Back in 2001, when Laura Weathered was struggling through construction on the Acme Artists’ Community housing development, there was a lot of talk about protecting artists from the gentrification that dogged them.
The city contributed $200,000 to the $3.2 million rehab project, and buyers were able to get additional subsidies of up to $30,000 (in the form of loans that would be forgiven across a ten-year period) for each unit. Artists with as little as $3,000 for a down payment were able to purchase the condominiums, which were priced from $90,000 to $130,000.
“We aren’t affordable housing, and there was no deal with the city,” Ebner says. The huge tax increase turned out to be mostly due to some unnamed former drone in the Cook County assessor’s office who, apparently by accident, did the building a considerable favor. Taxes at 2418 W. Bloomingdale had declined appropriately after the 2008 housing bust, but in 2012 they dropped off a cliff. Weathered says the tax on her unit, for example, which had initially been about $2,300, fell to about $500, and stayed there for three years before shooting up to $3,000 in 2015.
Batya Hernandez, who moved into the building in 2003 and whose now-deceased husband, poet David Hernandez, was a vital part of its artistic heft, says she voted against dropping the equity cap.
