It’s too soon to say whether any families will be affected by Related Midwest’s plan to sell the historic 694-unit complex of apartments, but the sale would offer a fresh opportunity to reverse the fortunes of a complex mired in violence and poverty, and jump-start the housing market west of Cottage Grove Avenue.
Shame of Chicago tells tale of Chicago s fair housing struggle chicagotribune.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from chicagotribune.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Two days later, the three-bedroom bungalow on Kildare Avenue went under contract to a buyer who in late March paid $235,000. That s a sale at 18 percent over the original asking price, $199,000, after just five days on the market.
The real estate market has been moving fast the past several months, fueled by low interest rates and pandemic-related lifestyle changes, but no place has been as fast as the city s West Lawn neighborhood.
Houses in the neighborhood, south of 59th Street and east of Midway Airport, sold in an average of 36 days in the first three months of the year, according to data released mid-April by the Chicago Association of Realtors and Midwest Real Estate Data.
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In 1962, John W. Baird attracted the ire of fellow members of the Chicago Real Estate Board, which would later change its name to the Chicago Association of Realtors, when he stood in front of the Chicago City Council and called for an open occupancy law that would bar discrimination in real estate sales due to race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry.
Three years later, Baird, then president of his family real estate brokerage Baird & Warner, resigned from the trade group his great-grandfather had helped found to protest the use of its funds to push for discrimination. Years later, Baird would say that supporting fair housing was simply “the right thing” to do, according to his 2013 obituary.