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On Saturday Rick Levin & Associates will auction 16 condos, nine townhomes, and vacant land located near the intersection of 65th Street and Nashville Avenue in Clearing, on Chicago’s Southwest Side. That’s a community area we rarely cover, so I spent the morning reading up on it.
Clearing, along with Garfield Ridge to the north, is one of the two westernmost neighborhoods south of the Stevenson Expressway. Its boundaries are 59th Street to the north, 65th Street to the south, Cicero Avenue to the east, and Harlem Avenue and the village of Summit to the west. The southern half of Midway International Airport extends into the neighborhood.
According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, former Chicago mayor and congressman “Long” John Wentworth was Clearing’s most prominent landowner in the 1860s. Clearing took its name from the circular switching yard cut by the Chicago Great Western Railroad. The area incorporated into a village in 1912 and was annexed into Chicago three years later.
As recently as 2000, Clearing was a primarily white neighborhood with a median household income of $46,000. WalkScore.com recently ranked the community area 49th out of 77 in terms of walkability, characterizing the neighborhood as “somewhat walkable,” similar to Woodlawn, Jefferson Park, and East Garfield Park. (Judging from WalkScore’s heat map, most of the neighborhood’s amenities are concentrated between Narragansett and Austin avenues.)
The majority of the homes listed for sale in Clearing are single-family homes with a median age of about 50 years and a median price in the $220s. Most of the 50 or so condos listed in the area appear to be converted two-bedroom apartments, with a median price in the $130s.
The average listing has been on the market for about 193 days.