Journal of Housing and the Built Environment https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-018-9615-4 ARTICLE

Community participation as a tool for conservation planning and historic preservation: the case of “Community As A Campus” (CAAC) Ivis García1 Received: 11 January 2017 / Accepted: 13 October 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018

Abstract The objective of this article is to examine a community planning approach to urban conservation and rehabilitation. In Chicago, like in many other cities across the USA, there has been an unequal distribution of school closures in minority neighbourhoods with higher than average poverty rates. The closure of school buildings, most with historical value, has destabilizing effects in communities, including the loss of public assets, vacancies, and disinvestment. In neighbourhoods experiencing rent increases, such as with Humboldt Park, the use of historic properties can provide an opportunity to develop affordable housing and avoid displacement. This case study seeks to demonstrate how a grassroots organization in a gentrifying neighbourhood created their own participatory planning process to obtain a surplus school building and reuse it as a “teacher’s village”. The reuse plan includes affordable housing targeted primarily at school teachers, office space dedicated to educationalcommunity-related uses, a café open to the public, and a number of other amenities. The overall development plan seeks to make significant upgrades to allow the building to operate sustainably for years to come. The building is expected to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places and will require a unique and sensitive approach to creating an inspiring, collaborative, and community-oriented development. The methodology employed in this article is based on Participatory Action Research and includes field notes and interviews. The researcher engaged as a participant–observer and committee member for about 1.5 years with “Community As A Campus”—the initiative dedicated to envisioning and planning the redevelopment project. Keywords  Community development · Urban conservation · Community engagement · School closure · Historic buildings · Gentrification · Affordable housing In cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Newark, and Chicago, Departments of Education have been closing schools as a means of balancing budgets and filtering out low-performing or underused campuses. An important concern among activists is the fate of the * Ivis García [email protected] 1



Department of City and Metropolitan Planning, The University of Utah, 375 South 1530 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA

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shuttered buildings of historical, social, and community value. Teachers, parents, students, and community members seem to agree that these buildings represent either potential public assets or hazards if they remain vacant, or if their future uses clash with the needs of the surrounding community. This article explores how an activists’ coalition in Chicago called “Community As A Campus” (CAAC) is pushing for the idea of reusing a former school building to develop a “teacher’s village”, which includes affordable housing for k-12 faculty in the community among its other goals. The particular building of concern for CAAC is located in the Humboldt Park community—a predominately Puerto Rican neighbourhood in Chicago—which many perceive to be experiencing the pressures of gentrification. Through this project, CAAC seeks to reclaim the school for educators who work in the neighbourhood but struggle to pay ever-increasing rents and ballooning mortgage rates. Long-term residents of Humboldt Park have combatted the forces of gentrification for more than 2  decades by organizing grassroots campaigns, protesting the development of unaffordable real estate, and even building their own subsidized housing. This article argues that by way of a grassroots community organizing for historic preservation projects, planners and policy-makers can create an environment that inspires equity, diversity, and empowerment in a way that may exceed the capacity of any given top-down planning effort. The CAAC case study shows that urban conservation can offer more inclusive pathways where community members engage in democratic participation by cultivating historic landmarks at the local and national levels. Historic conservation in the USA was born from community engagement and community organizing in the 1960s as a response to urban renewal—a policy that destroyed the urban fabric and character of historic districts. Preservationists were vehemently against the federal bulldozer that tore down older historic structures and homes (Howard 1972; Gilbert 1973). With the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the preservationist movement was institutionalized at the federal level and grassroots efforts became more technical in their orientation. A specialization of historic preservation methods was formalized to deal with technical matters like material integrity, methodologies for conservation, determination of significance, and understanding of site context. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that planners and others involved in historic preservation started—in both theory and practice—to pay more attention to the socio-economic conditions where sites were located, to assess whether or not local residents were involved in the planning process, and to make sure that historical buildings could serve the social, civic, and cultural needs of the surrounding community. Since the 1970s, economic issues have mostly driven urban conservation, even while other matters remain important (Lichfield 1983; Rypkema 1994). With de-industrialization, many cities have turned to real estate as a means of increasing their tax-base. Thus, historic preservation has come to serve as a tool for economic development and tourism. Spatially, this has resulted in an unequal distribution regarding where historic buildings are being restored in urban areas. Properties being renovated tend to be concentrated in downtowns or higher-income neighbourhoods capable of attracting tourists and local investment. In turn, tourism creates the income and tax bases that further increase the possibility of preserving historic buildings. While higher-income neighbourhoods have been able to restore many buildings, in poorer neighbourhoods these properties have deteriorated over time, with the exception of perhaps publicly owned and maintained buildings like public schools. Although there has not been considerable research dedicated to studying historic preservation in poor neighbourhoods, there is a growing interest surrounding historic preservation in gentrifying areas. This is because the threat of gentrification changes the

