Tenants and neighbors battle HUD and ComEd

This is the fifth article in our series on community organizing, made possible by a grant from the Woods Charitable Fund, Inc. For details on the other articles on community organizing, please turn to page 34.

While shopping at a corner grocery store in Chicago's Westtown community last spring, Luis Rodriguez eyed "an alarming flier" on the front counter. It said, "There's a killer in your alley." The flier was issued by the 25-year-old Northwest Community Organization (NCO). It explained that a site on his block was contaminated with PCBs, a highly toxic lubricant once used by electric utilities but now banned. The flier called residents to a community meeting to learn more.

Raised in the infamous Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, Rodriguez was no stranger to urban problems but had never gotten involved before. Finding it difficult to get a job in New York after gaining an education degree, he moved to Chicago last year, into the Westtown building owned by his family for over 17 years. "With time on my hands while looking for work," Rodriguez recalls, he decided to go to the NCO meeting with some neighbors.

Nick Iakovos was also introduced to community organizing

'The figures didn't add up. Our rent money wasn't going to claimed higher taxes and fuel bills, much less into our building'

via a piece of paper. One morning last January, Nick and his wife Carmen found a 30-day notice from their landlord slipped under the door of their two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. The notice sought a 40 percent rent increase from the 14-year residents of 833 West Buena. The landlord was demanding that the five-member Iakovos family take a larger three-bedroom apartment, or move. The owners of the federally financed building had recently prepaid their 40-year FHA mortgage, believing this action released them from federal rent regulations in the speculation-ridden Uptown housing market.

"There was something fishy here," Nick recalls. His family had been good tenants: "I never got in trouble here." So Nick brought his notice to a local group he had heard his sister-in-law talk about, Organization of the NorthEast (ONE), a 15-year-old community organization serving the Uptown and Edgewater areas on Chicago's north lakefront.

What Rodriguez and Iakovos learned and the processes they found themselves caught up in changed their views on the ability of a community to move large institutions. The stories that follow tell about campaigns by two community organizations on two different issues. Iakovos became involved in ONE's effort to avail low-income renters of the protections afforded by the federal emergency housing act. Rodriguez became part of NCO's drive to force Commonwealth Edison to inform local communities about its toxic spills. Both stories show how ordinary citizens brought accountability to the powers that be.

When Iakovos visited ONE's office, news of his eviction notice from a federally financed building was no surprise. Felecia Mitchell-Bute, an organizer with ONE and also with the Uptown Tenants Union, had been alerted to the problem in the spring of 1987: The city faced the potential loss of over 10,000 units of affordable housing through prepayment of FHA mortgages. Over 2,000 units of affordable housing in Uptown faced this demise by 1994. The disclosure was reported in The Network Builder, the newsletter of the Chicago Rehab Network, a city wide housing development coalition.

The FHA mortgages derived from a federal program. The government had offered private investors 40-year loans at 1 to 3 percent interest. In return, investors had to agree to rent the housing to low- and moderate-income tenants for 20 years. Owners would then have the option of continuing the arrangement or of prepaying the remaining mortgage. Prepayment would free owners to do what they wished with the property.

In Uptown, Mitchell-Bute had a ONE college intern survey the owners of HUD buildings. The survey found that most were going to prepay, believing that this would enable them to charge market rents or sell their buildings for a higher price.

To ascertain the best response to the pending wholesale evictions, ONE organizers met with an ad hoc citywide coalition

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This is the Buena high-rise building in Chicago's Uptown. Faced with possible eviction from low- and moderate-priced apartments of the FHA-financed building, tenants organized with the help of the Organization of the NorthEast. Their fight is now in federal court.       Photo by Thorn Clark

of FHA building tenants, with other area groups who made up the Uptown Task Force on Displacement and Housing, and with attorney Dan Burke of the Legal Assistance Foundation. Burke informed them of pending federal legislation that would preclude or severely limit the prepayment option for owners, and he encouraged them to start working with tenants of the affected buildings.

Mitchell-Bute and Susan Gahm, another ONE organizer and member of the Uptown Tenants Union, began contacting tenants in HUD buildings, but not at the Buena building because the ONE organizers thought another organization was working with its tenants.

