Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 2

f. 2 Section 1 Chicaoo Tribune. Monday, October 1. 1979 Why middle-class whites are returning to city If son why a number of people are finding the city more attractive. The energy shortage and the expansion of exurbia are both making the daily commute from suburb to city and back 'again more and more expensive and time consuming, said Fidel, woo is himself a commuting suburbanite.

Thus, be attributes the desirability of neighborhoods such as Lakeview and Lincoln Park to their proximity to the Loop and the lake and the fact that both communities have great architecture and good public transportation. These characteristics explain why the Ravenswood community and the area around Wrigley Field are now becoming more interesting to young professionals who can no longer afford Lincoln Park or Lakeview, Fidel said. ESCALATING PRICES for property to such trendy communities as Lincoln Park and Lakeview even astonish those who have watched their development over the years. Sharon Glavin, a real estate agent for Joseph Vitale Realtors, 1155 W. Webster has been selling property in the Lincoln Park area since 1975.

"Four years ago if a buyer told me their top purchase price was $100,000, that made my week," Miss Glavin said. "Now if they tell me they don't want to go over $100,000, 1 have nothing to show them." There are indications that regentrification is not limited to Chicago's predominantly white Near North side. DEMPSEY TRAVIS, a black real estate broker on the South Side, said the city's "housing market is so tight that for every house I get in this office, I got 100 buyers." Many of those callers, wanting to buy in South Shore and Kenwood, are white, Dempsey said. "I've talked to more whites this year about real estate than I've talked to whites collectively in the past five years," Travis said. Tribunt Ptwt Sy John Btrllev Steve and Elizabeth Ballis have been city folk and sub- They live in a renovated Victorian building in Old Town, urbanites and find they prefer "the richness of the city." with their daughters, Stacy (left) and Debbie.

By Monroe Anderson EIGHT TEARS AGO, Steve and Elizabeth Ballis packed their belongings and moved to suburbia in pursuit of their golden dream. Two years later, the glitter was gone. The disillusioned couple, with their two pre-school age children in tow, sold their Arlington Heights tract-land home for a tidy profit and returned to Chicago- Though they bad nice neighbors and it was good enough life, the Ballises said they realized suburbia wasn't the life for them. "IT WAS A BLAND existence." recalled Ballis, now 34 years old. "Everybody on our block was approximately from the same ethnic background and was approximately the same age with approximately the same level of income and approximately the same number of children.

"We found that there was not enough diversity for us. We missed the richness of the city." Steve and Elizabeth Ballis were not alone. For reasons as varied as the types of lifestyles available in an urban setting, more and more affluent individuals and families are choosing either to remain in the city or move back to Chicago from the suburbs. A back-to-the-city or stay-in-the-city movement among those who could afford to live in the suburbs is, of course, a recent development. SINCE THE EARLY 195s.

Chicago has been losing its white middle class population to outlying suburbs at a pace so alarming that a number of urban experts began routinely predicting the death of the city as we now know it. Chicago was to be mostly poor and non-white, ringed by wealthy suburbs. Those predictions are seldom heard anymore. Now, experts think they're detecting what may be a reversal of the flight to the suburbs. That reversal is what urbanologists call "regentrification" a word which has European roots, denoting the return of the "20th Century Gentry" the upper-middle-class professionals to the cities.

REGENTRIFICATION has been a fact of life in European cities, according to most urban experts, for about two decades. The phenomenon has been evident only in the last few years in America's oldest cities, but the results are reflected in the new and expensive facelifts that deteriorating and declining sections have received in New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston. A rebirth of a number of Chicago's lakefront and near-Loop neighborhoods is now going on, although experts say. that no one will definitely know until the 1980 Census how much regentrification has actually taken place or what percentage of the city's total population is now upper-middle class and professional. There is little doubt, however, that an urban renaissance is occurring in Chicago.

"IT'S REMARKABLE to see how much the city has changed," said David Dootson, 42, president of Sears Investment and Management Co. Dootson, who has lived a number of Why are middle-class whites returning to the city, which a few years ago looked as if it woijld be abandoned by all but the poor? This is the second of two reports on displaced residents and the "urban pioneers" who are reshaping many areas id Chicago. years in the suburbs of Northbrook and Mission Hills, now lives in a condominium on Chicago's Gold Coast. He says he's happier in the city and is discovering that not only are "more and more of my friends coming in on the weekends to do things" but that many are toying with the idea of moving back. Although none of them have taken definite steps to return to the city, the thought itself is "a consideration that wouldn't have been done 5 or 10 years ago," Dootson said.

