The stars must've been aligned for Ann Filmer when she moved to Berwyn two years ago. In addition to finding a comfortable, affordable home in this nearby suburb, she found a new job in a community ready to embrace her talents.

Filmer and her husband, Barry Bennett, are both professional artists: She's a theater director; he's a musician. After years of plying their trades in Chicago, the couple had a daughter and started looking for a house. They cast their gaze from Humboldt Park to the suburbs, quickly ruling out Oak Park and Forest Park as too expensive. "Then there's Berwyn and its beautiful neighborhood of bungalows," Filmer says. "We know a lot of musicians who live in Berwyn," lured there in part by the bungalows' spacious basements, which provide plenty of room for a band to rehearse. Sure enough, the couple found a "great deal" on a house for $225,000 and moved in April 2007.

"We wanted to invest ourselves in the community," Filmer continues. "I found the Berwyn Arts Council and joined immediately." Then fate kicked in: Filmer learned that the finishing touches were being made to the new Berwyn Cultural Center on 16th Street, including a new 49-seat venue -- but no theater company to occupy it yet. Before the year was out, Filmer had become the founding artistic director of the city's new resident professional company, the aptly named 16th Street Theater. It's already become a bright new spot in Cook County's cultural scene, having been declared the "Best Emerging Theater Company" by the Reader two months ago.

"It was kismet," Filmer says of the new job following so quickly on the heels of her new home. "Our mission is really to engage our audience and to tell the stories of everyone in our community. We're big on diversity. We're interested in telling your story, and also in telling your neighbor's story."

To that end, 16th Street's debut in December 2007 was a co-production with Teatro Luna -- a nod to Berwyn's large Hispanic population.

Filmer shares her residential street with a diverse ethnic mix. Berwyn's melting pot, she notes, also blends generations and professions. "It's a really good mix of people," she says, "which is why we like it. That's the kind of community that thrives."

"Berwyn is a very diverse community," agrees Joseph Vallez, executive director of the North Berwyn Park District. Although there's no residency requirement for his job, which he assumed eight years ago, he bought a home in Berwyn last year because, he says, it's important to be a part of the community he serves. And Chicago isn't far away, he points out: This suburb of 3.8 square miles is nestled between Interstate Highways 290 and 55, just a 15-minute drive from downtown Chicago.

Anthony La Monica also praises the geographical convenience. A real estate agent with ReMax in Berwyn, La Monica has almost two decades of experience in the area -- and he's lived here since 1976, when his family moved from Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. "I love its central location," La Monica says. "There are so many ways to get downtown: I can drive down there; I can take the Metra; I can take the CTA."

Metra's BNSF Railway runs through Berwyn's Depot District, while two CTA "L" lines feed into adjacent suburbs. (Depending on where you live in Berwyn, you can walk north to the Blue Line in Oak Park or east to the Pink Line in Cicero.)

Beyond diversity and location, Berwyn's affordability makes it increasingly desirable to new homeowners. Prices are a little bit higher than in Cicero, but "way lower than Oak Park," La Monica says. And the city's iconic houses provide a great value for your buck. "Most of these bungalows were built between 1921 and 1929," he continues. "They're all brick structures, supported by the bricks themselves. It's not just cosmetics. These homes have anywhere from 1,000 to 1,300 square feet."

These multiple factors have led to a new reputation for Berwyn, which throughout the 1980s was best known to many in the Chicago area as merely a bizarre recurring punchline ("BURRR-wyynn!") on the local TV show "Son of Svengoolie." In the wake of an advertising campaign launched in Chicago to lure prospective homeowners, La Monica says his near western suburb has enjoyed "a huge influx of people from [Chicago's] North and Near North Side." The younger residents are lowering Berwyn's median age and further increasing its diversity: "They're not your traditional families with a mother and father and kids and a dog. They're cohabitants of the same sex and stuff like that."

Crime isn't much of an issue here, according to Police Chief William Kushner. "Violent crime is very, very low," he says, noting that index crimes dropped 2.4 percent in 2008. "We still see a number of garage burglaries. . . . We have a lot of incidents of retail theft; that's because of the shopping center in town." Every community has gang issues, Kushner adds, but in Chicago, that could mean drive-by shootings. "Coming here, a gang problem is gang graffiti on a garage," he says -- and the city has two trucks equipped with power washers to clean the graffiti away.

Kushner, who spent 29 years with the Chicago Police Department before taking this job three years ago, still lives in nearby Beverly. But he says he and his wife were struck by the friendliness and sense of community in Berwyn: "It's still got, in so many respects, the small-town feel. People know their neighbors, they talk to their neighbors."

In his park district job, Vallez and his staff are trying to combat gang issues by increasing after-school programs that help keep kids off the street.

"The community transitioned in the past eight years," he says. "You now have families with single parents, or both parents working one or two jobs."

The park district can help by picking up the slack -- and, in keeping with the values of the city's increasingly progressive population, they've made a point to include arts programming in the mix.

"When you look at the positive aspects of arts in a child's development, those [programs] are very important. As I say, not every kid is a baseball player or a football player," says Vallez.

Which isn't to say sports get neglected: The park district has recently built a skate park and a new soccer field.

