Non-Profit Landlord Of Below-Market Rate Senior Building Gives Elderly Tenants The Word: We're Selling - You've Got A Year To Pack Your Bags Or Face The Boot; Resident: We're Mostly "Middle-Class People Who've Gone Broke!"

In Chicago, Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reports:

• Crowder Place is not a fancy place, but the senior citizens who live there love it.
  
  For years they've taken comfort in the belief that they could live out their lives in one of the building's 40 small apartments.
  
  They like the friendly Lakeview neighborhood, the easy walk to doctors and to church, the clean carpets and the community room where they can gather to play cards, work on the shared computer or watch "Father Brown" on TV.
  
  Some are in their 80s or 90s, though most are younger, and they're mostly, in one resident's words, "middle-class people who've gone broke."
  
  Despite the downturn in their fortunes, living in Crowder Place has made them feel lucky.
  
  "I thought I'd never have to worry about having a roof over my head again," a 75-year-old resident named Lisa said Friday when I went to visit. "But I tell you what. I'm worried."
  
  In August, the residents of Crowder Place, along with tenants of two other subsidized buildings owned by Presbyterian Homes, a faith-based nonprofit, received notice that the buildings were up for sale and they would have to move by November 2016. They were stunned.
  
  "We were told we would be here forever," said a 75-year-old resident who didn't want her name used. "They just hit us over the head with a brick."
  
  Many residents say the same thing: When they moved in, they were told they could stay until they died.
  
  The shock of learning that they have to leave is compounded by the fact that until now everyone at Presbyterian Homes had treated them so kindly.
  
  "Like family," said Betty Holcomb, 64, who says she moved in after losing her home in foreclosure. "This is a tragedy."
  
  "Let's use the proper word," said Lisa, who says she once owned a home in the neighborhood and lives on $750 a month from Social Security. "It's cruel."
  
  Now when residents pass each other in the halls, they ask, "What are you going to do?"
  
  Almost always the answer is, "I don't know."
  
  Now a table in the community room is covered with papers — sheets from HUD and Habitat for Humanity, glossy brochures featuring happy gray-haired couples — and all of it adds up to one thing.
  
  "Confusion," Carole Hendricks, 76, said as she leafed through the papers Friday.
  
  She is trying to keep things simple. So far she has made one application, to the Little Sisters of the Poor.
  
  Here's how Presbyterian Homes explains the decision to sell:
  
  It has been subsidizing three buildings on the North Side for years, with no government funding and relatively small donations. The cost of maintaining the buildings in the future had become too much.
  
  While continuing to do charitable work, the organization is shifting its focus to the market-rate senior homes it runs in the north and northwest suburbs.
  
  As for telling people they could live in the three subsidized "neighborhood homes" for life?
  
  "I don't know what was said to them," said Robert Werdan, vice president of marketing and public relations, noting that once residents can't live independently they move out anyway, into some kind of assisted living.
  
  "This is a difficult thing for everybody," he said. "We've known some of these residents for 20 years. We've had great relationships with them. It's not been an easy thing for us to do."
  
  What rankles the residents is not so much that Presbyterian Homes is selling the buildings — business is business — but that the organization hasn't tried hard enough to sell to an affordable housing developer.
  
  Werdan says Presbyterian Homes looked into the possibility but it didn't seem feasible, and further discussion would probably be unproductive.
  
  Many local politicians disagree.
  
  "I'm puzzled and I'm very angry," James Cappleman, alderman of the 46th ward, said Friday.
  
  He said he and other politicians — including state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, Alderman Tom Tunney and state Senate President John Cullerton — have proposed affordable developers ready to buy, at market rate.
  
  "We gave them names of affordable buyers and they never contacted those buyers," Cappleman said. "It's not adding up."
  
  A few days ago, Jan Schakowsky and Mike Quigley, members of the U.S. Congress, reinforced the plea in a letter to Presbyterian.
  
  "Please protect those who have relied on the affordable housing that you have provided for so long," they wrote, "... and allow these residents to age with dignity and security."
  
  Presbyterian Homes has a done a very good thing for many years. Selling to an affordable housing developer would keep the good going.
  
  Dignity. Security.
  
  "All this is doing," said Lisa, looking around the small sitting room at Crowder Place, "is allowing me to stay in my neighborhood and not feel I've been tossed out on a trash pile."

For the story, see Tenants worry as senior apartment buildings go up for sale.