The Chicago Reporter articles from January 2005

The Chicago Reporter archives from January 2005

Editor's note.(analysis of real estate investments)(Editorial)
January 1, 2005... They started small. Land had always meant something to my mother's parents, poor farmers-turned-schoolteachers. So after my grandpa sold his share in the small-town Kansas hardware store he and a friend had opened after returning from World War...

Letter to the editor.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... I recently read your article ["Kids Again," October 2004] regarding the disproportionate amount of minority youth who travel through the Cook County Judicial system. In addition to being stigmatized by the label of going through the judicial...

Rapid response: when the tsunami hit, a suburban community's ties stretched across the globe.(New Voices)
January 1, 2005... Bhima Reddy has seen a lot in the last month. On television, he saw a tsunami-decimated field in southern India where he used to play cricket as a boy. In person, he's witnessed his temple in southwest suburban Lemont join its...

Flooding the block: police in the Harrison District say area crime keeps dropping, but some residents aren't so sure.
January 1, 2005... Anthony Baumann, an eight-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, is having a slow January afternoon. As he cruises streets in the Harrison Police District on the West Side, many eyes turn to his squad car. He waves to children, who are...

Costly choices: many African Americans struggle for home loans, leading them to expensive alternatives.(Cover Story)
January 1, 2005... In a month she'd be homeless. Edna Williams-Foreman wasn't sure why her landlords of 10 years called the meeting in October 1999. She and her 11 neighbors headed to the basement of their building at 54th and Woodlawn. Their landlords had...

Case dismissed: lending discrimination--hard to detect, even harder to prove.
January 1, 2005... After much searching, Alyce Lyle found the home she wanted to buy. was a three-bedroom, single-level home in downstate Springfield with an asking price of $50,500, which was just doable on her substitute teacher's salary. But when Lyle made an...

Banking on Latino buyers: in recent years, lenders are paying more attention to Chicago's fastest growing population.
January 1, 2005... By the time he was 21, Rafael Yanez had already done what experts say the average American won't do until he or she is 32. He'd bought a home. Prompted by his success, Yanez convinced his parents to do the same, then a sister-in-law,...

Moving closer: an achievement gap remains, but parents and officials say the Evanston school district is making progress.
January 1, 2005... For four years, west-central Evanston resident Marjorie Smith piled her son into the family van every morning to make the two-mile trip across town to Lincolnwood Elementary School on the city's northwest side. Shortly after they pulled...

January 9, 2005.(Parting Shot)
January 1, 2005... Juliana Armbrust, sound engineer at the HotHouse, pays tribute at a draped piano that memorialized the victims of the December tsunami at Chicago Responds: HotHouse's Benefit Concerts for Tsunami Relief.