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Snafu puts focus on dorm: Some Moody students may have to move
(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Aug. 28--About 160 students may have to leave one of Moody Bible Institute's dormitories before the school year is over, after federal and state officials recently realized the students aren't supposed to be there.
Jenkins Hall, a 14-story building on the edge of the Christian evangelical school's sprawling Gold Coast campus, is instead meant to be filled with low-income senior citizens and others living on subsidized rent, federal housing officials said.
About 125 senior citizens are still there. It was the building's entire makeup several years ago until Moody slowly began converting it into student housing and corporate apartments, an action that violates a federal rent subsidy contract tied to the building. Yet state housing authorities mistakenly gave the school formal permission to make the conversion in the mid-1990s.
"I don't have any records at all that would explain why we would enter into this," said Bryan Zises, spokesman for the Illinois Housing Development Authority, the state's arm for affordable housing development. The permission was granted under former Gov. George Ryan's administration, Zises said, and there are no current staffers at IHDA from that era.
Moody officials expressed surprise at the revelation. They say the school has no place else to house the students, many of whom only recently moved into the building at Oak and LaSalle Streets after the fall semester began earlier this month.
Losing Jenkins Hall "in future years will seriously impact the institute's educational programs," the school said in a statement.
Federal and state housing officials said they are meeting with the school to work out a solution that causes the least amount of student disruption while quickly returning the building to its former role.
Officials have also begun forcing the school to make improvements to units occupied by the senior tenants, whose moldy carpets and chipping paint are in stark contrast to the freshly renovated dorm rooms with new floors and Internet access.
"My nose is stopped up all the time because of the mold," said Liz Brake, 61. "I've asked them to change the carpet and they said no."
The 201-unit building, which is near a CTA train station and grocery stores, is among the last affordable housing options available in the downtown area, said Kate Walz, a senior attorney at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. The nonprofit group--representing the senior tenants and others who have tried to move there and were turned away--alerted officials to the situation and is pushing for the students to move out quickly.
"We have clients that are doubling and tripling up in apartments, making decisions every day about how they're going to survive in Chicago," said Walz. "This building represents a great option to them."
The building has a 40-year federal housing subsidy contract tied to it that began in 1978, the year it was built by a private group that included the school as a member, said Edward Hinsberger, a Chicago-area director for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The contract gives the school--which bought the building outright from the group in 1999--a window every five years to opt out of its obligation early if it gets approval from IHDA, Hinsberger said.
The school said it is considering pursuing that option during its next opportunity, which will be in 2008.
Moody said it believed a 1994 agreement with IHDA allowed the school to begin converting the building into a dorm. The school said it has 1,400 students living on campus and expects to add 100 in the next five years.
The IHDA agreement, which was part of a transaction that allowed Moody to pay off a $6 million mortgage still owed on the building, allowed Jenkins Hall to eventually become free of Section 8 housing.
No one realized that agreement conflicted with the federal subsidy contract until Moody recently started to move aggressively forward with its plan, officials said.
In 2004, the school renamed the building formerly known as Morningside South Apartments to honor Jerry Jenkins, a former vice president of publishing at Moody who has co-authored the best-selling "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic Christian novels.
Jenkins and his wife Dianna Jenkins donated an undisclosed amount of money to the school that made the building's 1999 purchase possible, according to the school's Web site. Besides having the building named after them, the couple have a suite on the building's top floor, converted from two former senior units, an accommodation Zises said is "troubling" to state officials.
Seniors inside the building--many from the former Soviet Union--said they first noticed the resident population was changing a few years ago. Where old friends once lived, they saw younger tenants sporting "Jesus Loves You" stickers on their doors, lounging in the hallways at 2 a.m. and leaving empty pizza boxes in trash rooms, the older residents said.
"I think we're invisible to them," said Brake, complaining about late-night noise.
Some moments of awkward religious friction have also occurred.
Last year, a small group of Moody students sought to connect with their older Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking neighbors, several of whom are Jewish, by offering to teach them English. Their textbook: the New Testament.
"We want to know English, but it's not interesting to me to learn that way," said Rakhil Shapiro, 78, smiling apologetically.
Most important to the senior tenants, however, has been the difference in living conditions.
Rosa Kashetsky, who has lived in the building since she and her husband, Gregoriy, came to Chicago from Ukraine in 1991, said she has also had problems breathing in her bedroom because of mold growing beneath a leaking air conditioner vent.
"The carpet hasn't been changed once," Kashetsky said through an interpreter.
Moody receives $1.4 million per year in rent subsidies that, among other things, is supposed to go toward maintenance, Zises said.
In its statement, Moody said it only recently learned of the discrepancy in living conditions, citing complimentary inspection reports from IHDA.
The school is "in the process of developing a plan for implementing necessary improvements, including more regular painting and re-carpeting," officials said.
Moody is seeking a compromise inside the building, where the current mix of students and subsidized tenants would remain intact.
"This type of arrangement would meet our needs of student housing and the city's desire to keep low-income housing for the elderly available," the school said.
Adam Smith, a freshman at Moody who like many students living in Jenkins Hall was unaware of the conflict, said he'd like it if the two groups could become better neighbors.
Smith, 26, said he and his wife felt lucky to get in Jenkins Hall after realizing they couldn't afford to live anywhere else near the campus.
Among the first neighbors they met, he said, was a 97-year-old woman named Helen, who persuaded Smith and a few friends to pick up a few things for her at the grocery store.
"It was a real testament to how we can live in symbiosis here," Smith said.
aolivo@tribune.com
Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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