Through NTJN, we join organizations across the country in creating the right transitional job programs — ones that help people become and stay employed quickly.
  4. Fighting for good policy: Our work can’t stop when we have good programs. Policymakers need and want to know what works in the fight against unemployment. We have the answers.

It’s a holistic approach and it works. Just ask Wendy. A participant of one of Heartland Alliance’s jobs programs, she found herself homeless and jobless after a term of incarceration. Once we’d helped her find housing, we connected her with a skill-building transitional job — the kind supported through NTJN. She’s now gainfully employed and moving up in her job at the Greater Chicago Food Depository. She truly has escaped poverty. See her story here.

Growing the economy by getting unemployed Americans back to work should be one of the most pressing national priorities today. As we debate the future of job training, skill building and transitional job programs, millions of individuals’ futures hang in the balance.

By this time next year, we will have come far in our fight against chronic unemployment, hardship and poverty. The question remains though — in which direction?

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Sid Mohn: Raising the minimum wage isn’t bad for business

 

The State Journal-Register

 

February 22, 2013

 

 

From The State Journal-Register:

Gov. Pat Quinn recently called for an increase in Illinois’s minimum wage in his State of the State speech. His proposal prompted a flurry of debate in the media, but one thing was missing: the facts.

When you look at the data, it’s clear that raising the minimum wage isn’t bad for business. In fact, it would create jobs and an influx of money into the state economy while reducing taxpayer costs by moving workers out of poverty.

Illinois is home to 400,000 minimum wage workers. These are the workers that keep our state running — the men and women that prepare and serve food at our favorite restaurants, pour our morning cup of coffee, clean our office buildings, hotels and homes, bag our groceries, deliver our pizza, and ring up so many of the purchases we make every day.

Like all workers, minimum wage workers are consumers, too. The workers at the lowest end of the pay scale spend the lion’s share of their income locally on basic goods such as groceries, health care expenses, gas and housing.

Increasing the minimum wage would increase household spending, increase the demand for goods and help businesses grow. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a raise in the state minimum wage to $10.65 would infuse $2.5 billion into our economy.

History has shown that raising the minimum wage would not only spur an increase in spending but would create jobs. A study conducted by the Indiana Business Research Center found that job growth patterns between 2003 and 2005 indicate that Illinois’ increasing minimum wage rates did not reduce overall employment growth for private employers. And in 2005, when Illinois increased the minimum wage a full dollar, our state achieved the second biggest improvement in job growth in the Midwest.

Leading economists agree that in recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment. The bulk of the evidence now shows that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market.

With a growing service sector economy in Illinois and the increase in minimum wage jobs, more and more Illinoisans are not earning enough to cover basic expenses and to provide for their children. In fact, almost 100,000 workers in Illinois work full-time, year round, and still live in poverty.

For a family of three that means earning less than $17,916 a year. Families earning at or below the federal poverty line are struggling to make ends meet and are often forced to make trade-offs or decisions about what to pay for first — food or medicine, heat or lights, diapers or gas. In addition to stimulating economic growth and putting more revenue into the hands of service sector businesses, raising the minimum wage would help move more Illinoisans out of poverty.

Businesses in Illinois will do better when workers are doing better. A raise in the minimum wage is good for businesses, it is good for workers and it is good for Illinois.

Sid Mohn is president of Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights in Chicago and co-chair of the Illinois Commission on the Elimination of Poverty.

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Minimum wage proposal raises hope for workers, fear for employers

 

Kane County Chronicle

 

February 3, 2013

 

 

From Kane County Chronicle:

Should Illinois’ governor get his way, workers at the bottom of the wage scale soon could get a state-mandated pay raise.

But should state lawmakers increase the minimum wage, businesses and other employers of those earning the wages say it could create problems for employers and consumers.

In his 2013 State of the State address Wednesday, Gov. Pat Quinn told lawmakers in Springfield that he intends to push for legislation to boost Illinois’ minimum wage from $8.25 to $10 an hour.

Quinn’s proposal is similar to a proposal introduced in the state Senate in 2011 that would have raised the minimum wage to just over $10 an hour by 2014.

Quinn and others who support increasing the minimum wage say it’s needed to help families living at or beneath the poverty line survive.

Kimberly Drew, a policy associate with the Chicago-based Heartland Alliance, said the increase would largely go to those over the age of 20 working full-time jobs.

She said the increase would help families and the state’s economy.

She pointed to a report issued in 2012 by the Economic Policy Institute that indicates increasing the minimum wage would act as an economic stimulus, putting more money in the hands of consumers likely to spend it immediately.

The report claims that increasing Illinois’ minimum wage to more than $10 a hour would help the wage keep pace with inflation and provide more than $3 billion a year to low-income families.

Businesses and their lobby groups take a different view.