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opportunities for preservation. In fact, a number of scholars have noted that urban conservation can result in rent increases and ultimately lead to gentrification (Heudorfer 1975; Steinberg 1996). Most research has been dedicated, however, to understand the relationship between historic preservation and displacement, while little has attempted to show how the process of preserving/restoring historic properties in gentrifying neighbourhoods might provide an opportunity for reusing structures to create affordable housing and ameliorate the displacement of local residents. As stated above, although historic preservation has been dominated by economic arguments, this paper seeks to make an argument for community building in urban conservation efforts and highlights the role urban conservation could play in gentrifying communities that are at risk of losing their unique character (Lichfield 1983; Rypkema 1994; Archibald 1999). The CAAC initiative shows how grassroots organizations attempt to protect the identity and sense of place in Humboldt Park by reclaiming a historical school building for use as workforce housing.

1 Urban conservation in the USA Historic preservation (or, urban conservation) came to be formalized in the USA in the 1960s as a response to urban renewal and the unmitigated construction of highways, which resulted in the demolition of hundreds of thousands of historic sites across the nation (Cullingworth 1997). The publication, Heritage So Rich (1966), by the US Conference of Mayors and the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) vehemently criticizes the harmful effects of federal policy. Ultimately, the Federal National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 was passed to codify preservationist ideals into law. Preservationists were critical of the very foundations of “rational planning”, which dominated planning ideals at the time. Under the rationalistic paradigm, planners demolished historic sites because their focus was to destroy blight and rationally place industrial parks, residential zones, and natural areas throughout their cities (Friedmann and Clyde 1980). According to these ideas, the elimination of blight and the separation of uses would necessarily lead to healthy, safe, and efficient cities (Boyer 1986). Minority, low-income, and inner-city neighbourhoods suffered the most because they were considered blighted and unsanitary (Vale 2002; Goldsmith and Blakely 1992). Although city plans were implemented differently throughout the USA, with local and regional traditions curtailing attempts to standardize the discipline, the basic ideal of segregated districts was broadly accepted as being the best practice for city planning endeavours nationally. Neighbourhoods were segregated by use as well as racial and ethnic categories (Mele 2000; Angotti et  al. 2016). Further, urban spaces were delineated from suburban spaces in an attempt to control crime and the negative impacts of neighbourhoods which had become poverty-stricken or underdeveloped like Humboldt Park—the community we will explore in this article. In the 1960s, rational planning came under attack for the very foundations of its rationalistic creed. Notably, Jane Jacobs, an activist and journalist in New York City (NYC), came to serve as a central voice in the contestation against the rationally minded planner as represented, in her case, by the highly influential NYC planner, Robert Moses. Moses himself was a staunch advocate for the rationalism of modern planning ideals, but when the implementation of his ideals threatened to tear apart a large section of the city’s Greenwich Village neighbourhood—where Jacobs resided—to build the proposed Lower Manhattan

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Expressway, Jacobs penned her seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), and presented an activist challenge to his plans and eventually led to the expressway’s cancellation altogether. Jacobs argued that cities—far from being rationally manageable by way of organized sectors—were in reality large organisms which, when allowed to operate unimpeded, would solve many of the problems planners sought to address without their intervention (Jacobs 1992). In fact, she argued, it was often the very sensibility of the rational planning method that was causing the problems planners were seeking to address. This kind of opposition to Moses reaches a turning point in 1963 with the demolition of NYC Pennsylvania Station (Christin and Balez 2014). Following the completion of Penn Station’s demolition in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Historic Preservation Act.

