January 3, 2001
BY BRENDA WARNER ROTZOLL STAFF REPORTER
First it was "No Yuppies" scrawled on "For Sale" signs on Ravenswood buildings. Then it was graffiti defacing spruced-up homes--never mind if they belonged to lifelong residents.
Now the ongoing anti-gentrification graffiti campaign has reached such a point that Ald. Eugene Schulter (47th) on Tuesday put up $5,000 of his own money as a reward for the capture and conviction of the vandals.
Ravenswood residents, many fearing retaliation if their names or addresses were used, said the signs have gone from cute to scary over the last year. They said there has been some gang graffiti following the anti-gentrification graffiti.
And it's not just buildings for sale that are being targeted.
"I've lived here for over 40 years," one elderly resident said. "My son and his friends painted my house this fall and then someone threw paint and wrote markings on my home. I am not a new resident or a yuppie--whatever that is. I'm 82 years old. I just wanted to improve my home, and now that's a bad thing?"
Last month, the 19th Police District put out a communitywide alert of widespread property damage crimes, said Harriet O'Donnell, a vice president of the Ravenswood Community Council.
"We understand that people have strong feelings about change, but this is not the way to go about expressing yourself," O'Donnell said.
Mary Edsey helped create the North Center-Lincoln Square Neighborhood Association a year ago when residents successfully fought to keep the Davis Theater on Lincoln as a low-budget, art and family oriented place.
"We had hoped to be a positive force in the neighborhood and give people a chance to vent how they are feeling and see if we could come up with some positive way to deal with it," Edsey said.
She said the association cannot condone expression by violence. Edsey noted that residents are upset because assessed valuations in Ravenswood have risen an average of 53 percent in recent years.
When the protests began, Schulter said, "they started to put little slogans on `For Sale' signs that said, `No yuppies allowed.' " Now they've targeted senior citizens' homes that have been recently repainted, neighbors said. Vandals have left signs on seniors' garage doors saying, "Yuppies go home," while other markings contained profanity.
Said Schulter, "Obviously this is a small group of people doing this, but with the tens of thousands of dollars' damage they are doing, something's got to be done."
Many older Ravenswood residents have said they may be forced to sell and move out because of rapidly rising property values and the accompanying steep rise in property taxes.
One woman who has lived on West Wilson for 20 years decided to move to be closer to her family. Once she put up a "For Sale" sign, she said, someone painted graffiti on the sign, and there were several break-in attempts at her home.
The woman said when she scrubs off the graffiti, it reappears.
"This is an attempt to intimidate me, and I greatly resent that," said the woman, who asked that her name not be used.
Elsewhere in Ravenswood, Mary Johnson bought a house last February and started to repaint it and replace windows. She said graffiti was painted on signs and on the house at least 16 times.
"The night we moved in, in December, they wrote, `No Yuppies,' on my house," Johnson said, adding paint was thrown on the cedar siding of someone else who moved in nearby the same night.
That was costly to the new owner because once cedar has been sanded it loses some weather resistance and must be painted, Johnson said.
She said at first she took the attacks personally, then realized the vandal or vandals "have a personal vendetta against anybody who rehabs or improves in this neighborhood. He's even marked up houses the original owners are rehabbing. He doesn't want to see an increase in property values."
At one point someone painted on the side of Johnson's house the words "Affordable housing for everyone in the 47th Ward. How about it, Schulter?"
"I literally took the siding down and took it to the alderman," she said.
Johnson said as the vandal painted graffiti on her house repeatedly, "we were constantly following him with a bucket of paint and covering it up. I didn't want to have to be his sounding board."
The vandalism keeps coming. Schulter was pointing out a "no yuppies" sign to a photographer Tuesday afternoon when police notified him another house had been targeted on Seeley.
"No Yuppies" had been spray-painted on a real estate agent's sign and on the building's siding.