A proposed ordinance aims to preserve affordable housing on Chicago’s Northwest Side and prevent the displacement of longtime existing residents.

It would expand a pilot program around the area of the 606 Trail that has successfully helped stabilize that neighborhood after it began to experience rapid gentrification.

The ordinance would target portions of Logan Square, Avondale, Hermosa and Humboldt Park — all areas with large Latino populations that have seen significant displacement in recent years.

Juliet de Jesus Alejandre is the executive director of Palenque LSNA, previously called the Logan Square Neighborhood Association. She said the proposal would help protect existing residents from unscrupulous developers.

“We are creating a layer of protection that says we need to allow communities to thrive …,” Alejandre said. “And that means we have to stop vulture capitalists from taking them apart.”

Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th Ward) is a lead sponsor, along with Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26th Ward).

Ramirez-Rosa said the 606 pilot program needs to be expanded because the communities he serves are seeing a loss of two- and four-flat buildings that are “the greatest source of naturally occurring affordable housing that is not receiving a government subsidy but is affordable to working- and middle-class families.”

He noted that that kind of affordable housing is getting rarer and rarer.

“Particularly in communities like Logan Square, Avondale, Humboldt Park, we’ve seen rising rents and we’ve seen increasingly the conversion of these multifamily units into single-family homes or the demolition of this housing to be replaced by single-family homes or more expensive housing,” Ramirez-Rosa said.

The new ordinance proposes developers would have to pay a surcharge of $60,000 to demolish a detached house, townhouse or two-flat, and $20,000 per dwelling for the demolition of a multiunit residential building.

The money collected from the surcharge will help offset the impact of demolitions and go toward a community land trust started by Palenque that has helped acquire properties to keep them affordable.

“We want to mitigate and address displacement,” Ramirez-Rosa said.

Lupita Sujey Delgado, 17, has lived in Logan Square with her mother, father and brother her entire life.

She lamented the changes she has seen, including the loss of the small pushcart vendors selling shaved ice, fruit and chips.

“I don’t see that anymore,” Delgado said. “I walk down the street, and I see luxurious apartments, single-family homes that have glass walls. … They don’t represent homes for my family, and they don’t represent homes for many other families.”

Delgado hopes the proposed ordinance will help maintain communities and protect longtime residents like her parents who have in recent years contemplated selling their home because of rising property taxes.

“I know they wouldn’t be comfortable doing that,” Delgado said. “They wouldn’t want to move from Logan Square. Gentrification and the effect that these luxurious apartments and luxurious housing has on the (existing) community affects people so much. … You’re asking families to move somewhere else and to make memories somewhere else — at the end of the day, that’s their life.”

Joy Aruguete is CEO of Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation, a nonprofit focused on developing affordable housing on the Northwest Side, and has seen the impact of rapid gentrification.

“Logan Square sort of caught fire from a real estate perspective and really was kind of gentrified overnight,” Aruguete said.

Aruguete sees the demolition surcharges as a way of creating accountability by forcing for-profit developers to give back to the community.

“It’s kind of an impact fee,” Aruguete said.

Because Bickerdike primarily either develops vacant lots or rehabs existing homes, the demolition surcharge will have little impact on its operation.

“Logan Square for over 50 years has been a majority Latino community — Central Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans — and in a very short period of time Logan Square became a majority White area,” Aruguete said.

“The income in the area also went up substantially,” Aruguete said. “When you see a racial change and a change in income at the same time, that tells me that there are new individuals moving in and the net effect is that the Latino community has been pushed out of Logan Square.”