My View: Rockford needs to support efforts for well-managed public housing

I encourage the Rockford City Council to respond positively to fixing up Fairgrounds Valley. That place is in such disrepair that almost any rehab would be an improvement. The Rockford Housing Authority’s plans called for new and less-dense housing, a bike path and a small park. The City Council defeated it 8-2,which is amazing and sad. I did not think our aldermen were so opposed to affordable housing. It’s gotten a bad rap, especially in this town, and it has to be well-managed with lots of services for those who live there.

But our aldermen have opposed even the best of nonprofit housing providers. Case in point: Zion Development, which has led the rehabilitation of the Seventh Street neighborhood (and Rockford Urban Ministries has been a good supporter). Zion lost its request to rehab the Lantow Lofts with partially subsidized lofts. Zion’s big dream under then-director Brad Roos was always mixed housing, encouraging wealthy Christians to live next door to poor families. It has been a success in that many of the homes Zion rehabbed gave housing to families who could not otherwise afford a good place to live.

Zion manages their housing units impeccably, so when Brad presented his carefully crafted plan for the rehabilitation of the Lantow Pharmacy at Seventh Street and Fourth Avenue, the City Council surprisingly shot it down. They demanded, and he acquiesced, to building market-rate condominiums. That was evil, to force a nonprofit that provides housing for the poor to work on market-rate housing in a poor neighborhood.

The collapse of the housing market practically destroyed Zion’s 30 years of work. I’m not sure whether the aldermen really wanted to destroy Zion, but their actions denigrated one of the best nonprofit organizations in the city and forced them to cut back on a number of their projects for the poor.

Maybe the aldermen were looking to gentrify Seventh Street, but you need an upper-middle class demanding more housing in this poor neighborhood. Instead of supporting Zion’s work at lifting people up, the City Council was trying to get them to drag people down. “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater” has been a Rockford activity for a long time.

Our housing problem is aggravated by the fact that Rockford has so much open space in which to move. God blessed us with a lot of land (really, we took it from the Indians); and if we do not like our neighbor, we can just move and the developers are more than happy to build out onto some of the best farmland in the world. We should try to put a green space around Rockford and have developers fill in the empty spaces (or rehab the dilapidated), but the city is so hungry for any type of jobs that they’d support the world’s largest parking lot even if there were no store! But I digress.

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