The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  As for where all these people came from with a million dollars to throw around, well, that wasn’t all that complicated either. We stayed one night at a bed-and-breakfast in an old Victorian mansion on a hillside overlooking Frankfort, Michigan, a pretty harbor town where lake ferries had once docked. The following year we were told the place had been sold to a wealthy businessman from Texas who meant to use it as a vacation home. How he’d found out about the area I have no idea. The point was, once a place achieved a certain cachet, the wealthy just showed up.

  It seemed to me I now understood what was going on back home in Chicago. Property values naturally rose when an area became more desirable, and up to a point it was essential that they did; otherwise fixing up old houses and other properties to the level required made no economic sense. Eventually prices reached the point where new construction became viable—undoubtedly the city construction boom of the mid-1990s had begun partly because the potential selling prices home builders plugged into their spreadsheets reached the point that the minus signs on the bottom line disappeared. That in turn greatly simplified the problem of urban revival. At low moments during our work on the Barn House the chances of the city making a comeback seemed remote—no one with a choice would sign up for the grief we’d endured. Once rising prices attracted home builders back into the city, the problem solved itself. People who wanted to live in the city didn’t need to fix up old houses; they simply bought new.

  The downside was that the process didn’t end with the initial run-up in property values—prices could continue rising for a long time. (In the sociological literature this is known as “super-gentrification.”) Eventually supply and demand would come into equilibrium, but given increasing affluence nationwide, pent-up demand, and gentrification’s inherently slow spread, prices could easily exceed the levels that ordinary people could afford.

  That had happened in Chicago, we now recognized. My brother, transferred to Nashville ten years earlier, told me moving back to Chicago was now financially out of the question. We ourselves realized we couldn’t afford to buy a house in our neighborhood. Property taxes jumped across broad swaths of the city, leading to protests. We were insulated from this for a time by the historic-preservation tax freeze we’d earned for fixing up the Barn House, but eventually that expired, and over a period of a few years our annual tax bill tripled. I appealed three years running, getting a reduction the first time and denials subsequently. After the latest round of reassessments I considered appealing yet again and printed out all the proposed assessments for the neighborhood from the assessor’s online database, then walked up and down the streets hoping to suss out the Byzantine classification system. Finally I concluded that on a comparative basis my assessment was probably on the low end and I’d better just shut up. The state enacted a cap intended to limit the amount assessments could increase each year, but that just postponed the inevitable. In the end, most people recognized, none too happily, that their taxes would go up.

  We recognized ruefully that we ourselves were only transitional figures in the neighborhood’s transformation. The first wave had been the creative types and free spirits who preceded us, with good intentions but little cash. The second wave consisted of undercapitalized rehabbers like us, who could afford, barely, to undertake major renovations, although the work might take them years. The third wave consisted of those with sufficient resources (thank God) to buy the finished job.

  That was the point the Barn House’s neighborhood had now reached. The thought gave me pause—it does to any rehabber. We hadn’t been poor, of course, and the house’s appreciation had made us unexpectedly wealthy, at least on paper. The people who bought it from us, though—anybody who could afford $1.6 million for a house would have to be rich to start with. Already the neighborhood had seen a few people who dwelt on this lofty plane—an actress, a rock star, a wheel in the world of finance. No doubt there would be more as time went on.

  We comforted ourselves with the thought that this was Chicago, and not an especially fashionable part of Chicago at that. We lived in an interior neighborhood, not on the lakefront; if nothing else the mix of housing, with big homes like ours on the same street as apartment buildings and town houses, meant the neighborhood wouldn’t become an enclave of the superrich anytime soon. Sure, the more decrepit multifamily dwellings might eventually be renovated and rented to lawyers and bond salesmen. But for now we had a good mix.

  All American parents, recalling their own rebellious youth, regard the looming adolescence of their children with unease, not merely because of the possibility of disasters involving inebriants, cars, and sex, but because of the prospect of clashes over basic values. God forbid you should invest countless hours in soccer games, owie patching, and homework help only to have your kids prefer Green Day to the Rolling Stones. Or in our case, discover they liked the broad lawns of suburbia better than good old urban grit.

  We needn’t have worried. The kids loved the city, without prompting or indoctrination from us. No doubt in large part this was because they went to grade school downtown, which was abrim with things to see and do, predisposing them to think the world was organized for their amusement and leading to disgruntlement when they realized large parts of it weren’t. Mary and I first noticed this attitude on our annual spring car trips to visit friends in Atlanta, which involved frequent detours onto choice bits of two-lane Americana—my favorite was Route 135 in southern Indiana, a delightful landscape of remnant hardwood forest atop limestone hills. We might as well have been driving through the Gobi Desert as far as the kids were concerned. “What do people do around here?” they wailed as we cruised past this or that bucolic scene. They brightened up if we stopped somewhere sufficiently diverting to accord with their idea of civilization, but were always relieved when we got home.

