How The Green Line, A Pink House And 12 Cents Changed How I See My City

If you grow up where I did, you can’t help but run into this city’s disparities. I feel like I got hit with them every time I left the house.

I grew up in the Galewood neighborhood, a small pocket of the Austin community on the far West Side of Chicago. It has a quiet, suburban feel — neat brick homes, manicured lawns. Possums, even. 

And, it’s one of the only places you’ll see white people on my side of town. 

Everyone from Chicago knows the West Side is black. And, since as far back as the 1960s, a lot of it has been struggling. 

Even as a kid growing up, I was always aware that my neighborhood stood in contrast to the rest of the West Side. Returning from family excursions downtown, I would press my face against the window of the car and watch the city change around me. I would see fewer businesses, more boarded-up buildings, more desolation the further west we drove — until we crossed back into Galewood. 

These blatant differences were part of life growing up black in Chicago, and questions always swirled in my head about why these differences existed, why Chicago continued to be such a tale of two cities. 

I found part of the answer in a place I never really expected, reporting on a topic I didn’t know anything about before I began: home loans. I had absolutely no idea about anything related to banking at all, especially in regards to home lending. Why would I? I’m in my early 20s and a recent college grad.

But analyzing where banks give home purchase loans in Chicago made me realize some things about my neighborhood and my city that I hadn’t understood before. Things that go deep into the reasons that whole parts of Chicago look poorer and more run-down than other parts — and stay that way. 

When my family first moved to Galewood, we got a taste of racial hate. We were the second black family on the block (there are still only two black families). Our neighbors at the time did everything they could to try to prevent us from moving in. This was not 1965 — it was 2001. 

My parents still remember the sting of the ways we were treated shortly after we moved in. My mom frequently tells a story of watching me out the kitchen window as I played outside and seeing my neighbor intentionally ignore me as I repeatedly tried to greet him across our backyard fence. He refused to speak to me. I was 4 years old.

So we had to deal with individual bigots trying to stop us from moving into Galewood.

But this thing with the bank loans is much bigger. It’s about entire communities being systemically locked out of the same homeownership opportunities my family was looking for. It’s a story of communities being trapped in cycles of disinvestment.

Prime property, run down

As a teenager, the Green Line train became my connection between my two worlds — my little pristine pocket of the city and the rest of the West Side. 

The thing about the Austin community area is it feels like it shouldn’t look the way it does. There are huge houses with big backyards that sit right off the Green Line and feel like they should be prime property. Instead, many of them are run-down and sitting adjacent to vacant lots

A lot of my neighbors in Galewood — a lot of people generally — have an explanation for why things look better in their community than they do on the rest of the West Side. 

My neighbor Steve Vasko, an extremely welcoming neighbor who has always been gracious to me and my family, has a pretty typical take. 

“Just go ahead and look at our homes here,” he said when I asked about it during my reporting. “Everybody keeps up their homes. The gentleman next to me, he’s putting money into his property. … So is my neighbor next door to me. … People are reinvesting. They want their property to look good. There is a lot of construction work going around in the area. People buying homes, people fixing them up, selling them.”

What Steve is basically saying is that this part of the West Side looks better because people care. Buying, fixing, investing — that’s what you do when you care about your home and community. And from Steve’s perspective, it’s really not that hard. 

“For instance, we’re looking to go ahead and probably refinance. I just picked up the phone and called my bank,” said Steve. “They asked me over the phone how much we made, and then from there it kind of went to, ‘You know what? It’s all up to you if you’d like to go ahead. We could run a credit check. How fast do you want that loan?’” Steve recalled.

I learned that his experience of just dialing up for a loan is definitely not universal. Our reporting showed that entire neighborhoods are being left behind when it comes to this critical way of getting money into communities.

$57,405,604,000 for Chicago neighborhoods, but not spread equally

My reporting partners and I looked at 168,859 loans that people received to buy homes, condos or apartment buildings in Chicago during a seven-year period from 2012 to 2018. 

All those loans represented $57,405,604,000 (that’s $57.4 billion with a B!)  flowing into Chicago neighborhoods, but it was definitely not spread around evenly. 

We made a map of all that money, plotting out the amount lenders invested in each ‘hood. We color-coded the white, black and Latino areas of the city.

Next, our jaws dropped.

On the map, investment is piled high over white areas of Chicago. In black areas, it’s almost nonexistent. 

Majority white neighborhoods in Chicago got 68% of all home purchase lending, while black neighborhoods got just 8%. Latino areas got a hair more. That’s despite the fact there are similar numbers of black, white and Latino neighborhoods in Chicago.

It was striking — and sad —  to see how closely banks’ investment patterns followed racial lines. It was almost like a redlining map, with all the lending in white areas and very little where black people live. 

Chicago even has a handful of white communities — like Lincoln Park on the North Side, for example — where the total amount lenders invested in that single community was more than what banks loaned in all of Chicago’s black neighborhoods combined.

And it turns out, home purchase lending is the single biggest way money flows into communities, so these loans really matter. 

Analyzing these bank loans made this major invisible force shaping the city suddenly become visible to me. I started recognizing its impact everywhere. 

