Make Pilsen a model for providing more affordable housing

I was pleasantly surprised to read your thoughtful editorial on Pilsen with its concise overview of gentrification’s ripple effects in a community.

I wanted to share two additional thoughts.

As of the 2018 Affordable Requirements Ordinance, Pilsen and Little Village now “benefit” from higher affordable housing requirements: 20% of a market rate development must be set-aside for affordable units.

However, the ordinance requires that only 10% of units be constructed on-site in Pilsen, with the remaining 10% off-site, and the in-lieu fees remain woefully under the average cost to build/operate affordable housing units.

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This “improved” 2018 ordinance does little to encourage developers to actually construct the higher 20% of affordable units — it is lip service.

It’s important to note that in 2005, the Pilsen Land Use Committee required a 21% affordability requirement on-site for any new developments of 10 units or more seeking a zoning change. So the “improved” 2018 ordinance actually reduces Pilsen’s ability to require affordability.

Today, we are beginning to see major changes in Pilsen’s demographics and its secondary effects.

Second, community members and political and civic leaders must point Pilsen neighbors to action when the opportunity arises for affordable housing development.

Earlier this year, Pilsen-based Resurrection Project proposed a 45-unit, 100% affordable development on 19th and Racine. However, neighbors voiced their discontent with the “density” and forced a reduction to 37 units.

While the difference may seem minimal, we cannot allow communities to simultaneously complain about the lack of affordability while they reduce affordability by complaining about density, parking, (insert NIMBY reason here).

I look forward to the Affordable Requirements Ordinance Task Force’s suggestions and encourage them to utilize Pilsen as a living experiment, still with an opportunity to change her outcome.

Catalina J. Vielma, Denver, former Pilsen resident

Lessons not learned from the Pentagon Papers

Forty-eight years ago, I celebrated the release of the Pentagon Papers that showed the utter failure of the Vietnam War, its secret expansion into Laos and Cambodia, and the endless efforts to hide the war’s failure from Congress and the public.

I hoped the release, and the subsequent exoneration of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, would prevent a recurrence of senseless, perpetual wars and government efforts to hide their utter failures and keep them going. Alas, a half-century on, we get the Afghanistan Papers, not purloined by a patriot but dug up through the Freedom of Information Act by the Washington Post.

In 2,000 pages spanning over 400 interviews, we learn that the government, the military and the media learned virtually nothing from the lesson of the Pentagon Papers. Hundreds of thousands killed, injured or displaced, over a trillion dollars squandered and not a word of truth on the futility, corruption, failure and disinformation that has continued this war into its 19th year with no end in sight.

The Pentagon Papers helped lead to the eventual collapse of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War some four years later. Let’s hope the release of the Afghanistan Papers doesn’t take nearly that long to end our involvement in this sad chapter of the United States’ long litany of perpetual war.

Walt Zlotow, Glen Ellyn