  Naturally, Mary and I made it our business to provide our children with urban survival skills. In addition to the usual look-both-ways-and-don’t-talk-to-strangers lectures, we instructed them in such elementary procedures as riding the L home from school, which we decided we could hazard when Ryan entered seventh grade, by which time he was taller than me. (Ani could take the L, too, as long as she rode with her brother.) Mary, with maternal caution, bought Ryan a cell phone and suggested I follow the train in the car after the manner of Popeye Doyle in French Connection. I thought this excessive and said I would take all three kids on a dry run before school started.

  First we took the L from our house to school, during which time I offered instruction on the rudiments—here are the signs, there are the maps, this is how you insert a fare card in the slot. I laid special emphasis on the necessity of changing trains at a station called Belmont. We rode down to the school uneventfully, then turned around and headed home. The kids ran ahead while I purposely hung back. They succeeded in negotiating the turnstiles, taking the stairs to the proper platform, and boarding the train. As we rumbled along, Ryan and Ani gazed out the window at the passing scene, oblivious to the fact that we were approaching the transfer point. When the train pulled into the station, Andrew, always a methodical child, got up and headed toward the door. “We have to get off here,” he announced. Startled, Ryan and Ani scrambled up from their seats and out the door.

  I chastised them on the platform as we waited to change trains. “Were you looking at the signs and listening to the announcements like I told you?” I asked Ryan.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then how do you expect to know where to get off?”

  “Social cues,” he said.

  I don’t know if you can call it progress, but that isn’t an excuse I’d have thought to give my old man. “Ryan,” I said with as much sternness as I could muster, “you’re going to be riding with total strangers. They’re not all going to get off at the same stop as you. That’s why you have to pay attention.”

  “Oh,” said Ryan. He looked around. “What did you say the name of this station was?”

  They got the hang of it eve
ntually, although this entailed many adventures, the most frequent of which—even Andrew fell prey to it—was changing to the Purple Line by mistake, which also stopped at Belmont but then ran express five and a half miles to the city limits, where you had to get off and catch the next train back. The first time Ani did this she sounded so woebegone on the cell phone that I drove up to Howard Street to get her, but when she did the same thing a month later I said, “Honey, you’re on your own,” having first provided the necessary directions. She arrived home an hour later and never got on the wrong train again.100

  Just living in the city was an education for the kids. Ryan, six feet tall by the time he reached eighth grade, began playing basketball with a racially mixed travel team organized by a coach from one of the public high schools. The team’s home court was a YMCA a few blocks up the street from Cabrini-Green, the notorious public housing project. While waiting for a game to start during a holiday tournament I sat in the stands at the Y’s gym with another parent, an avid basketball fan and sometime coach. “Uh-oh,” he said when he noticed the opposing team filing in. “I know these guys. They’re from Washington Park. They’ve got their own weight-training coach.” Washington Park was in a tough neighborhood on the south side. The weight training had evidently paid off—three of the kids, presumably also eighth-graders, were taller than Ryan and looked to be half again his bulk.

  The Washington Park team proceeded to trounce Ryan’s squad. At one point Ryan tried to block an opponent going in for a layup, and in my estimation timed his leap pretty well; the other kid passed the ball from his right hand to his left while airborne, then tossed it over his shoulder for a basket. Ryan’s team wound up losing by 51 points. In the car on the way home I expected him to be crushed. Not so. He was in good spirits—he’d learned a few things, admittedly the hard way. “You see how the game is played,” he said.

  Fact was, none of our fears had come to pass—raising a family in the city had again become a mainstream choice. We signed the kids up for soccer; I became a coach and later the organization’s webmaster. The old hands told me that in the space of a decade the program had grown from a few hundred kids to twenty-five hundred. (As I write it’s three thousand.)

  In 1995, the dismal Chicago public school system had been taken over by the mayor and reforms instituted. By the time Ryan was approaching the point where we had to think about such things, the city had established a half dozen selective-enrollment high schools, one of which, based on test scores, was the best in the state. Ryan took the entrance exam for this school, Northside College Prep, and was admitted. At freshman orientation, one parent unclear on the concept asked if scholarships were available. “This is a public school,” the principal explained. “Tuition is free.”

  True, Northside was an elite school—but it was an elite public school, which in Chicago historically had been rare. The best high schools of my youth had mainly been Catholic, the public schools in those days being largely the preserve of greasers in baggy gray pants. Moreover, it was by no means an elite rich public school, a common enough thing in the suburbs but in the city completely unknown. Thirty-one percent of the students came from low-income families; three out of five were minorities. There were lots of Asians and girls in head scarves; the social center of gravity for my kids’ friends (Ani followed Ryan in due course) seemed to be a handful of outlying neighborhoods that, due to residency requirements, were popular with firemen and cops.