2 The fall of rational planning and the rise of community engagement As rationalistic models for city planning slowly fizzled out after the 1960s, what took their place was a general awareness of the need to engage directly with the communities they intended to serve (Medoff and Sklar 1999; Triece 2016). Concurrently, community members also began to expect planners and policy-makers to respect their ideas and demands in their planning processes and to incorporate the needs of the community first. However, any idea of best practices, expertise, or orthodox methodologies of the new approach were to be set on the backburner or disregarded altogether (Hyra 2008). The “community engagement model”, in contrast to the rational model for planning cities, seeks to understand cities and neighbourhoods as complex, living organisms in a constant and unending process of change (Jacobs 1992). As changes inevitably progress, ideas that were once held as absolute and commonsensical often come to be seen as outdated, antiquated, or backward. To allow for change, and perhaps even to accommodate it, contemporary planners seek to engage and understand community members and make policies with local interests and needs in mind. Community engagement might roughly be described as the ongoing process of facilitation of community members, especially the representation of diverse or underrepresented groups, into the participation of the design of their neighbourhoods and cities (Harwood 2005). The means by which a city, a neighbourhood, or even a block come to be designed, developed, or built is a highly complex process—one which seemingly never comes to an end. This complexity, it is felt, is best addressed when a large section of stakeholders with a wide ranging set of beliefs and understandings come forward and interact to create and recreate the spaces in which they live (Innes and Booher 2005). By the late 1960s, planners such as Sherry Arnstein began formalizing community engagement models which sought, not to control communities, but, to facilitate them in their struggle for improvement. Arnstein presented what she called the “ladder of community participation” (Fig. 1), wherein each rung represented a step in the direction away from merely manipulative engagement processes, towards a purer sense of citizen control and democracy. The ladder has three main levels: non-participation, tokenism, and citizen power (Arnstein 1969). Arnstein’s ladder has come to be seen as indispensable for planners trying to conceptualize the processes and means they might use to engage communities in the USA and internationally. The CAAC case study is an example of citizen control/power, which is the top rung in the ladder of citizen participation. A group of residents and parents engaged in an

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Fig. 1  Sherry Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation” Image recreated by author

initiative known as “Community As A Campus” (CAAC) were able to take advantage of an important opportunity when a historic urban school was left vacant and “up for grabs” in the for-profit real estate market. While the building was threatened with gentrification and displacement, CAAC decided to transform it into housing for teachers, and amenities geared towards the local community. This strategy ensured both the

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preservation of both the building and the local culture in an integrated framework of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. This article seeks to offer lessons to those stakeholders in urban conservation and planning attempting to engage in community participatory processes, where the community is ultimately empowered to solve problems on their own—although with the support of decision-makers in government and elsewhere. This article demonstrates that communities work best when they are empowered to engage in urban conservation projects that value the local culture and promote equity.

3 Methods The primary methodology of this paper is predicated on Participatory Action Research (PAR) as the author was/is an active participant of the Community As A Campus (CAAC) planning committee. PAR is a research methodology where the researcher takes part of an initiative or project with the community (Bosco-Pinto 1976). All participants (including the researcher) are understood to be working as agents of change (Fals-Borda 1978). In this view, participants are not just informants and the researcher is not solely impartial to what the community is trying to achieve (Schutter 1981). PAR seeks to facilitate democracy and, ultimately, to transform the conditions of power (Freire 1994; Freire and Macedo 2000). In summary, PAR seeks to empower agents to find solutions to community problems without the inevitable biases that stem from the “ideals” of expertise. In this case, the author has been working with the community in various initiatives for more than 6 years, and in this particular project, the author was actively engaged on a weekly basis with other CAAC members for more than a year and a half. While much of what has been written in this article comes from these weekly meetings—whether from meeting minutes and write-ups of different scripts of the CAAC committee, the author also conducted seven individual interviews with key participants and stakeholders. In these interviews the author asked participants the following open-ended questions: • How would you describe the CAAC initiative to those who do not know about it? • In an initiative like this, why is a teacher’s village important? • How does the teacher’s village address the needs of this community?

In order to provide a more critical view of CAAC, the researcher interviewed three people outside of CAAC who had concerns on the proposed development. Along with the qualitative data that emerged from the aforementioned techniques, this article uses quantitative data to describe and supplement the storyline that was crafted by participants. For instance, publicly available data were collected from the Census and the American Community Survey to create a demographic picture of the community such as race, ethnicity, poverty rates, median incomes, and educational attainment. For the purposes of this article, Humboldt Park is loosely defined as a general space where a large number of Puerto Ricans live and go to school (Fig. 2). This article used a one-mile radius surrounding the site at 2620 W Hirsch St Chicago, IL 60622 (formerly Alexander von Humboldt Elementary School), as the geographic area for which community data were collected and analysed. Data were aggregated from the 2000 Census and contain 29 census tracts, while data aggregated for the 2011–2015 American Community Survey 5-year estimates contain 25 census tracts.