At a HUD building at Sheridan and Gunnison that faced prepayment in January 1989, ONE organizers contacted Linda Roberts. She had lived in Gunnison for 13 years and was part of a previous FHA tenants union that had fought rent increases in her building. "We would go over the owners' profit and loss statements with a fine-tooth comb. The figures didn't add up. Our rent money wasn't going to claimed higher taxes and fuel bills, much less into our building," Roberts says.

When ONE's Uptown Tenants Union (UTU) came to Roberts" building, the FHA tenants union saw it as an opportunity. "We wanted to hook up because our previous union couldn't survive off of member fees collected. We learned about the prepayment option pending on our building and decided to again try and find the owner and sit down to negotiate options, including giving us six months' notice. I had the fact sheets and files on the building, but without UTU, I'd be at wit's end. I didn't know how the FHA worked. I would have been fighting a meaningless game." Uptown Tenants Union in fact, had made contact with tenants like Roberts in several HUD buildings. Numbering some 350 members, Uptown Tenants Union began filling up file drawers with tenant assistance intake forms. "We targeted four buildings in particular with upcoming prepayment option dates," recalls Gahm.

By the time Nick Iakovos arrived at ONE's office with his notice from the Buena building landlord, the organization knew what to do. ONE organizers immediately paid a visit to the regional office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Interviews with key HUD staff and searches through HUD records revealed important information: Prepayment on Buena had been quietly accepted by the agency on January 4, 1988, only one day before the owners' legal 20-year anniversary date and just weeks after congressional approval of the legislation Burke had been talking about — the Emergency Low-Income Housing Preservation Act of 1987.

Among other provisions, the act effectively precluded any prepayment of the FHA mortgages for two years. It required HUD to negotiate with building owners, provide vouchers to maintain affordable units, and otherwise certify that prepayment would not disrupt local housing. HUD had performed none of these tasks before accepting the Buena prepayment.

"HUD clearly goofed on this one," Burke asserted at the time, and within days one of the congressional sponsors of the act agreed. In February, invited to speak at a city wide conference of Chicago's FHA tenants, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D. Mass.) said: "This is clearly a situation the new law was supposed to prevent. [HUD's action] represents a continuation of a national trend causing an upsurge in homelessness."

"We had to get into the building to inform tenants of their rights, before people started to move out," Mitchell-Bute recalls. Working with Nick and Carmen Iakovos and over 60 other tenants from the 209-unit Buena building, ONE leafleted apartments. It also brought legal aide attorneys to several evening meetings at a local church hall to interview tenants and began planning a demonstration against HUD to force agency compliance with the new law. "When we learned about Buena," recalls Roberts, "we just had to plug in. We didn't want another HUD building in the neighborhood to slip through the cracks. If [evictions or rent increases] were going to happen to them, then it could happen to us."

Dozens of sign-carrying Uptown tenants picketed the HUD regional office February 22. When representatives of ONE's

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David Del Valle, an organizer for the Northwest Community Organization (NCO), holds the sign that Commonwealth Edison uses to mark PCB-contaminated sites. Not satisfied with these signs, NCO designed and posted bilingual signs at the sites in Chicago. At right is NCO leader Faith Urrutia.       Photo by Thorn Clark

Uptown Tenants Union met with HUD regional director Gertrude Jordan, they learned that local HUD officials were "not in a position to do anything." Media coverage was intensive. The next day, Burke filed suit in federal court on behalf of the Buena tenants, seeking a stay of the eviction notices and return of the mortgage prepayment to the owners. This was the first test case nationally under the new law. The court granted a temporary reprieve to the tenants. The final outcome of the suit is still pending.

HUD officials were not suprised with the court action. According to HUD's Jim Zale, "We knew the Emergency Housing Act would generate a lot of lawsuits because it reneges on some long-held owner rights for prepayment." But as acting housing director of the HUD's regional office at the time of the tenants' demonstration, Zale also felt that the meeting in Jordan's office was "very productive." He says, "We were dealing with forces that none of us could control. The tenants were very professional and knowledgable. As is often the case, they had looked into this legislation better than we had."

