LOGAN SQUARE — Three Logan Square homes will soon house families looking to stay in the gentrifying neighborhood after two longtime neighbors donated their buildings — worth more than $1.5 million combined — to an affordable homeownership program.
Sally Hamann, 76, and Anne Scheetz, 73, community activists and friends who have been fighting for the preservation of affordable housing in Logan Square since 2015, donated their workers cottages to the Here to Stay Community Land Trust, which helps younger families with roots in the area become homeowners.
“This was a fulfillment of a dream that we were to donate these two houses that belonged to my husband and me,” said Scheetz, who lived in Logan Square from 1986 through last year.
Scheetz’s homes, which sit next to each other, were valued at nearly $1 million and are being remodeled, said Lucy Gomez Feliciano, community engagement director for the Here to Stay Community Land Trust. Families are expected to move in later this year.
The Here to Stay Community Land Trust, founded in 2019, helps lower- to medium-income families with roots in Logan Square, Humboldt Park, Hermosa and Avondale build generational wealth by buying the land of subsidized properties.
Local organizations Palenque LSNA, the Center for Changing Lives, LUCHA and the Spanish Coalition for Housing launched the community land trust to counteract rapid displacement in the area.
The effort’s inaugural home, near The 606’s Bloomingdale Trail, sold to a family in 2022. The program has sold four homes, and organizers are eyeing more properties with support and funding from a growing list of housing organizations and developers, including Chicago Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation and the Chicago Housing Trust.
Hamann and Scheetz, still active in the neighborhood, decided it was time to downsize and do their part to support affordability in the area, which has changed rapidly in the past 35 years, they said.
Hamann’s activism began when she was in college and ramped up when she moved to Logan Square, where she helped create initiatives like the 14th Police District CAPS Beat meetings.
Hamann rallied for social justice, public safety and housing stability through Somos Logan Square, a group of neighbors fighting increased displacement. As part of that effort, Hamann was arrested in 2016 for lying down in the middle of Milwaukee Avenue near California Avenue in protest of the Noca Blu towers, she said.
Hamann became a court advocate and served the Greater Goethe Neighborhood Association Zoning Committee 2004-2021, lending her support to the Preserve Lathrop Campaign, among other neighborhood developments.
“In every development that went up in this neighborhood, I pushed for affordable housing,” she said. “When I first started doing it, everybody was like, ‘What?’ and I pushed, I continue to push, and now it’s a city law.”
Scheetz was also a member of Somos Logan Square and worked as a primary care and internal medicine physician in Chicago for 30 years. In 2010, she retired from clinical practice to work full-time as a volunteer for single-payer universal health care alongside her late husband, Jim Rhodes, she said.
“We both shared a belief in safe, affordable housing as a critical social determinant of health and a human right,” she said.
The women now live in an apartment and an assisted living home “with no stairs,” they said.
They are grateful to the housing program and the community groups that have allowed their homes to remain in the community at an affordable price and “take them out of the for-profit madness,” Scheetz said.
For Hamann, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1979, preserving property for future generations was an important goal — especially after seeing rapid displacement and a slew of $1 million homes go up around her cottage near Artesian and Fullerton avenues, she said.
“I really loved the house, and I watched many beautiful old houses like mine [where] people died … and the houses got knocked down and we got these more expensive houses,” Hamann said. “I saw this to the south and was like, ‘They’re not going to do that to my house.'”
Renovation was made possible through public and private funds, such as the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Program, led by the city of Chicago’s Department of Housing. Hamann’s home was the first project in the city to leverage the program for affordable homeownership, Here To Stay officials said.
Hamann’s home, which has three bedrooms, a yard and a garage, underwent a gut rehab after she donated it.
“The house was built in the 1880s. There’s literally big, huge tree trucks that support the house, and I’m sure they will last for another 100 years and outlast the houses next door,” Hamann said. “It being both preserved and affordable is a blessing for me.”
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