MTO - METROPOLITAN TENANTS ORGANIZATION
Chicago, Illinois
Story and Photos By Mary Jo McConahay

For more than 20 years the Metropolitan Tenants Organization in Chicago has been educating and organizing renters to demand their rights from landlords and authorities, and participate in public debate about decent—and affordable— housing. Its volunteer tenants' rights hotline counsels hundreds of families each week. Tenants themselves become organizers, and it could not be happening at a more critical time. The city's housing authority is demolishing thousands of public units, HUD contracts are expiring, and landlords are seeking to gentrify, which means the working poor who cannot afford to buy are squeezed out.

She couldn't pay the rent. Divorced, distraught, feeling alone, Sylvia Melecio watched terrified as the possibility of life on the street came closer by the day. How would she keep her three children together? The apartment crawled with mice and roaches, it was true, but the family had nothing else. The landlord entered at will to show the place to prospective tenants.

It is a period even Sylvia's youngest, Ricardo, now 10, still holds inside him. His large dark eyes appear to see what he describes. "Being homeless means you have no place to sleep at night except maybe with a lot of other people you don't know, and it makes going to school hard," Ricardo says, with all the wisdom of a kid who lived with the possibility for years. "And it could be cold."

When the grapevine led Sylvia to the Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO), she says she stopped sliding. "They listened. I cried."

Counsel came: Be tough.

Tense court appearances led to judgment against the landlord, for failure to repair and unlawful entry. Soon Sylvia was working on the MTO's Tenants' Rights Hotline. Her favorite advice: "Don't let them intimidate you." She learned the housing code. Today Sylvia has a different, clean apartment, and experience has led to a new salaried job with an advocacy organization near home. Older son Hector must sleep on a sofa, teenage daughter Violet shares a room with her small brother, and the kitchen is tiny. But Hector is attending college to become a teacher, and Ricardo likes to show his collection of action figure cards. Ordered in a shiny tin box, they are a symbol of his own newly stable world. "I keep them in excellent condition," the boy says importantly. Sylvia and the youngsters are, for now, survivors of the city's tenant wars.

It's hard to see that struggle at first glance because Chicago hums and gleams these days. Lovely Lake Shore Drive and inlets with pleasure boats have always been there, but now nearby neighborhoods too display fresh porches or remodeled facades. Newly blooming medians make even trafficked corridors more attractive to condominium buyers. As population grows and values rise, however, tenants on welfare—as Sylvia once was—and those with minimum wage jobs find it bitterly difficult to pay rent increases. "Chicago has turned around urban disinvestment, but someone has paid a price," says MTO's executive director Pam Alfonso. Properties are increasingly "flipped," bought and sold with costs passed on to renters. Owners see more profit potential in condo conversions than the status quo. Gentrification makes eviction a leading cause of homelessness.

"In the fall renters start to call about heat, and we tell them the landlord is obligated to turn it on," says Sylvia. "I've visited places where babies' faces were all bitten up, and we had to help the families get emergency de-infestation—it's their right."MTO organizers and advocates, low-income tenants themselves, say fear of retaliation makes other renters cautious about exercising rights, and beyond that, shy about contributing to public policy that might bring more safe, low-cost housing. Retaliation can be real: eviction, rent raises, failure to repair, threats. Advocates even have a martyr, Arnold Mireles, shot dead on a southside street in 1998 because his organizing efforts for another group sent a landlord to jail for failing to comply with building codes. The landlord hired the hit men.

"But if you don't stand up for those rights you're gonna be crushed," says June Griffin, a friend of Mireles and MTO volunteer, who spends days accompanying renters to Housing Court. She spends more hours in the courthouse basement researching records. Does the landlord own other buildings? Is there a pattern of neglect? June's own spare apartment sits near a rumbling elevated train. Weighing less than a hundred pounds, with physical challenges, she moves with surprising speed down her street at night, heading for yet another meeting, slaloming around clutches of young men in gang clothing, past grated windows of shopkeepers who don't dare stay open past dark. "Welcome to my world," she says. "I live here, sleep here, pray here, and have never seen a politician here."

Yet tenants like June Griffin, and her friend David Wilson, refuse to roll over. David, a caregiver for the homebound, was born in a bedroom at Robert Taylor public housing project when it was a flourishing set of eight high-rises and home to thousands, where growing up "you could eat off the ground." By the 1990s, however, it was a rough place, where young men had to carry the elderly up 15 floors when elevator repairmen refused to come. One recent day, David Wilson stood in a vast field of grass on a spot he reckoned had once been his home, all that remained of the community he had known for 33 years, until seven of the eight buildings were demolished. There were drugs and crime at Robert Taylor by the end, but key to its disappearance, believes David, was soaring land values and suddenly desirable geography. "You could jog to the lake from my house," he says wryly. "They want this for the elites." In the end it happened quickly, although David was among tenants who had long argued with city officials for action to clean up the place, not eradication. It was like shouting into the wind off Lake Michigan. "I was always told, 'This is not the place or the forum for it.' So how do I get heard?"

"David was skeptical from all the betrayal when he first came to MTO," recalls Pam Alfonso. Being with others in the same situation helped. Now part of his volunteer advocacy work is counseling troubled renters who walk into or call the storefront office.

"You have to let them know even though you're a woman and a certain race, you can advocate for yourself, because who knows your story better than yourself?" says Sylvia Melecio of some tenants she counseled. Some go on to organize for improvements in their own buildings, or fight eviction. Others appear at housing authority hearings in attempts to influence policy made downtown. It's hard, but necessary, says Sylvia, to keep some distance in order to be effective when organizing renters. "You have to be able to listen but not get emotional, because otherwise you'll be crying with them," she advises.