From the March/April issue of the CHB:

"Spotlight on Park Forest"

 By John A. Ostenburg

Park Forest, Illinois, is a city of approximately 25,000 residents, some 6,500 of whom today reside in five separate housing cooperatives. The city began as the post-World War II brainchild of Philip Klutznick, a governmental worker in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations who later became an ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary of Commerce under President Jimmy Carter. Working with Nathan Manilow, a Midwestern builder, Klutznick took some empty prairie land about thirty minutes south of Chicago and created one of the first totally planned suburbs in the United States.

According to the Klutznick-Manilow plan, the first phase in building Park Forest was to construct some 3,000 rental townhouses around a central shopping mall and other community facilities. Then, with this nucleus in place, the second phase was the building of detached houses, mostly smaller, two and three bedroom ones. The final phase was the construction of larger single-family residences, many   split-level and custom-built.

As the second phase of individually owned houses got underway in the early 1960s, the developer had increasing difficulty in keeping the townhouses rented. Too many tenants were buying the new houses. FCH, the operating arm of the Foundation for Cooperative Housing Services, Inc., was retained to convert some of the townhouses to cooperative home ownership, thus diversifying the market. A FHA insurance commitment under Section 213 of the National Housing Act enabled conversion of the 370 townhouses in “Area B,” which was then almost half vacant. Sales were slow at first, but when the down payments were reduced to $200, the amount of security deposits then being required of all tenants, Area B was sold out and converted to co-op ownership in a few weeks.

Initially, co-op residents and the various boards of directors that represented them were interested primarily in the governance of their own corporations and paid little attention to the affairs of local government. Eventually, however, it became obvious that government could make decisions that had a huge impact on the manner in which the housing corporations operated and on how they provided services for their residences.

Among of the more troubling actions by local government that brought this awareness were:

·        highly restrictive plat covenants that limited opportunities for expansion and for providing some outdoor amenities;

·        an extremely costly tree-replacement program that the co-ops, as businesses, were obligated to follow even though single-family residents were not;

·        a move-in/move-out inspection program by the local municipal building department that was redundant to inspection programs already underway within each of the co-op corporations;

·        a general treatment of the co-ops as simply rental property rather than as housing corporations whose shareholders were the owner-residents.

An even more troubling development came when a Chicago legislator proposed a bill in the Illinois General Assembly that subjected all housing co-ops in the state to the Illinois Open Meetings Law, thus imposing different restrictions on boards of directors for housing co-ops than for any other Illinois-based corporations.

Park Forest’s co-op residents successfully united to fight each of these impositions and to make their voices heard politically. In the process, they not only influenced government to alter its positions, but also created a system for making sure they were properly represented in government from that point on. In the years since then, co-op residents have been elected as state representative, as mayor of Park Forest, as a member of the Park Forest city council, and as president of the Park Forest school district. Other co-op residents have been selected as chairperson for the city’s Environment Conservation Commission, as vice chairperson for both the Plan Commission and the Commission on Human Relations, and as members of the Cable Television Commission, the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Fair Housing Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee, and the Park Forest Housing Authority. In addition, no one seeks elective office in the Park Forest area today without appealing to residents of the five housing co-ops for their support.

How Influence is Generated and Sustained

The battle to stop the Illinois legislature for enacting unfair regulations for meetings of the housing co-op boards of directors was the first unified effort by Park Forest co-op residents to influence government. The battle plan included hundreds of letters that were written to several legislators, not just to the ones who represented the legislative district in which the co-ops were located. Lobbying visits to the Illinois State Capitol by a group of co-op residents followed, with many of the same legislators receiving a face-to-face pleading of the case. On the day the bill was debated on the floor of the House of Representatives, several legislators rose to explain that they had no co-ops in their district but they were voting “no” on the bill because they had heard from so many co-op residents who did not want these restrictions imposed. Overwhelmingly the bill was defeated, even though it earlier had sailed out of the House Judiciary Committee with hardly any objection at all.

The success of the lobbying effort with the legislature made directors of the co-op board aware of how much potential influence they bring to bear on important governmental matters. They quickly closed ranks to improve voter registration among their residents and to improve voter turnout at elections. Soon the co-op precincts began to show the highest turnout in local elections of all precincts in the town. That fact, combined with the election of a co-op resident as a city council member, caused local elected officials take notice.

As elected officials began to understand the electoral power of the co-op residents when they voted in a bloc, the doors of city government began to open wider to co-op officers and staff. Meetings between the mayor and presidents of the co-ops began to occur, as did meetings between the city manager and the managers of the five co-op corporations. Department heads within the city government began to contact co-op managers for input on public projects that were scheduled to take place within the geographic region of the co-ops, and to communicate more freely on other issues of local government.