ONE PROBLEM MAY be that many suburbanites have an image of Chicago as all slums and run-down property, Steve Ballis said. When the Ballises decided to move from Chicago to the suburbs, that decision was made, in part, because "we weren't even aware of the urban renewal' going on in Lincoln Park." The discovery that weather-beaten, deteriorating 19th Century townhouses were being transformed into renovated dreamhouses helped prompt the Ballises return to the city where they settled in a brownstone in the Old Town section of Lincoln Park. In the six years since the. Ballises moved into the Near North neighborhood, other areas of Lincoln Park have been transformed. OVER A PERIOD of 20 years.

Kenneth Fidel, a sociology professor at De Paul University, has watched the De Paul-Sheffield area of Lincoln Park go from near-slum conditions to one of tee most chic, expensive neighborhoods in the city. He attributes this rebirth to a number of social and economic factors. "The city has been' gaining white, collar jobs while at the same time losing blue collar jobs," Fidel said, noting that the change in Chicago's status to a service producing city from a goods producing one has added to the change in some of the neighborhoods. There is also a natural progression in the movement of the affluent and the poor, he said. "HOUSES AGE and as they do people who can afford to do so move to better housing," he said.

As the affluent abandon the older dwellings for newer ones, the poor abandon the worst housing for what is better housing for them that which has been abandoned by the more affluent, he explained. Therefore, for a number of years the suburbs have been attracting those who could afford to move there because they could upgrade their housing at relatively bargain rates, Fidel said. Chicago housing is now becoming more attractive to buyers, Fidel said, because a turn-of-the-century graystone or brownstone in the city can often be bought and renovated at prices competitive with the cost of buying in the suburbs. THERE IS ALSO a more obvious rea- Travis attributes the high price of housing in the suburbs and in the North lakefront communities for the sudden interest in property along the South Lakefront. EQUIVALENT CONDOMINIUMS that sell for up to $120 a square foot on the North Side can be purchased on the ci ty's South Side for $38 a square foot, he said.

Equivalent single family homes selling for $120,000 North can be purchased for about $40,000 South, Travis said, adding he foresees the South Side's "black population being systematically displaced particularly the urban poor who can't compete." To underscore his point, Travis said he was recently driving east on 76th Street when he spotted a white family out doing work in their yard. "Who would have ever thought you'd find white folks buying a HUD building in a black community?" he asked. REG. 16.00! SAVE ON OUR MIXABLES; over pants and skirts, they're fall's richest recipe for delicious In polyester, 8-18. A.

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Blouses, first floor, State; Gateway, Prudential, suburbs. Call 372-6800 or write Box AA 60690. Add 1 .50 Nabbed in Denver service charge on mail or phone orders under 19.95. Berserk passenger stabs three on Chicago flight SpecUl to The THbunt DENVER A passenger on an American Airlines flight went berserk Sunday night and wounded three other passengers with a table knife before crew members on the Chicago-to-San Francisco flight could subdue him. The three passengers were not seriously injured and continued on to California after being treated for their wounds in Denver, where the jumbo jet was diverted after the incident.

An FBI official in Denver said the assailant, identified as Edward A. Provenzano, 30, was taken into custody at Denver's Stapleton International Airport. He was charged with "interfering with a flight PROVENZANO was carrying no identification and refused to give his home address, the FBI official said. David Lobb, an airline spokesman at corporate headquarters in Dallas, said the suspect apparently "went berserk, and several passengers and crew members tried to calm him down. Then he picked up a knife and slashed at three of the passengers." Lobb said there were 152 passengers and 13 crew members on the plane, the airline's Flight 205.

He said initial reports that the incident was a hijacking attempt were erroneous. FAA spokesman David Myers in Denver said "at no time was there a hijacking attempt." A policeman at the airport said the suspect was taken to a mental custody ward at Denver General Hospital. SUETS "spend it togethei if (tAUJ crrsopjs Index Sec. Pg. Action Line 1 After 5 Cook 4 3 Joan Beck 5 2 Bridge 3 11 Briefing Page 1 18 Business Section 6 Business Report 6 10 Classified Section 4 Comics 310-U Crossword Puzzle 3, 10 Maggie Daly 5 6 DearAbby 2 4 Sec.

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