How does Nick Iakovos feel now? "I believe the law will protect me," he says. "You have to be willing to get in there and play the game. We're no lawyers, but [the owners] tried to evict us and then they backed off." Carmen Iakovos believes the HUD demonstration was critical to convincing people "that the only way to resolve our problem is to stay together."

Buena tenants continued to meet over the summer and participated in another affordable housing demonstration in July at the nearby home of Gov. James R. Thompson. "We're holding stable," Carmen says, "everything's quiet in the building." Nick believes the building's owners are just waiting until after the November election before they make their next move. He says, "I got in here 14 years ago when things weren't so good in the neighborhood. Now it's improving and they want us out. I won't give up on myself."

Like ONE, the Northwest Community Organization (NCO) is a veteran of many organizing battles. In its Westtown/Humboldt Park neighborhood, it is best known for its education, housing and development organizing, but its entree into environmental concerns did not begin with the PCB problem on Luis Rodriguez' block. A few years before, a fire in an abandoned factory had spewed toxic-laden waste water into the alley and backyard of longtime NCO leader Dorothy Meada. NCO took up the fight to force a cleanup involving both the U.S. and Illinois Environmental Protection agencies. It also led a campaign through the Chicago City Council to enact more stringent environmental legislation.

"If it hadn't been for Dorothy's fire," recalls Faith Urrutia, another NCO leader, "I wouldn't have paid much attention to the men in moon-suits going down my alley last March." The team of moon-suits left an excavated site, marked by street saw-horses, yellow and black warning tape, and "a little sign I took the trouble to read," Urrutia says. In obtuse legalese, the sign declared the excavation to be a PCB site and directed further inquiries to Commonwealth Edison or the Coast Guard. Faith called ComEd and stopped by the NCO office to report her discovery.

NCO staff director Kim McReynolds assigned a college intern to the case. After filing a Freedom of Information request with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), Urrutia and the intern were soon thumbing through agency files downtown. They found that ComEd had submitted to a 1986 consent decree to clean up 492 PCB-contaminated sites in the Chicago metro area. The contamination was caused by utility pole capacitor explosions, some dating as far back as 1978. By the spring of 1988, only one-third of the sites had been cleaned, most of them in suburban areas.

"We knew we had stumbled onto something," McReynolds says. Though the USEPA files were disorganized, NCO determined that Westtown/Humboldt Park contained 14 sites scattered over five wards. McReynolds brought the issue to NCO's executive board to consider the best approach. "With [ComEd's] pending rate increase request and expiring franchise with Chicago, the way NCO cut the issue and how ComEd handled it could mean a lot," she explains.

With board approval, McReynolds sought technical expertise from two nonprofit corporations: Citizens for a Better Environment and the Center for Neighborhood Technology. She also sought legal assistance from Howard Learner of Business and Professional People in the Public Interest, known for its years of litigation against ComEd on nuclear plants and rate issues. Learner agreed to assist NCO, not in a lawsuit but in an organizing campaign.

Luis Rodriguez and his neighbors came to one of the NCO's informational meetings. He learned he was living 150 feet from a capacitor that had blown up eight years before. Though the site had been initially "cleaned" four years ago, the federal standard for an acceptable PCB level had been lowered in the interim. Rodriguez was concerned. (Indeed subsequent testing

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But it was not health concerns that galvanized the community. McReynolds says, "What finally clicked in the minds of community people was the right to know. ComEd acted as if the community couldn't handle the information, and this made people angry. Furthermore, cleanup costs had been built into ComEd's rate base, and people didn't think utility customers should have to pay for ComEd's mistakes."

NCO's community meetings led to a public hearing with ComEd representatives August 1. A careful press strategy was mapped out beforehand with Business and Professional People in the Public Interest. As a result, the story of ComEd's slow cleanup was in the media before the meeting was held. The media coverage "shook up ComEd," McReynolds recalls. Utility representatives were "responding to our issue, not the other way around. They found an informed panel of community residents unwilling to accept the utility's P.R. assurances that all was okay."