Effects of the recession can be seen in Berwyn. Vallez says he feels it "from an organizational point of view with families saying, 'We have to pull our child out of preschool,' or 'Can you give us a reduced rate?' " Meanwhile, some stores have shuttered up. One of its main business districts -- the Roosevelt Road corridor, which Berwyn shares with Oak Park -- is undergoing an infrastructure overhaul, with some stores taking advantage of TIF funds to make improvements. In the short term, all the construction is causing traffic issues, but the massive project is a promissory note for the future.

"Berwyn is a hidden gem," Vallez says. "While [some areas] might not be thriving right now, it will certainly be thriving in the future."

Christopher Watson started his search for a condo by reading a tourism guidebook about Chicago, one that included descriptions of its neighborhoods. He liked what was written about Andersonville. After a job interview at Northwestern University in Evanston, he hopped off the elevated train at Berwyn Avenue and took a walk.

"What I read about Andersonville reminded me of my neighborhood in Boston. I thought it would be a fun place to live. It's walkable, friendly and has everything at your doorstep," he said. "That I discovered the area is beautiful was fortuitous."

Watson, now Northwestern's dean of undergraduate admissions, found the two-bedroom, 1½ bath condo that he had dreamed about on a tree-lined street in Andersonville. "There were four that I looked at," he recalled, "but this building was owner-occupied and that meant a lot to me."

For many people, Andersonville is a nebulous area, according to Maggie Finegan of Keller Williams Realty, who has lived and owned property in the neighborhood for over 15 years.

There's East Andersonville, West Andersonville, South Andersonville and just plain Andersonville, she explained. Of the city's 77 official neighborhoods, none of the A'villes are listed. The city wraps it in with Edgewater and a little of Uptown community areas.

The Andersonville Chamber of Commerce doesn't have that problem. It says the neighborhood is bounded by Victoria Street on the north, Ainslie Street on the south, Ravenswood Avenue on the west and Magnolia Avenue on the east. Some, however, say the southern boundary should be Lawrence Avenue.

Within those shaded and historic blocks, condos are selling ahead of the curve, Finegan says, and backs up her statement with figures from the last six months.

Condo sales

Quality of life

Diversity of businesses

An insider's view

WASHINGTON—As a home owner, seller or buyer, what should you make of the Federal Reserve's latest bombshell report on Americans' home-equity positions?

Panic? Mild concern? No big deal?

The dollar losses involved were sobering. On a national basis, they document the personal financial impacts of declining home prices, especially in the frothiest boom markets of California, Florida, the Middle Atlantic states and New England.

But it's important to keep the Fed's numbers in perspective. They may not ring true in your housing situation, neighborhood or where you want to live.

With that in mind, here's a look at the home equity estimates assembled by the Fed, released this month:

• Equity holdings on a national basis got creamed in the last year. Homeowners lost an estimated $879.6 billion in net equity wealth—that's the difference between the market values of their houses and their mortgage debt. In the first quarter of this year alone, estimated national equity losses totaled $399.1 billion.

•Americans' equity in their homes represented just 46.2 percent of their properties' market values in the first quarter of this year. Put another way, total mortgage debt exceeded owners' equity and constituted almost 54 percent of total home values.

The Fed's estimate of a nearly $880 billion loss of home-equity may strike you as shocking, but keep that number in recent perspective. Depending on where you live or own property, these wild gyrations of growth shrinkage may not mean a lot.

Listen to Jay Brinkmann, vice president for research and economics at the Mortgage Bankers Association and an expert on real estate cycles.

"I don't think numbers like an $880 billion equity loss are all that meaningful for most individual homeowners," he said. "When you look at home-price data over the last five years, you find that large parts of the country never got caught up" in the boom and bust.

"The Fed's [equity decline] numbers for the country as a whole are really being dragged down disproportionately by the big drops in prices in California, Florida and a handful of other states," said Brinkmann. "Most markets haven't been hit anywhere near as hard."

The latest home-price-index report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, backs Brinkmann. The U.S. watchdog of property value movements found that even in the current down cycle, 56 percent of the 292 metropolitan areas it surveyed showed positive—though often small—price gains in the first quarter. OFHEO's data exclude jumbo loans, those more than $417,000, and most subprime loans.

Some markets are appreciating strongly, such as Austin, Texas (up 7.7 percent in the last 12 months), Grand Junction, Colo. (up 9.1 percent), Charlotte, N.C. (up 6.2 percent) and Provo, Utah (up 6.8 percent).

But even in areas with steep price declines, the five-year net equity gains are still significant. If you bought a house at the peak of the cycle in dozens of high-froth local markets—between 2004 and 2006—"you probably have seen some significant declines" in your equity, says David M. Berson, chief economist for mortgage insurer PMI Group Inc. "But if you bought a few years earlier, you're still probably well ahead of the game."

Five-year data from OFHEO suggest that's correct. Houses in Naples, Fla., lost 18.7 percent last year, but are still up a net 61 percent in the last five. Riverside-San Bernadino, Calif., houses lost 13.8 percent last year, but are still up a net 71.5 percent since 2003. Metro Washington, D.C., houses lost an average 5.1 percent last year, but have gained a net 68 percent the last five.

Bottom line: National numbers get all the attention. But unless you bought at the peak of the boom in a highly volatile area using a toxic mortgage, things probably are nowhere near that grim.



Contact Kenneth Harney by e-mail at realestate@ tribune.com or send letters to: Kenneth R. Harney, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Homes, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611. Sorry, he cannot make personal replies. Answers will be supplied only through the newspaper.