Boarded-up building is small win for neighborhood

Empty apartments in Chicago Lawn had been home to prostitution, drugs

It wasn't long ago that the empty two-story brick apartment building across the street from Fairfield Elementary Academy in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood was home to prostitution, drug use and other nagging crimes.
Now, after neighborhood residents pressured city officials to do something, the building is secured with plywood and there are plans for it to be the canvas for a colorful mural and host to a community garden. The upgrade has provided a small victory for residents in a Southwest Side neighborhood where more than 5,500 properties have been foreclosed on since 1986.
Residents and community groups celebrated Thursday with a block party and barbecue in front of the freshly boarded-up building at 6210 S. Fairfield Ave.
"This is your baby now; you've got to patrol it," Ald. Toni Foulkes, 15th, told the crowd.
Foulkes said it is not clear who owns the building. Foreclosure proceedings were started about 18 months ago but remain incomplete.
Local activists say the property is among thousands of "bank walkaways" that plague the Chicago neighborhoods hit the hardest by the housing crisis. The term refers to foreclosure cases that remain in limbo, leaving in their wake abandoned properties in various states of disrepair.
In Chicago Lawn and nearby Marquette Park, local community groups are working to take legal possession of those properties, which have drawn crime and further destabilize blocks that are already hurting.
"When we remain silent, we are complicit" in those crimes, said Rami Nashashibi, executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, one of several local nonprofit groups that worked to secure the Fairfield Avenue building. "We are going to collectively monitor this property. We are going to collectively reclaim this property."