Earlier this year the Tribune noted Berwyn’s attempts to position itself as an “affordable and amenable” alternative for the gay and lesbian residents of Lake View and Andersonville, and we wondered whether Berwyn’s marketing campaign was a violation of its own fair housing laws.
In his most recent post at Homeward Bound West, Joe Zekas says there are 40 single-family homes in Berwyn priced under $100,000. “We don’t know how many of these bargain-basement-priced homes are actual bargains, or whether Berwyn’s growing romance with foreclosures will drive prices even lower,” he says, referring to a recent report from Berwyn News about the almost 800 new and active foreclosures in Berwyn from this year alone.
Tax rates in Berwyn are on the rise, in some cases by as much as 5 percent compared to 2008. The property taxes on one of those $100,000 homes in Berwyn’s School District 98 / North Berwyn Park District, would come out to about $2,435 with a homeowner exemption. It’s approaching, but still hasn’t reached, the rates of tax-loving Maywood, where taxes on an identically valued home $100,000 come out to $3,339. (Maywood has seen 578 foreclosures of its own in 2010, according to Berwyn News.)
A Chicagoan paying the city’s general rate on a home of the same value and with the same exemptions would pay approximately $1,282 in property taxes.
My guess – Chicago won’t lose many gays to Berwyn. It’s GU: gay-ographically undesirable.
Er, didn’t we have this discussion already? There is a large and growing gay (and lesbian) population in Berwyn.
Sheridan B:
Perhaps you missed the first paragraph of this post, in which we link to that very discussion. This post, if you read it, is more about the state of foreclosures and property taxes in Berwyn.
If this is more about foreclosures and property taxes than it is about LGBT relocations, then your post should have led with the forclosures and property taxes.
Just because there may be more verbiage on the latter does not mean that readers will interpret it that way. That’s a basic journalistic principle. You put the most important information at the beginning of the story.
And if this were an AP article instead of a 200-word blog post, I might feel obligated to write in inverted pyramid format, BD.
And how has that principle been working for journalists the last decade or so?