Though he usually paid week-to-week for his room at the Sheffield House, for Joe Torsan, the Lake View hotel that he called home for over a decade was anything but temporary.

Originally from the South Side, Torsan moved into the “single room occupancy” hotel in the late 1990s after being evicted from his apartment and losing his job with a health insurance company. At the time he was also suffering the recent loss of his parents and struggling with drug abuse.

“I had no place to go except this hotel — a friend told me to go there,” said Torsan, 58.

The limited amenities offered at Sheridan House — a small studio with no kitchen and a shared bathroom — were enough to help Torsan get back on his feet, and what was supposed to be a stay of a few months turned into a 14-year residency.

Now working the overnight shift at a nearby Target store, Torsan has held various jobs in the neighborhood, as well as at Sheffield House, where he served as a security guard and front desk attendant for years. At one point, he even owned and operated a few vending machines in hotel.

But along with the rest of the occupants at the 84-year-old building, Torsan found out earlier this summer that he would have to leave Sheffield House.

Soon after serving eviction notices at the building, the new owner, Jamie Purcell of the Park Ridge-based BJB Partners, told Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) that he intended to renovate and redevelop the building. Residents at Sheffield House were originally given one day to leave the hotel, but that order fell through when held up against the city’s eviction laws.

Purcell handed down similar evictions at the Belair Hotel, 424 W. Diversey Ave., which he had purchased around the same time. Only a handful of tenants now remain at that 250-unit building.

Calls to Purcell at BJB were not returned for this story.

As of last Friday, Torsan was one of the few residents still living at Sheffield House. He was packing up his belongings and getting ready to move to another nearby SRO hotel, the Hazelton at 851 W. Montrose Ave.

Others haven’t been so lucky.

Sarah Raney had been living at Sheffield House for three months when word got out that she and the other boarders would have to leave. Raney, 74, will go to court over her eviction on Oct. 28, but she expects the case to be thrown out when she agrees to vacate her unit.

“The eviction is sort of a harassment to get people to move out,” she said.

Since being served with the notice in August, Raney has been looking a new place to live, but has so far come up short.

Raney said that financial issues — coupled with a bad leg which prevents her from living anywhere without an elevator — have complicated her search for a new home.

“I want to have a little money left over after I pay rent every month,” she said.

Raney also hopes to bring along her three cats, but most landlords at SRO hotels don’t allow pets, she said.

Though Raney has looked at some senior living developments, she feels that she is still capable of living independently in SROs or in similar situations. Applying for a unit with the Chicago Housing Authority is starting to look like one of her better bets, she said.

Though options (and waiting lists) for low-income living facilities have expanded over the past few decades — supportive housing developments now offer case management, job training and healthcare services along with cheap rooms — some believe that SROs are still a vital element in the spectrum of affordable housing.

“They call it ‘affordable,’ but we like to think of it as ‘accessible housing,’” said Bob Zuley, a volunteer with the housing advocacy group Lakeview Action Coalition.

Zuley said that SROs are often the only available route for those who need a place to stay but are barred from most renting opportunities when they are unable to cover security deposits or because they carry an eviction on their record.

Zuley’s group, which promotes affordable housing projects in the Lake View area, has been working with displaced residents at Sheffield House and the Belair since July. He said that while there are still a number of SROs in the area, such as the Lawrence House and the Chateau Hotel, the closing of these two hotels dealt a blow to a community that works in the Lake View while teetering on the brink of homelessness.

In an effort to reverse this trend, LAC is currently drafting a proposed ordinance that would codify standards for preserving the city’s existing stock of SRO units.

“We hope to stabilize, preserve, and expand SRO housing stock in Chicago as well as promote SRO urban housing as essential, viable, and necessary,” Zuley wrote in an email.

Among other policy points, the amendment looks to block zoning changes that would shift the use of an SRO building away from low-income housing, and calls on aldermen to “advocate for all economic and political resources to preserve and improve SRO housing in their wards.”

But the fight to preserve SROs in the city may prove to be an uphill battle, as very little money has gone into SRO development and rehabilitation in the Chicago in the past twenty years.

Development efforts have mostly shifted to non-transient, supportive housing projects, which have enough trouble closing financing gaps as it is, said Lisa Kuklinski, spokesperson for Mercy Housing Lakefront, a non-profit affordable housing developer that operates 1,300 supportive housing units across the city.

Outside of utilizing low-income tax credits, Lisa Kuklinski said that her group usually identifies six to 12 funding sources, both in the public and private sectors, for development projects.

“We call it lasagna financing,” she said. “No one source provides enough to fully fund the construction, operations and services in a building, so you have to go to many sources.”

Kuklinski said that while the construction of supportive housing has largely replaced that of SRO hotels, the latter is still considered an important resource in the effort to keep people off the street.

“It was always a way to prevent homelessness day-to-day,” she said, “so I don’t think it would be identified as being ineffective.”

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By Boyee
Posted: 10/29/2011 12:51 PM

While this is not good for the residents of these SROs, I do not find it surprising as the neighborhood around these SROs has been getting more and more gentrified and it should come as no surprise that the owners want to gain the most they financially can out of these buildings in this gentrified neighborhood. Both the Sheffield House and Belair will be market-rate apartments or condominiums soon.