One of the problems with being a carpetbagger is competition from the other carpetbaggers. A story in today’s Tribune quotes buyers of pricey new homes on former Cabrini-Green land who plan to protest the “high-rise yuppie condos” threatening to destroy “their” neighborhood. Apparently they’re fine with low-rise yuppie housing, since they live in it, and the newcomers have no qualms about the effect its development had on all sorts of neighborhood residents, not just those living in Cabrini. But new high-rises in their neighborhood? Shocking.
One of the prime reasons most of these folks moved to the neighborhood and one of the reasons developers have coveted it for years is that its location, on the edge of Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, had the potential to be some of the most valuable real estate around – if the projects disappeared. Buyers of low-rise yuppie housing understood the economics of this when they recently – very recently – bought into the neighborhood. They didn’t think that developers could do the same math? They didn’t understand that once a base of low-rise housing was established here and once enough of the projects had been demolished, it was a certainty that high-rises of a new sort would replace the ones the CHA knocked down?
Kingsdale Enterprises, LLC is planning the 25-story tower on Division Street that will be considered by the Plan Commission today, according to the Trib story, and a pair of 20-story towers also are being conisdered at Division and Halsted. Another tower on the drawing board could rise as high as 30 stories on Kingsbury.
And the residents of MCL’s Old Town Village West thought they really were moving into a village. There’s a poem here somewhere.