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Fig. 2  Study area, one-mile radius around the Alexander von Humboldt Elementary School, located at the 2620 W Hirsch St Chicago, IL 60622. Image by author

4 The setting: a gentrifying Puerto Rican ethnic enclave Puerto Rican migrants began moving to the US en masse as part of the Operation Bootstrap, which began in 1947 primarily to resolve worker shortages of productive and domestic labour (Padilla 1947). In 1960, there were 32,371 Puerto Ricans living in Chicago, and by 2000 the population had more than tripled to 113,055 (Census 1960, 2000). As populations have waned in other industrial cities, the Puerto Rican population has correspondingly declined slightly to 104,325 according to the last American Community Survey of 2015 5-year estimates. In the 1950s, Puerto Ricans settled on the West Side of Chicago, but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that this trend accelerated as a result of the urban renewal project Chicago 21 Plan, which displaced Puerto Rican families living in the North Side to the West Side (Betancur 2002). Humboldt Park is a community on the West Side of Chicago with a strong history of political engagement, self-determination, and coalition building. As early as the 1950s, Puerto Rican residents bought or rented homes, raised their families, sent their children to the local schools, launched businesses, organized on behalf of the community, and ultimately built an ethnic enclave (Rúa 2012; Pérez 2004). Residents have settled into Humboldt Park in search of jobs, affordable housing, quality schools, conveniently located shopping, green space for families to play and for the sense of community. Those residents formed a commitment to their neighbours that helped build a strong cultural foundation within Humboldt Park. As evidence of the community development work that has emerged from the Puerto Rican leadership, in 1995 the city of Chicago recognized their efforts by erecting the steel gateway on Division Street near Western and California Avenues (Flores-Gonzalez 2001). This act honoured the contributions of Puerto Rican activists and visionaries for making the district unique within Chicago. Today, Humboldt Park—defined here as one mile from the Von Humboldt Elementary School (see note on method)—is a vibrant community of about 64,626 residents with a history of more than 50 years of community development (2015 5-year estimates American Community Survey). The population, however, has declined by about 8 percent from the

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year 2000. About 35 percent of Humboldt Park’s residents are Hispanic, and about 20 percent of Puerto Rican descent. A total of 11,367 people, or about 18 percent of the population living in this area, were foreign-born. According to a number of socio-economic measures, the area performs better than the city average—for instance, 29 percent of people have earned a bachelor’s degree compared to 21 percent in Chicago. The unemployment rate of Humboldt Park is half of the city average (6 vs. 12 percent). Across the area, an estimated 45 percent of households owned their homes compared to 44 percent in the city. The estimated median value of an owneroccupied home was $320,400 in Humboldt Park vs. $222,900 citywide. About 9 percent of housing units sit vacant, compared to about 13 percent in the rest of the city. Despite these hopeful indicators, Humboldt Park faces critical social and economic issues including a high concentration of residents living in poverty (28 vs. 22 percent in the city). The median income ($38,836) is lower than the city as a whole ($48,522). The typical median gross rent for rental units was $1301 compared to $965 (and more than a third of renters are cost-burdened). Along with all the collective problems related to poverty and low incomes, the community faces significant pressures of gentrification which threaten to displace the deep-rooted residents of Humboldt Park and erode its cultural base. The narrative of gentrification and displacement can partly be supported by looking at population losses among Blacks and Latinos—groups which both tend to have less purchasing power than Whites and Asians (Hao 2007). Between 2000 and 2015, the White population increased by 30 percent, and Asian population increased by 130 percent. Meanwhile, the African American population declined by 16 percent and the number of Hispanics decreased by 42 percent. The increase in Whites and Asians, combined with a decrease in African Americans and Hispanics, seems to indicate gentrification pressures in Humboldt Park (Mumm 2014). Similarly, there has been a concomitant decline of residents over 65 and under 18 years old (Hammel and Wyly 1996). Gentrification refers to a process where higher-income residents move into lowerincome neighbourhoods resulting in socio-economic changes such as increasing rents and the creation of inequalities that displace low-income residents (Smith 1996). For those who following Chicago news commentaries, the population decline has affected student enrolment to the point that about 50 elementary schools had been closed around the city in 2013 (Ahmed-Ullah et al. 2013). Four schools were closed in Humboldt Park alone: Von Humboldt, Duprey, Ryerson, and Lafayette (Johnson 2013). Certainly, population decline among school children, either in the form of disinvestment and/or gentrification, has contributed to lower school enrolment, and therefore school closings, throughout Chicago.