The Illinois Retail Merchants Association, for instance, called the proposal “job-killing.” IRMA president David Vite said boosting the minimum wage would “only hurt those looking for a job and those who employ them in this challenging economy.”

That view was shared by employers in the Tri-Cities.

Craig Frank, owner of job recruiting firm Frank’s Employment in St. Charles, noted that Illinois already has the fourth-highest minimum wage in the country.

He said raising the wage at this time would only deal another blow to the state’s relationship with business owners, who he said are fearful of Springfield.

“I think it’s a fallacy that this is going to help anyone,” Frank said.

Other business owners said they would have to to raise prices. Pete Spentzos, owner of Apple Villa Pancake House in Batavia, said he saw “no way to maneuver” his business or finances to just absorb any such increase.

He said he’d have “no other way” to keep his business operating than to pass the additional cost associated with paying his 40 workers on to his customers.

And at the St. Charles Park District, business manager Karen Schindel said the district likely would need to consider increasing user fees to absorb the cost of paying the increased wages to many of its 300 to 400 seasonal employees, including lifeguards, camp counselors and others who earn at or near the minimum wage.

“It would be very difficult for us,” Schindel said.

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The Numbers Game: Illinois’s 33 Percent

 

Huffington Post Chicago

 

January 17, 2013

 

 

From Huffington Post Chicago:

This week, Social IMPACT Research Center, the research arm of Heartland Alliance, released its Illinois’s 33 Percent: Report on Illinois Poverty. The findings are shocking — a full 15 percent of Illinoisans, 1.9 million people — live in poverty, more than 650,000 of whom are children. A full 60 percent of Americans will find themselves in poverty at some point in their lives, which for an individual means they earn an income of just under $11,500. They’re numbers that should be leading the nightly news and reminding us that the recession isn’t over for everyone.

Unfortunately, I think that this seems like a concept, rather than a reality, to many people — merely numbers on a page. We know people live in poverty, but we have little sense of what that means for their everyday lives. In my work at Heartland Alliance, the Midwest’s leading anti-poverty organization, I’ve seen that reality all too often. It’s the painful reality of feeding, housing and clothing a family of four on about $23,000 a year. And it’s the reality of having nothing to fall back on. A simple $10 bottle of antibiotics can mean an unpaid electricity bill.

A woman from DuPage County who spoke to my colleagues recently brought the reality of poverty into startling clarity. She works a minimum-wage job, making $8.25 per hour. This part-time job is her only source of income, and she’s been unable to find other work to supplement it. Altogether, she grosses $99 every week.

“Even a one dollar cup of coffee isn’t possible for me. To me that’s like $100,” she said. It’s such a small thing — a single dollar. But that’s exactly the point. When you live in poverty there is no such thing as a small expenditure. Every penny counts.

One would think that this crisis would become less dire as the recession fades, but our research shows it’s just the opposite. As lawmakers in DC and at home in Illinois look for places to cut spending, programs and policies that fight poverty are on the chopping block, making it harder for people to access housing, healthcare, jobs and justice — the four components to a stable, healthy, independent life. We can’t just stand by and watch this happen as those in danger slip further and further into poverty.

It’s time for the state of Illinois and all state governments to take action. Increasing funding for lynchpin programs such as homelessness prevention and increasing the minimum wage are good places to start. These programs not only offer emergency assistance to families in crisis, they provide them the support they need to get and stay on their feet.

No one should have to walk the tightrope of poverty, knowing they can’t even spare a dollar. With 125 years of experience, we’re rededicating ourselves to our mission of ending poverty and we know what works — offering housing, healthcare, jobs and justice to those in need, and promoting policies that make these crucial services more accessible. We’re advocating for policy change and we’re making our voices heard. Now it’s time for our state and our nation to take action.

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Report: 1/3 of Illinoisans In or Near Poverty

 

WSIU Public Radio

 

January 16, 2013

 

 

From WSIU Public Radio:

 

A new report puts a spotlight on poverty in Illinois, claiming one-third of the people in the state are in or near poverty.

 

The study, published Wednesday by the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights’ Social IMPACT Research Center, defines “near poverty” as up to 199% of the poverty line.

The report says a family of four is considered poor if its annual income is below $23,021.  Nearly 1.9 million Illinoisans are in poverty, and almost half of those live with less than half the income of the poverty line.

IMPACT says 39 out of 102 counties are on either the Poverty Watch or Poverty Warning Lists. Six of the worst ten counties in terms of poverty are in southern Illinois.

Jackson County has the highest rate at 33.7%, more than twice the state poverty rate of 15%. Alexander County is second on the list at 31.3%. Pulaski County is 4th at 22.4%, Saline County is 6th at 20.8%, Hardin County 7th at 20.4% and Union County 10th at 19.4%.

You can find the report at www.ilpovertyreport.org.

 

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