Last week when I was visiting my parents in the Chicago area, my mother told me about visiting our old house in Park Forest. It’s the house I grew up in and every space is permanently engraved in my memory. She took my niece to see it and found that it had been foreclosed on and abandoned over a year ago.
My heart broke as she described the damage: all the appliances stripped, the basement walls covered with mold after flooding, the living room window broken, the yard unkempt and trashed.
Ours was a modest house in a functioning, integrated neighborhood. In my high school, our town was a bridge between the wealthier folks (still very middle class) in Olympia Fields and the working class folks finding their way from the South Side of Chicago into the suburban middle class in neighborhoods bordering Chicago Heights. Our neighborhood was full of children and though we pushed against the boundaries of suburbia, we also embraced its opportunities. We were free to ride our bikes and play and explore without supervision from morning to night, all summer long. There was a city pool and an amazing library, baseball diamonds, tennis courts and ice skating rinks. All our friends lived in houses that looked like ours– though ours had the special attraction of having a carport instead of a garage.
My parents bought the house for $23,000 in 1970, when my brother was 2, my sister 4, and I was almost 7. Our ages mirrored the street address of our new house. My parents sold it for about $75,000 in 1993 when they moved “to the country.” According to the online listing, it last sold in 2006 for $129,000. That was no doubt an inflated price and I suspect the loan was tricky and offered to someone who couldn’t afford it, or someone who lost their job in the recession. Now it is being offered at $26,500 and the value is estimated just slightly above that. Personally, I wouldn’t pay that much for it in the shape it is in now. Looking at the photos, my heart sank even lower.
The pictures show the tile floor my mother put in the kitchen, meant to last forever, earthy and warm. It also shows the fireplace we built in 1976 with the bicentennial “cornerstone” brick given to us by my Uncle Jack. But where did that parquet tile floor come from? All that is left is the bones, the layout of each room all but unrecognizable, half-painted walls, ruined wood floors and sagging cabinets.
We had a problem house on our block, that belonged to the Payne family. They had two vicious dogs, one black and one white, named Devil and Angel. Their young son Ricky was scrappy and sweet, foul-mouthed and lost, and for years he would come to our door and ask my mother if she wanted to play or if there were any kids who could come out and play.
My mother said that seeing the house was so sad, she had trouble explaining to her young granddaughter that this is not how it was when we lived there. “Susan, it was worse than the Paynes’ house,” she said. I felt a sting of shame.
The house was in fine shape when I last visited it in 2007, on a trip to the neighborhood with my mother and new husband Steve. The neighborhood seemed much the same, with children playing and riding their bikes. Two of my childhood friends still have parents living on the street, and one of these couples still has their house painted the same white with green shutters. That trip would have been just after it was sold a final time, just before the economic downturn of 2007-8 with its foreclosures, just before the American Dream came crashing down for so many families due to the greed of bankers. Some of those bankers probably grew up in houses and neighborhoods like mine. And yet, where is their shame?