5 School closures On March 2013, Chicago Public Schools released to the public their plan to shut down 54 failing and underutilized campuses in order to cover the City’s budget deficit of $1 billion. The new plan affected about 30,000 students, where 90 percent were of colour and 85 percent were low income. The Chicago Teacher’s Union, along with thousands of parents, students, and community members, protested against school closures for months arguing that the vacant buildings would result in further disinvestment and force children into dangerous commutes—due to crossing gang territories after being transferred to a different neighbourhood (Lipman 2011). Although protestors were effective in preventing the closure of 5 out of the 54 schools, there were still

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49 schools shut down. Many Chicagoans felt that these schools were important anchor institutions that should not have been closed. Meghan a local activist, part of the teacher’s union, expressed her opinion on the matter: With the excuse of having deficits, alongside the ‘imperative’ of reforming education and increasing students’ performance levels, the state is rationalizing neoliberalism. Public teachers lost their jobs and, more likely, these buildings will be transformed into charter schools or luxury housing. This is called neoliberalism—where public assets are sold out to private entities. It doesn’t matter which entities; it can be private developers or non-profit organizations. Once these public assets are privatized, there is not going back. All schools closed were in low-income communities of colour—either majority Latino or African American. Pauline Lipman does not see this as an accident, but as a public policy of neoliberal governance that, in the name of a privatization agenda, hurts democracy and dispossesses working class families of their assets (Lipman 2011). On the other hand, the administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel not only emphasized the budget crisis and the need for a turnaround in the schools, but also talked about how these communities experienced a population decline, especially among children. The 2010 census revealed that in the last decade the population of Chicago had decline by 100,000 people and that of these, 90 percent were African American. While the majority of Black neighbourhoods are losing population due to economic decline, most Latino neighbourhoods are experiencing gentrification. In our study area, between 2000 and 2015, the percent change in population under 18 years old was close to 40 percent. During the same time period, the non-Hispanic White population increased to 32 percent, while the Latino population declined by more than a 40 percent (Census 2000 and American Community Survey 2011). There is also growing inequality in Humboldt Park, a sign of gentrification. For example, the median income for a family in 2015 ranged from $26,607 to $204,792. According to Boxwood Means, Inc., since the recession, home sales have increased by 60 percent and home prices by 33 percent—from $338,000 to $450,000 on average. Previous research has discussed how gentrification contributes to the decline of public school enrolment in two ways: 1) gentrification is characterized by young professionals and/or “Dual Income, No Kids” or “DINK” couples without children, and 2) more affluent families have a preference for private education (Garnett 2010). Despite protests from parents, teachers, and school administrators, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) decommissioned a total of four schools in Humboldt Park: Alexander Von Humboldt, Duprey, Ryerson, and Lafayette. In response, CAAC proposed to redevelop Von Humboldt into a teacher’s village. All of these schools were suffering from under-enrolment. For example, Von Humboldt Elementary had 362 out of a possible 900 students. A mother expressed her disappointment, I understand that there were less kids in the school, but small classrooms are supposedly great for children. I remember I received an automated call from the school saying that the school was closing and I was like, what? For me this came out of nowhere, you know. Then they had meetings about it, I went. A lot of people complain, protested, but the decision was already made, you know. Residents argued that there was a lack of public participation all along this process. At public hearings, residents were allowed to express their opinions to an advisory board only after they were notified their school would be closed. As will be illustrated in the next

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Fig. 3  Historic picture of Alexander Von Humboldt School, 1894. Courtesy of Bill Latoza

Fig. 4  Modern picture of the Alexander Von Humboldt School, 2013. Courtesy of James Iska

section, the formation of CAAC can only be understood as part of a broader concern about Chicago Public Schools (CPS) lack of interest in engaging teachers, administrators, parents, and the general community in decision-making processes (Figs. 3, 4).

