Senior citizens and local politicians converged outside an Evanston-based retirement community Monday morning pleading for the survival of its affordable housing program in Chicago after threats of closure.

About 60 people gathered outside the corporate headquarters of Presbyterian Homes in west Evanston to demand CEO Todd Swortzel maintain three Chicago retirement communities as affordable housing for low-income seniors. Presbyterian Homes announced in August that it would sell three properties in Lakeview and Rogers Park to developers, which would displace more than 100 seniors.

Speaking at the demonstration along with other politicians and community leaders, state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz (D-Chicago) asked Swortzel to consider offers from affordable housing developers that could allow the low-income seniors to remain in their homes instead of those from developers that would raise rents.

“Let these people live and stay in their homes,” Feigenholtz said. “Please reconsider — I am pleading with you.”

Presbyterian Homes, headquartered at 3200 Grant St., is a religious nonprofit with residential and health care programs in Evanston, Chicago, Lake Forest and Arlington Heights. Sale of the three affordable housing developments in north Chicago — Peter Mulvey Place, Crowder Place and Devon Place — would effectively end the organization’s subsidized housing program.

Ald. James Cappleman from Chicago’s 46th Ward said he was informed of the closures the same day the residents were notified. Cappleman said he and other local politicians then spoke with affordable buyers willing to purchase the properties at market rate, but Swortzel refused to work with them.

Although Swortzel was not available for comment, Bob Warden, a spokesman from Presbyterian Homes, told The Daily the organization considered selling to affordable housing developers prior to the summer announcement. Warden said that type of agreement was not possible due to a lack of public funding sources available to partner with affordable housing developers.

Elaine Sonkin, a 77-year-old resident of Mulvey Place, an affordable housing development slated to close in Lakeview, said the residents of the home were told they have one year to find alternative affordable housing. But Sonkin, who has been living in the development for eight years, said the wait list for other subsidized housing for seniors in the city is between two and five years.

“I’m at a point where I can’t function anymore because of this,” Sonkin told The Daily. “I don’t have the energy to move. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anyone to help me.”

State Rep. Laura Fine (D-Glenview) said the intention of the protest was to elicit compassion from the retirement community’s administrators by showing them the faces of people impacted by their decisions.

“We can’t profit over people’s lives,” Fine said at the demonstration. “These are our friends, these are our family members, our parents, our grandparents. We have to make sure that they have a security and a solid home for the rest of their lives.”

Less than half an hour into the demonstration, security asked protesters to leave the property and board the bus in which they traveled from their retirement homes in north Chicago. The residents who organized the protest were assisted by ONE Northside, a Chicago group that organizes social justice activists, and Jane Addams Senior Caucus, an organization advocating for issues concerning senior citizens.

Letters asking for the survival of the affordable housing developments included signatures from state Sen. Daniel Biss (D-Evanston) and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois).

When demonstrators attempted to deliver the letters from politicians and senior residents in support of maintaining the affordable housing, Keith Stohlgren, vice president and executive director of Presbyterian Homes, told protesters they needed to set up a private meeting with administrators.

Cappleman said because local politicians’ attempts to negotiate with the administration were unsuccessful, a group of senior citizens — some traveling to Evanston with homemade protest signs — has been led to action themselves.

“They never thought that today they’d be engaged in a protest, in civil disobedience,” he said. “That’s what we’ve come down to. We are in desperate straits, and it calls for desperate measures.”

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