The meeting attracted not only NCO old-line leaders and newly involved residents like Rodriguez, but also union activists, environmental groups and other community groups from around the city. "We were not only demanding that ComEd clean up the PCB sites we'd discovered in Westtown, but also that they release a city wide list of sites. We didn't want ComEd to set neighborhood [against] neighborhood," McReynolds says. A slide show of the sites, testimony from a toxicologist and attorney Learner, and informed questions from a vocal crowd made for "a fact-filled, exciting meeting," McReynolds recalls. "ComEd responded with some stupid statements from a P.R. point of view." The next day, ComEd released a list of all the sites to the Chicago Tribune.

"ComEd started backing down because we had a plan," Rodriguez says. "I would have thought that with their franchise expiring with the city, they'd be doing all they could to get public opinion on their side, that they'd be doing the site cleanups better than the law required. But they sure were taking their time."

ComEd spokesman Mike Kelly disagrees. "When we first became aware of the NCO campaign in the newspapers, most of the cleanup of the PCB sites in that area was completed." Cleanup had begun during 1987 in two of ComEd's six operating divisions, one in the western suburbs, the other on the city's north side, "not in response to any perceived demand by one community group over another," according to Kelly, but for logistical reasons. Kelly says that under the USEPA consent decree ComEd has until 1991 to complete the cleanup program.

Within days of the original spills starting in 1970s, all of the sites had been cleaned, Kelly explains. And while ComEd agreed under the consent decree to reclean the sites when the federal standard changed, Kelly says, "we didn't feel the hazard posed any danger to the areas surrounding the spills. Instead of arguing over how clean is clean, we agreed to go back and resurvey the sites and reclean to the new standard. It's a model program. We're the only utility in the nation cleaning up to this standard."

Once NCO had the site locations, it turned to City Hall on the remaining issues: the cleanup schedules and proper site signs. Initial meetings between community leaders and city bureaucrats were tense. The city wanted to research the question further; NCO produced the research it had already completed. NCO sent letters to every alderman whose ward contained PCB sites, as well as to community groups in the affected areas. By fall, organizations around the city were clamoring for City Hall to take action.

Follow-up testing of the sites began (with two of nine previously "cleaned" sites found to have PCB levels over the EPA-mandated minimum). As of the end of October, according to Kelly, ComEd had some 20 sites left on the south side and was doing all it could to accelerate the cleanup of all the sites in the city during the coming year.

Agreement on signs came after a series of meetings held with the city and community groups, including NCO. ComEd agreed to "install signs at spill sites which still had to be cleaned, which had not been identified prior to that," says ComEd's Kelly. While waiting for a decision, some members of the NCO planning committee had designed their own PCB-site warning sign and had it printed and distributed.

For ComEd, Kelly says, this PCB cleanup was more than an environmental issue. "It even becomes a political issue in a city that's as politicized as Chicago," Kelly says. "ComEd is an easy target, but we don't feel there's anything to be ashamed of with the way we've conducted this clean-up."

For Luis Rodriguez, NCO's campaign against ComEd was exhilarating. Now a special education teacher in a local school, Rodriguez has backed off some on his involvement as the Westtown sites were cleaned and other groups around the city picked up on the issue. "The exposure gave me a thrill," he says of the media coverage, including several radio interviews. "What gave me a real kick was when ComEd started to back down."

For Urrutia, the battle with ComEd isn't over. Other city sites need cleaning and retesting. "My role now is to back up other groups, to let them know we got it done, so they can too," she says. "ComEd's arrogance as a monopoly must be considered in light of ongoing franchise negotiations," she says. Both NCO

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and ONE launched successful petition drives in their wards over the summer to put an advisory referendum on the ComEd franchise on the November ballot. The referenda were approved overwhelmingly. Though not binding, the message was clear: The city should bargain tough with ComEd.

For McReynolds the PCB campaign opened up new possibilities. "Organizer friends of mine didn't think NCO had any business in environmental issues," she says. But unlike traditional NCO campaigns around affordable housing or appropriate redevelopment planning, "the press we got allowed us to cut across block boundaries and class lines in a way that's difficult with other issues." Solid research plus planning the strategy with both old and new community leaders, McReynolds believes, "made it easier for people to accept an organization being agressive with a major institution."