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6 Community As A Campus (CAAC) With an influx of Puerto Ricans into the West Side of Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s, schools in the area were subject to disinvestment by the CPS. According to the report, “Puerto Rican Dropouts in Chicago: Numbers and Motivations”, written by Dr. Isidro Lucas, the dropout rate among Puerto Rican high school students in 1971 was more that 70 percent. In 1973, Puerto Rican parents and students mobilized, demanding school reform. Students would protest by walking out of the classroom and marching to city hall. They would demand from city government: better equipment, facilities, and services. Another important demand was to hire more teachers (schools were overcrowded) and hire Spanish-speaking teachers to run bilingual education programmes. In 2008, more than 3 decades after these protests and attempts to reform, a group called Community As A Campus (CAAC) started to create their own model of change. Through this coalition, administrators, parents, and school reform activists created a master plan to turnaround schools by linking a total of 12 schools in the Humboldt Park area. The idea was to align curricula and create a pipeline from K-12 education as well as share resources and programmes between schools. The basic concept of CAAC was to get rid of the school boundaries and extend them to the community. They often borrowed the African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” to communicate what CAAC meant. The argument here is that schools were failing because the community was not involved. In their eyes, it was necessary to link the school to the community and vice versa in a holistic manner instead of working on silos. Parents needed to be more involved, so CAAC proposed that parents should take adult classes in their children’s classrooms where they were not used. Classes would be free, but parents needed to volunteer at school events. A survey was conducted to assess family needs for education, employment, and affordable housing. The idea was to start connecting families to community services. CAAC became part of a programme called “grow your own” where they would train high school students to eventually become teachers. One of the arguments presented by CAAC was that teachers should be able to afford the rents and home prices in the vicinity, as teachers who lived in the community where more likely to understand the needs and wants of their students. In addition, CAAC identified that retaining teachers was an issue because of the rising rents in the area. These are just some examples of how CAAC conceptualized the community as an ecosystem—meaning that there should not be any separation between schools and the community. By looking at the whole system, they could make structural changes. This plan was so compelling that the CPS Board of Education decides to officially endorse it. Jose Lopez, Executive Director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and the primary spokesperson for both CAAC and the teacher’s village, communicated his vision: The only way for us to make educational changes is by taking a holistic approach to educational practice; where we can harness the social capital of the community by bringing all the agencies and organizations to claim a stake in our educational experience. The idea is to create a Community As A Campus, where we value the community as a critical space for intellectual engagement. The teacher’s village is part of that broader vision. Although the teacher’s village is not the centrepiece of CAAC, it is the primary mechanism to maintain community control (to return to Sherry Arnstein’s conceptualization) by

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helping teachers stay in the community and attract those who work in Humboldt Park, but live somewhere else.

7 School conversion into teachers’ housing Most of the school buildings that were closed in 2013 went up for bid starting in 2014. On March 2015, CPS opened a Request for Proposal (RFP) for Alexander Von Humboldt, joining other 17 school sites across the city that had been put on the market, most of them in prime real estate areas. Community residents in Humboldt Park felt immediately cheated by the possibility of losing a community asset to a for-profit developer that would build market rate housing. The first school sold in Chicago on October 2014, Peabody Elementary, was only two miles away from Von Humboldt. Although Northwestern Settlement house—a non-profit organization that provides early childhood and parent education programmes—put a bid for $1 million, it lost to a real estate developer, Svigos Asset Management Company, who offered $3.5 million for the property (Hauser 2014). CAAC members understood that they needed to make a winning proposal, by finding a compatible use, and drawing upon political support, as well as providing an acceptable monetary offer to CPS. They knew that one of the caveats of the RFP was that the Advisory Committee for School Repurposing and Community Development required a final approval from the local Alderman to ensure that the development met community needs. Since CAAC members worked closely with Alderman Moreno, they sought his support for their vision. As a result of this alliance, before accepting any public bids, Alderman Moreno proposed to rezone the building as mixed-use residential and commercial development, thus limiting other uses and possible bids. The new use was approved unanimously by the Planning Commission. Another key element was that representatives from CAAC were able to bring on board the Illinois Facilities Fund (IFF) as a partner. IFF is a non-profit developer and lender; they brought to the project $3.1 million. Although there were two higher bidders, the Chicago Board of Education chose the proposal that provided “the highest value” and more closely aligned with the community’s wants and needs (CPS 2015). The Board approved the teacher’s village proposal on July of 2015, and after being 2 years in the making, the project is expected to break ground in the summer of 2017. The Humboldt Park teacher’s village, rebranded as “Teacher’s Square”, is partially being modelled after a project in downtown Newark, New Jersey, that was developed in 2012 by the RBH Group. This project is the largest and most well-known teachers village in the USA. It first phase costs about $150 million and included about 70,000 square feet of commercial space and more than 200 apartments—housing about 1000 teacher families. Since 2016, Ron Beit CEO of the RBH Group became a partner of IFF and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center (who represents CAAC). On November of 2016, Beit went to Humboldt Park to speak on support of the plan. He spoke about how community residents would be able to take from free to paid classes in the community classrooms at the village. Members of CAAC spoke about how they already were partnering with local universities to further develop their “parent university”, which currently operates in Roberto Clemente High School, offering video, computer, and other classes to parents. The teachers village would become another campus, along with CAAC “teacher and administrator’s institute” where participants will improve curriculum and teaching skills, as well as share and reflect on strategies (Figs. 5, 6, 7).

