Having failed to respond to moral and political persuasion, the operators of three senior apartment buildings slated for closing will find themselves in court.
Serves them right.
On Friday, lawyer Matthew Piers filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the residents of Presbyterian Homes’ three facilities on the city’s North Side.
As I’ve been telling you, Presbyterian Homes in August informed more than 100 residents of its rent-subsidized Neighborhood Homes program that it had decided to sell the buildings and that everyone would be required to move.
They did this despite having long told most of these very same residents they would be allowed to remain in their apartments as long as they lived — or at least as long as they could live independently.
It seems Presbyterian Homes has tired of its charitable mission of providing subsidized rents to the elderly and saw an opportunity to sell its properties in the booming North Side real estate scene and plow the proceeds into its more upscale market-rate senior housing business in the suburbs.
Although it is organized as a nonprofit, Evanston-based Presbyterian Homes is a very prosperous nonprofit with a $100 million annual budget, millions of dollars of assets in the bank, and a chief executive officer, Todd Swortzel, who pulls down more than $500,000 a year in compensation.
The organization has no formal ties to the Presbyterian Church, which doesn’t prevent it from aiming its fundraising at generous church members. It receives no government funding.
OPINION
I would have thought my fairly gentle prodding in two previous columns might have convinced Presbyterian Homes’ leaders to rethink the public relations problems inherent in pulling the rug out from under the very people they are pledged to help.
No such luck. Now they will have to spend money on lawyers to defend their actions instead of spending it on their residents who deserve it.
The three affected buildings are Mulvey Place, 416 W. Barry; Crowder Place, 3801 N. Pine Grove, and Devon Place, 1950 W. Devon.
I’ve visited both Mulvey Place and Crowder Place where I met with stunned residents who showed me what close-knit communities they had formed and told me how fearful they were of what now lies ahead.
“If I go homeless, will one of you let me use your shower once a week?” Stanley Rumage, 68, asked his neighbors at Mulvey Place. He meant it, having been homeless previously.
Residents of Crowder Place, 3801 N. Pine Grove, and two other North Side apartment buildings slated for closing by Presbyterian Homes say they were often told by company management that could live there the rest of their lives. |Mark Brown/ Sun-Times
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