  I don’t mean to exaggerate the extent to which things had improved. Northside and its peers were among the few bright spots in a public school system that the middle class had largely abandoned—some might say had never embraced. Eighty-six percent of Chicago public school students were poor; only 8 percent were white. During the 1990s, a period when poverty in the city as a whole declined slightly, the percentage of low-income students in the public schools had markedly increased. In many affluent parts of town, the students at the local elementary schools, quite a few of which, judging from test scores, were actually pretty good, were overwhelmingly poor. In our far-from-impoverished neighborhood, for example, the low-income rate at the local public elementary school exceeded 90 percent.

  If the community was willing to make the effort, though, the local school could be turned around. We heard about a Wrigleyville elementary school where the community had managed it, mainly by persuading middle-class parents in the area to send their kids there. In ten years enrollment had increased by close to two hundred students while the low-income rate dropped from 90 to 35 percent—a figure still likely to leave suburbanites aghast, but which in the city you could live with. (Lest it be thought the change was accomplished by evicting all the minorities, white kids currently constitute just 38 percent of the student body, which nonetheless is two and a half times as many as were on hand in 1996.) A couple with a preschooler sent around a flyer trying to drum up some interest in our neighborhood school; Mary ran for a seat on the local council overseeing this school and won. We’ll see what develops. But experience showed that the schools could be improved, slowly and mostly through local initiative, one at a time.

  As for that bedrock educational mission, the transmission of life lessons to your kids—in my case, the principles of the right way and the love of manual labor—I confess the issue remains in doubt. The world conspires against you. The kids were too young to help with most of the house work, and the scale of the remaining projects—building a garage, for example—isn’t likely to provide many opportunities for patient instruction. I thought I might at least familiarize them with tools by showing them a few simple auto repairs, but even that proved difficult. Several times I tried teaching Ryan to change the spark plugs in our ancient Corolla, but on every occasion the lesson was interrupted after we’d barely started—basketball practice, an overdue school project, and so on.

  I remained determined till one day the auto repair shop called with an estimate for repairs on our van, a newer vehicle. We needed new spark plugs, the auto repair man informed me. Price: $300.

  “Three hundred dollars?” I protested that changing plugs took twenty minutes and cost six bucks. The auto repair man said I obviously hadn’t changed a newer car’s plugs—they were platinum now, designed to last a hundred thousand miles, and replacement required major disassembly.

  You see the problem. Forget spark plugs. Maybe I’ll get the kids to help repaint the basement.

  25

  When I decided to write this book in 1994, I thought it would be a story about a house—which is to say, an opportunity to spin a good yarn, as books about houses mostly have been. It turned out to be more than that purely by luck. At the start of work on the Barn House, the revival of Chicago had a lot in common with the Second Coming or, to put the issue in terms likely to have greater local resonance, the Cubs winning the World Series—consummations devoutly wished for that few expected to see. When it actually occurred, no one was more surprised than us. Things had been building slowly for some time, but the climax was so sudden and unequivocal that it left many wondering why events had come to pass as they had. The details naturally are specific to Chicago, but broader lessons may be drawn.

  One explanation I’ve seen proposed is that Chicago had evolved from a factory town into a global city, and the professional types who flocked to such places tended to like city life. I resist this explanation for three reasons: (1) If Chicago is a global city today—and hey, why not?—it was no less of one in 1893 or 1930; certainly no dramatic change in this respect occurred in the 1990s;101 (2) the global-city argument to my mind implies that only cities bulking large on the world stage can aspire to urbanity, which I don’t think is the case; and (3) most pertinently, it suggests we were borne along irresistibly by the historical tide, which sure isn’t how it felt to us.

  My own view is that Chicago didn’t revive because it had become a global city, but rather that it became a global city (or acquired whatever enhanced stature it may have) because it had revived—although reviv
ed is the wrong word. As I’ve tried to explain, I think it’s more accurate to say it had matured, by which I mean that it had become a city that people lived in because they wanted to, not because it was the best they could do at the time.

  One important element in the maturing process, and we may as well speak plainly, was gentrification. The term has acquired a pejorative connotation in some quarters, leading many to resort to euphemisms, such as urban renaissance or neighborhood revitalization. I’m going to stick with gentrification, partly because it’s a term everyone knows, and partly because it conveys with reasonable clarity what happens—the upper middle class establishes itself in some existing urban place and brings upper-middle-class money and habits with it. The process involves changes good and bad. On the plus side, the neighborhood typically becomes safer, city services improve, more shops and restaurants open, and the area becomes physically more attractive due to increased investment and better maintenance. The downside varies with the city. In New York, London, and some other cities gentrification was accompanied by fears of displacement of lower-income residents; 102 in Chicago, as I’ve said, the more frequent complaint was sharply rising property taxes.103 I don’t wish to belittle such concerns, but to focus exclusively on them is to miss an essential point: gentrifiers choose to live in the city, often at considerable cost to themselves, in my observation usually making common cause with the city folk who were there to start with. That a healthy city requires an abundance of such people hardly needs argument. Far from being alien invaders, they’re the city’s heart and soul.