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Fig. 5  Renderings of proposed development. Courtesy of RBG Group

Fig. 6  Renderings of proposed development. Courtesy of RBG Group

7.1 Housing for teachers as an educational issue The teacher’s village will be a 84-unit residential complex, which will include 17 affordable housing units, 25 middle income, and 42 market rate—according to the final plan.

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Fig. 7  Site Plan. Courtesy of RBG Group

Some community members expressed their concerns regarding the market rate housing. Roberto, who has been following the project, said, I support this project, I think that is a great design and it provides great amenities. I love that it housing for teachers. But I think that it begs the larger question of displacement. The rents have been going up in the area like crazy and I do not see the need of including market rate housing. Every time that a private developer comes to this community, we scream and yell, as we should be! We do not need more mixed-income housing within developments. What we need is affordable housing, because the market will take care of creating market rate all around us without our efforts. Do you know what I mean? The only mechanism we have as a community to stay here is if we ourselves create affordable housing. The state is not going to do it for us. That is one of my frustrations, while this is a great project and it is a necessary project, we are somehow missing the opportunity of providing housing for those who needed the most. Although not all the housing units will be affordable, CAAC members maintained that what is being presented is a better alternative than all market rate housing, which was what others developers had proposed for the site. In order to make it work financially and politically, they needed to develop mixed-income housing. They also argued that the mix of housing was determined based on the different teachers households— from single adults to families with one or two incomes as well as empty nest retired teachers. Already, units have been pre-marketed to teachers and many of the units have already been pre-leased. This speaks of the demand that exist for housing that teachers can afford in the area. The average salary of school teacher in CPS is about $57,000 per year, which is about 70 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI) for a family of four with one income earner. In 2014, only about 20 percent of the homes in the vicinity were likely affordable for a 4-person family earning 80 percent of AMI. Partners feel that providing workforce

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housing that is affordable to teachers would be key to both maintain and recruit teachers in the area. The teacher’s village will allow teachers to have a better understanding of our students and parents lived experiences. Teachers and families will be able to form a bond and “growing our own will truly be possible”, according to Roberto Clemente High School’s Community Representative, Jessica Fuentes. To that point, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, member of CAAC and chair of the Puerto Rican Agenda, added, The teachers’ village presents a unique opportunity for educators to experience the community they serve on a deeper level. Specifically, teachers will have firsthand access to critical information about the environment that contributes to shaping their students’ identity, community resources to complement classroom learning, and direct contact with community stakeholders and families. Additionally, their practice will only be enhanced by integrating themselves into the fabric of the community. Instead of being limited to a commuter who drives into and out of the community on a daily basis, the teachers’ village serves as a linkage for educators to truly be of and within the community.

7.2 Mixed‑uses Community As A Campus hopes that the teacher’s village will be a catalyst for positive change in the neighbourhood. CAAC believes that their proposal receives support from the community, city government, and financial institutions not just because it is workforce housing for teachers, but because it will become a community destination. In other words, the development as envisioned would provide opportunities for not only the new residents, but for the community as a whole, who will be able to use the childcare, classrooms, retail, supermarket, and so on. Mixed-uses were viewed as a way to activate the area (which is mostly residential) and open it to the general public; thus, it will maintain the former school as a public asset. CAAC has the vision of creating a community of learners—they are deeply committed to create an educational village and the teacher’s village is part of that vision. The building will house a teaching laboratory school academy where university students learn to become certified teachers. The teachers village will also house the teachers and parents institute from CAAC which are an important part of their community-driven educational reform plan. The mix of uses is expected to transform the area positively, both economically and socially.

7.3 Green rehabilitation and sustainability Wightco, the design firm assisting with the teacher’s village proposal, has a reputation for delivering innovative, integrated, and sustainable designs. First and foremost, the proposed project will maintain the existing building structure. Von Humboldt is a beautiful 3-storey building of Italianate style—red brick and terra cotta details, cut limestone, façades with decorative brickwork, and large windows that allow for panoramic views and sunlight. The building was designed by John J. Flanders and erected in 1884. Given its historical significance, the design will maintain the exterior façade and building structure intact. In addition, the development team expects to work with the Commission on Chicago Landmarks to include the building in the National Register of Historic Places. In addition, the facility

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I. García

is only one mile from the train station and about a 30-min train ride to the Loop; in other words, the project is easily accessible and well connected. Moreover, the new landscape design and streetscape improvements will attract more pedestrian traffic to these blocks— while mitigating water runoff and carbon monoxide emissions.

