Building More Housing Doesn’t Require Sacrificing our Lakefront—Patricia Sharkey

Chicago Tribune Letter To The Editor:

The Tribune Editorial Board’s singular focus on affordable housing in the Fern Hill lakefront development dispute reveals a troubling disregard for another cherished Chicago value: our public Lake Michigan shore.

If allowed to proceed, Fern Hill’s massive 600-plus-unit high-rise complex would be the first major private development built directly on Chicago’s Lake Michigan shore since the Lakefront Protection Ordinance was enacted in 1973. Yet, remarkably, the Editorial Board never mentions this landmark 53-year-old legal framework designed to protect Chicago’s lakefront for the public. Instead, it dismisses Edgewater residents seeking to have that law applied to their one mile of lakefront as NIMBYs.

Chicagoans have fought for generations to preserve and expand our extraordinary lakefront park system. The Lakefront Protection Ordinance embodies that history and Daniel Burnham’s enduring principle that “the lakefront by right belongs to the people.”

Former Tribune Editorial Board Editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lois Wille chronicled that struggle in her classic history, “Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront.” She understood that Chicago’s magnificent public lakefront did not happen by accident. It exists because generations of Chicagoans fought to protect it from private development.

The Editorial Board’s “build, baby, build” philosophy echoes the lack of planning and respect for the public interest in the Lake that transformed Sheridan Road into high-rise row in the 1960s, leaving residents with the serious congestion and lack of public lakefront that persists today. We should learn from that history, not repeat it.

Housing, lakefront protection and quality of life are not mutually exclusive. Edgewater has other locations crying out for mixed-use development where an even greater number of housing units can be built. Fern Hill’s 600-plus units do not need to occupy an irreplaceable stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline on an already intensely congested Sheridan Road.

Chicago may need more housing. But sensible development does not require sacrificing every other civic value to achieve it. We can build more housing while preserving the lakefront for the public as City policy and generations before us intended. Patricia Sharkey, President, Edgewater Residents for Responsible Development

Patricia Sharkey, President, Edgewater Residents for Responsible Development