Here we have a flyer for a community meeting tomorrow night, March 15th at 6:30pm. The location of this meeting is at The PACTT Learning Center - 7101 North Greenview Avenue.
From the looks of things on the hard to photograph flyer, PACTT wants to put a group home at 1434 West Estes. Alderman Moore wants to discuss this developing situation with us.
Sorry for such short notice, it's not my fault, I'm just the messenger. A neighbor in the area gave me the heads-up to check out the flyers posted on the streets. She told me to do some leg work. She told me I wouldn't find it on the other blogs or the Aldermans website.
Blognotes: Alderman Moore must have run out of orange flyers or he's trying to be sneaky and change it up a bit. The new yellow flyer doesn't photograph as well, they come out all blurry.
Please go back to the orange flyers Alderman Moore, yellow isn't your color.
Update: 1434 W ESTES-Owner: Catholic Bishop Chicago
7 comments:
craig-
from what i was told last night via several e mails and information is sketchy, this proposal is for a group home for autistic children.
Tom, it took about 3 solid weeks of lobbying by a number of people to get the Alderman to start posting ZLUAC information on his site, even after he had made a commitment to do it. Given that the meetings are held monthly, a three week delay to post seems a bit excessive...but anyway...
He also said he'd start posting these kinds of meetings on the site - but, as you point out, nothing yet.
It's a bit of an absurd position to put his constituants into (he never heard of the word "proactive"?)but I guess we'll just have to keep reminding and reminding him, brick by brick by brick...
Goodness, people...don't you ever look into things before you form opinions on them? You might feel less panicked if you did...
http://www.pactt.org/home.html
http://talknormal.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_talknormal_archive.html
http://www.dhs.state.il.us/AutismTaskForceReport.pdf
Sally - I don't really know what you mean by "rocking the boat"...lots of people in RP share information about public meetings, though blogs, emails and word of mouth, since getting the word out on these kinds of meetings hasn't really been one of the Alderman's strengths up to now. Craig is among the people who do this, of course, and if that works for you, great. But he is not the only one. Personally, I would prefer that Joe took on that responsibility a bit more, since he is the elected leader of this ward, and they are meetings that he has organized...which is why some of us have been pressing him to post this sort of stuff on his website.
Irrespective of what the home is going to be used for, there is a bigger discussion here and that is the volume of "institutional" housing in RP. On this block of Estes one has the nursing home, the PACTT center, and 1420 which had been used by Maryville. A block away at Touhy and Greenview (west side), there are two halfway houses; walk two blocks west and there is another halfway house. If we walk north, we run into many nursing homes. A nursing home sounds innocent enough. A place for old people to be cared for. How bad can that be? Just ask many of the residents near those homes that now house drug addicts (who seem to have recidivism issues), and almost all sorts except helpless old folks. On the face of it, a home for autistic people (adults or children)sounds fine and like a nice thing for a community to do. But what will it be in 3 years? 5 years? 10 years? Further, institutional housing, particularly of the halfway and nursing home variety is highly transient, unconnected housing. RP has a lot of this sort of housing and some longtime residents of the 'hood have made the point that RP's downward spiral started with institutional housing and that it continues to be a drag on the community. As long as we are a dumping ground for institutional housing that other neighborhoods don't want or won't take, we'll have problems. This one may be perfectly fine; no doubt every single one of the institutional houses approved was fine on its individual merits. Of course, this may all be a moot point provided no zoning changes are needed. However, given that that block of Estes recently pushed through a downzoning, one would hope that we're not already breaking zoning regs here whether it's a nice thing to do or not. If so, then what's the point of any zoning regs at all?
The house on Touhy and GREENVIEW (just west of Greenview) appears to house boys. Ditto the one on Touhy, just east of Clark. I've not seen any girls at these houses but I see lots of boys, usually hanging out front. This is not a comment on whether loitering out front is good, bad, or indifferent -- just an observation. As for the 1420 Estes house, it used to house boys as well, from what I observed. I also observed a boy from the house, buying drugs in front of the house the summer of '04. I can't speak to any housing on Greenleaf. The 1420 Estes House was operated by Maryville. I don't know who operates the houses on Touhy (at Clark or at Greenview).
I want to be clear that I am not against any one "institutional" house be it a single family home or nursing home facility in principle but am simply raising the issue of the volume of "institutional" housing in RP in general (in fact, I contributed to the formation of a halfway house in Wash DC which had the hilarious result of displacing me when the organization bought the house I lived in which I found very funny). We ought to be able to have this discussion in the larger context of impact on the neighborhood without being accused of being unkind or unfeeling. The residents of this type of housing come and go; the rest of us mostly have deeper roots to the community be it in home ownership or simple long-term residency. Further, many of these charitable organizations are exempt from property taxes which has the effect of placing a greater tax burden on everyone else.
Most people are kind, caring, and very open to helping others; but that doesn't mean we can't have a conversation about whether RP may be shouldering more than its fair share. Maybe we don't have such a heavy load here. But let's have the discussion without being shut down and accused of being jerks because we're asking questions.
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