8 Conclusions It was not long ago that urban planners and policy-makers believed that historic buildings contributed to blight, unhealthy, and unsanitary environments. They thought that modern commercial, industrial, and residential districts would work best when built from scratch and partitioned off from the others in a rigid and stratified manner so as to preserve the productivity, safety, and liveability of each space. Housing would be separated from industry, industry from commerce, commercial spaces from open spaces, and so forth. Today, planners ostensibly think the opposite. A city works best when it incorporates diversity—that is, different uses, buildings of different ages, a variety of housing types, and transportation choices. Encouraging this kind of mix in the built environment is also believed to contribute to social diversity in terms of incomes, ages, ethnicities, races, etc. In addition to the cultivation of diverse spaces and public interactions, planners would add that a city works best when residents are allowed to engage and participate in the democratic process of city building. Moreover, academics and practitioners of a more radical persuasion might even argue that the role of the state should be to facilitate residents in the creation and implementation of their own community plans. While participatory planning has been forgotten by technocrats managing historic preservation, today the processes of community engagement have come to be seen, not just as ancillary functions or even best practices, but as the very foundation of city planning ethics. The virtual necessity of engagement today, however, has not yet produced standards for engagement practices or techniques that could be seen as universalizing or ubiquitous among planning professionals and preservationist; much of the field is constrained to the art and craft of engagement, and not to a rigid methodology or a science. This lack of a clear framework presents both challenges and opportunities for modern planning endeavours. As with Jane Jacobs, it should be our goal to inspire and cultivate the organism that is social life, and not limit its definition or imitate it—and we should do so through stronger community leadership. We can understand the community engagement process as a steady transition from a diffuse, and perhaps disorganized, mass of stakeholders into the formalization of groups and organizations that have a vision for future development. The ultimate goal of community engagement, as with Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, should be citizen empowerment. In this vein, empowerment should be seen as the turning over of the direction of those groups to the community itself. CAAC was born from more than 4  decades of activism around educational issues in Humboldt Park. On the one hand, when Chicago Public Schools announced, the closure of Von Humboldt residents of the area feared that this would become part of a gentrification trend that has been occurring for decades. On the other hand, in response to the threat, these same residents proposed an innovative idea that reflected their deep commitment to education while fighting displacement by using a comprehensive development approach. In that vein, historic preservation acted as a method of conserving such a space.

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Community participation as a tool for conservation planning…

One of the lessons we can draw from CAAC is that community leaders need to start thinking about how to use surplus historic buildings to create positive community change. Although being critical of the state for closing schools, displacing kids from their campuses, and putting public assets for auction, the alternative example demonstrated by CAAC, and its success, is more than substantiated. And, while contesting policies that are unjust towards communities of colour is a necessary practice of grassroots development and organizing, it is also important to lead, fund, and find political support for projects that will help preserve the local community and enhance its quality of life. Being able to unify in the face of these injustices to assert one’s rights is the critical demand. Finding political support and presenting viable solutions requires a vision of the future and the mobilization of groups that are already engaged, planning, and implementing projects in the community already, like CAAC. The fact that CAAC was effectively mobilizing in Humboldt Park gave this leader’s collective the legitimacy they needed to be able to convince politicians, teachers, parents, and other community members that the teacher’s village was not only a good idea for the site in question, but it was, indisputably, the best idea available. Workforce housing for teachers was an issue that resonated with a large portion of the community and thus found support from different stakeholders. CAAC offered this alternative after being able to cultivate a narrative about displacement, an argument to maintain community assets for the public good, and an understanding of how education is interconnected with the community at large. Although revitalizing a neighbourhood while avoiding displacement is a major challenge in urban conservation, this article has demonstrated that it might be possible. Effective urban conservation necessitates community leadership and engagement, as well as having the support of local politicians, funders, and other important decision-makers. City governments should give priority to the proposals of community groups and provide programmes for the future owners to be able to renovate and maintain the properties for the public benefit. The teacher’s village as a concept gained traction, because it was constructed as the only educational alternative to the school closure. Although the community lost their school, which they resisted, they also found fertile ground for the construction of a project that would continue the legacy of Von Humboldt school building which has the following words carved into it, “Learning, Community, and Progress”. Finally, the building of teacher’s workforce housing could be a legitimate alternative to school closures in locations like New York, Philadelphia, Newark, and even Puerto Rico. Marvin Garcia, when asked about the teacher’s village, a project that he has been part from the very beginning, he felt the project really embodies what CAAC believes in, Securing the Von Humboldt school building for the community has been part of the overall CAAC plan to improve educational opportunities for the community and provide housing for teachers, and residents of who are at risk of being displaced by gentrification. We are proud of this accomplishment, however there is more to do.

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