A Gallery of Low Prices

Price cuts, short sales, and foreclosures cross my desk in herds these days. Since the start of the new year, it seems that the sellers of houses, townhouses, and condos who are eager to unload their property have become markedly more serious about making it happen.
Today I have pulled together a gallery of low-priced properties in the city and suburbs. Some of these homes are being sold at auction, and others are…

Glen Ellyn Short Sale

List Price: $599,900
The Property: The latest asking price on this contemporary four-bedroom home in Glen Ellyn is about what the sellers paid for the place in 2004—before they spent an additional $75,000 to add a little more than an acre to what was a half-acre lot. The listing is now a short sale (where the lending bank approves selling the property for less than what’s due on the mortgage)…

“Dude, Don’t Rent”

Most 20-year-olds can’t picture owning a home for at least another several years. For them, Kristen Conradi has a bit of advice: “Dude,” she says, “don’t rent.”
In December Conradi, a 20-year-old college student, bought a foreclosed two-bedroom condo near…

Ornate Past Gets Updated: West Sherwin Place is "ready for a new generation"

ROGERS PARK FROM $165,000 TO $230,000 If it weren’t for the ornate terra cotta detailing on the façade and the drop-off doors for the iceman on a few rear porches, the 85-year-old building at 1549 West Sherwin Avenue might pass for new. (Witness the new wrought-iron balconies and the newly installed windows.) “It’s one of … Read more

A Timely Decay: Construction slowdown benefits Astoria Tower sales

SOUTH LOOP FROM $169,800 TO $1.2 million Outdated maps that misidentified the locations of some nearby underground caissons pushed back construction on the new Astoria Tower by a year. That may have been a good thing: If work had proceeded as scheduled, the building would have been completed just as downtown condo sales were starting … Read more

John Van Bergen’s Wright Stuff on the South Shore

List Price: $499,000
The Property: Built in 1916 when the surrounding neighborhood was a stylish enclave centered on the nearby South Shore Country Club, this Prairie-style house was the work of the architect John Van Bergen, whose buildings are numerous in Oak Park, River Forest, and Highland Park. This is Van Bergen’s only work in Chicago, according to Lee Bey, formerly the architecture critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and now a blogger at…

New Life for Dr. King’s Lawndale Dream

In Lawndale, at the site of the Chicago apartment where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  lived with his family in 1966, work has begun on the Dr. King Legacy Apartments, a $17-million complex that, when finished, will have 45 units of affordable rental housing, retail space, and a mini-museum dedicated to the efforts of King and others to provide equal access to housing in Chicago.