Effective use of the media was key to NCO's success. Community organizations are usually trying, according to McReynolds, "to make good with the bad press we get, but here we had good coverage, even from the Tribune." Later the Tribune attacked NCO in its "New Politics of Poverty" series as being part of a city wide anti-development cabal. McReynolds believes that characterization is unfair. Though ONE was also pilloried in the series, its Buena campaign against HUD benefited from good print and broadcast coverage.

Community organizing, according to its proponents, "is a process by which exploited people learn to employ the tools of a democratic society" ("Alinsky's legacy," Illinois Issues, January 1988). Simply put, the success of these two campaigns hinged on careful and expert execution of what many activists once called "Alinsky-style" organizing: identify the problem, research the issue to find the opportunity, find and educate leaders and plan an action against a targeted personality or institution.

Each organization has relied on support and leadership from a local church base, as did Saul Alinsky's own early efforts in Chicago and Rochester, N.Y. But both have moved beyond these institutional constituencies to other networks and interest groups, such as tenants. Each secured assistance from outside experts — attorneys, environmental activists, city wide and national coalitions. Each organization found new leaders and members through the campaigns. Last May both Uptown Tenants Union member Roberts and NCO leader Urrutia attended the National Peoples Action conference in Washington, D.C., where they strategized with other community leaders on HUD and EPA problems.

For NCO, the success against ComEd strengthens its hand. "We made valuable new contacts in the community," McReynolds reports. NCO's "31-flavor mix" of organizing on housing, education, crime, utility and job issues "sometimes makes a very messy sundae," according to McReynolds. But the campaign cut across all these issues, and positive press coverage brought NCO's success to the attention of far more people than it generally gets.

For ONE, the Buena building campaign gave a tremendous boost to its Uptown Tenants Union and its work in other HUD high-rises facing similar pressures for conversion to market-rate rentals. New alliances were cemented with sometimes competing groups, and the public became more aware of the possible loss of affordable housing. According to Gahm, the tenants that ONE is working with now realize they can avoid disruption to their families. "They're realizing they have nowhere else to go, so they better organize and fight potential eviction," she says.

For Mitchell-Bute the campaign revealed what tenants can do. Now working on development programs in Cabrini-Green public housing on Chicago's near north side, she recalls that the Buena situation almost got away from the organizers. Delays occurred while turf battles between area community groups were sorted out. "We realized [ONE] didn't have the staff to canvass a 200-plus unit building with less than a month to go before evictions. We had to turn it over to the tenants. This ultimately was the most important thing we did, because as the tenants took over the canvass work, they developed relationships with each other, which is why there is still a core left of tenant leaders to persevere with the court fight."

The future of community organizing requires a return to some basics developed by Alinsky, Mitchell-Bute believes: "We've gotten so far from where Saul started — grass-roots leadership. We've had this dialogue in the last five years in Chicago about leadership development and non-profits. But the reality is the leaders are now beginning to look like staff. Our leadership development arguments got us to the point where we got too lazy to do what needed to be done, and we started relying on staff to be leaders, or we brought in staff from other groups to represent their constituencies.'' Buena was a good example of this, she says. "When we walked into our first organizing meeting, all of us in the room were paid staff from one group or another."

The same thing happened in City Hall after Harold Washington was elected, she says. "We just looked at everybody brought in as paid staff. We didn't build on that empowerment movement. After he died and paid staff started leaving the Hall, everybody was looking for the grass-roots movement again." What does she think now? "I feel good about Buena," Mitchell-Bute concludes. "The people there made the difference. We bought them time and if, as paid staff, we aren't there the next time, at least those tenants will take their organizing experience with them into the next building."

Though trained to deal with people, a community organizer is more often guided by the flow of paper across her desk: newspaper clips and legal briefs, legislative summaries and grant proposals, computer printouts and quick-print leaflets. But as Mitchell-Butte will tell you, organizing these stacks of paper into nuggets of knowledge will not produce a successful campaign. Training effective grass-roots leaders like Luis Rodriguez and Nick Iakovos is the essential task.□

Thom Clark is a free-lance editor and photographer with 15 years experience in Chicago's neighborhood development movement. Most recently editor of The Neighborhood Works, an award-winning bimonthly published by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, he has also been director of the Chicago Rehab Network and Voice of the People in Uptown.

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