The Pink House

Once I saw the lending data, my mind instantly went to the big houses I saw around the Austin area, and the Pink House in particular. 

It’s definitely a thing growing up out west: You haven’t been to the West Side until you’ve seen the Pink House. 

The Pink House is a big, beautiful, pink-and-white Victorian home that stands on Central Avenue, one of the major West Side streets. 

It has a lot of the things that I would love in a house — a wraparound porch, a balcony, a lot of windows, space for a garden.

But, it’s badly in need of repair. 

The front stairs are creaky. The porch is sinking, and the steps need to be replaced.

The Pink House is really a symbol of the West Side. A metaphor. Beautiful and loved, but in need of investment.

While I was outside showing my producer the house, a random West Sider drove by and yelled out his car window, “Get this house! It’s something special about it. Get the house, It needs a little touching up, but…” 

See, the Pink House has been for sale.

We asked him why he thinks the Pink House hasn’t been sold, and he said, “Well, maybe because they think the neighborhood is really bad, but I’m going to tell you the truth — it’s really not. They sell it like it’s bad.”

After working on the mortgage loan project, I am convinced that lending practices by banks and other financial institutions are a huge reason why the Pink House was for sale for more than a year  — just getting more and more run-down — and never sold. And also why so many properties on this side of town sit vacant. 

The Pink House was bought by Rev. Isiah and Wilhelmina Anderson some 35 years ago.

I talked to their daughter and now owner of the house, Yolanda Anderson, who was just a girl when the family moved in.

“My mother was very interested in investing in some of the properties here. My father was in construction as well as being a minister, and they were very passionate about bringing some of the houses in the area back up,” said Anderson, who showed me the Pink House’s plush ins and outs (inside, it’s more grand — and more pink — than you could even imagine). 

The family moved in even before the floors or windows were in, Anderson remembers. 

“We’ve taken on the job of refurbishing this house for over 30 years through our own expense,” she said.  

But when Anderson’s father passed away, the family couldn’t keep the house up anymore. They put it on the market, but the offers they got were like 1980s pricing: $40,000, 45,000. The highest was $85,000, said Anderson.

And this is for a landmark on the West Side. 

I learned there’s one big reason why those offers came in so low and why the Pink House hasn’t sold. No one can get a home loan to buy it — nobody. I don’t care how big your income is or how great your credit score.

“You wouldn't be able to get a regular bank loan on this home because it’s not going to pass inspection,” said Jeanne Keating, the realtor who listed the Pink House.

That’s because the Pink House needs a lot of repairs, repairs that would cost more than the banks think the property is worth.  

We’re used to hearing that borrowers have to qualify for a loan, but the property has to qualify too. There are whole neighborhoods in Chicago where the property basically doesn’t qualify, where banks have decided that the houses and vacant lots are not worth a loan. 

It’s a vicious cycle of disinvestment: Because properties need so much fixing up, banks won’t lend. Because they won’t lend, properties fall into further disrepair.

It’s one reason the West Side of Chicago looks as run-down as it does. 

Without lending, there’s just too little money here.

The Andersons have applied for every grant, special loan, and home makeover show that they can think of, but after a year of trying to sell the house, the family is almost out of options.  At this point, Anderson said,  they are just praying for a miracle.

The same systems that made the city so unequal

So what’s the difference between the area where the Pink House is located and my nearby neighborhood? The Pink House is closer to downtown than Galewood, closer to public transit, it’s in the same school system. What’s the difference?

As far as I can tell, the main difference is that the Pink House is in an all-black neighborhood. 

In my reporting, I ran into other West Siders with lending stories too. I heard about a family that just walked away from their home; they couldn’t sell it. The city eventually tore it down. Now, if you wanted to build a brand-new home on that vacant lot, good luck getting a mortgage for that! Many banks would say it’s not worth what it cost to build. 

I asked another woman planning to sell her family home if she thought the buyer would get a mortgage. She paused for a long time. Finally, she said she wasn’t really sure. Other houses nearby had only sold for cash.

This is in the city of Chicago, seven miles from the gleaming Loop. And people in the year 2020 are unsure whether anyone will be able to get a bank loan for their home, homes being lived in right now.

Investment really plays a huge part in how communities are formed, how they look and whether they are able to thrive. I guess maybe before I always thought “the city” should invest in our neighborhoods. What I learned working on this project is how big of a role banks have in neighborhood investment. When people can’t get home loans, it means folks who have good jobs and want to invest in their communities just can’t.

We hear about redlining, but we hear it talked about as something of the past. We learn about it in Chicago history classes, but we don’t see it as something that’s still in place. 

I saw that the lack of lending over time in these neighborhoods has created a system that’s causing whole communities to be locked in cycles of disinvestment. To me, that’s an injustice. The same systems that made the city so unequal in the first place are still raging on.

Aaron Allen was a 2019 reporting fellow with City Bureau. You can follow him on Twitter at @allenambition.

WBEZ's Linda Lutton contributed reporting and production. City Bureau's Andrew Fan contributed reporting.