I’m sitting in a restaurant on Milwaukee Avenue in the Logan Square neighborhood talking with Nick Katsafados. It’s between Christmas and New Year of 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t ceased, but indoor seating is finally allowed in some places. Big wide windows are open. The cold December air is streaming in. We’ve got our coats on.
When they first arrived in Chicago the Irish, Italians, and Greeks were disparaged and disrespected by established WASP-y whites. The story of Nick’s father Jimmy was a classic tale of immigrant struggle. His tragic path to an early death in a west suburban flophouse with heroin and cocaine in his blood helped set his son on a better path.
Nick Katsafados’ mother was a school teacher. His father was an immigrant. Like a lot of Greek guys in the 70s and before, his dad Jimmy worked in diners. It seemed like the greasy spoons of Chicago were all run by Greeks. And nearly all of them had a tall refrigerated dessert display case right up front. In these spinning multi-level towers would be plated slices of beautiful cakes, pies, and pastries. The baked goods were often outsourced. That’s where Jimmy came in.
With a trained baker as a partner he started a company to supply desserts to Chicago diners, and it took off. But his partner’s eventual drug addiction ran the train off the tracks. Jimmy had little education and no other plans. He never really recovered and lapsed into a downward spiral involving drugs and alcohol. It was his undoing. When Nick was twenty-two Jimmy died at age forty-three in a west suburban flophouse with heroin and cocaine in his bloodstream. All that set Nick on a focused path.
After having to make up a failed high school honors algebra class during summer Nick took more summer classes and finished high school in three years. Smart, cost-effective choices saved him loads of money on college. During college he worked in bookstores and at the Holsum Bread bakery’s outlet shop.
“I saw poverty in my face all the time…A lot of those cashiers were making nothing, so they were dirty. They were taking a hundred dollars in food stamps, taking a hundred dollars out of the register with fifty bucks to the customer and fifty bucks to themselves. It was a system, for sure. But you know, that also made me highly aware of how little some people have. It’s pretty bad.”
At eighteen Nick began to build solid credit. He took out small loans and paid them off on time. He finished his undergraduate education by the age of twenty with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and psychology.
He landed at a personnel and benefits consulting company. And then in a personnel position at United Center where the Bulls and Blackhawks played. He began night classes at National Lewis University for an MBA in human resources management. Living with his mom, “I had very few bills and I was just piling the cash away in every way that I could.”
Nick made his first real estate investment in his early twenties with a childhood friend, also Greek. Credit was easy. For five percent down they bought a two-bedroom, two-bath townhome being built in a new development near University of Illinois-Chicago.
A year or two later they sold it at a profit and bought a five-unit apartment building in Bridgeport and moved into one of the units. Nick had gotten a realtor’s license and would tuck away his sales commission checks. He still had his day job at United Center. He wasn’t paying rent, he was paying off a mortgage on an income-producing property. He completed his MBA. He also used his good credit to refinance his mother’s mortgage.
Nick still has the Bridgeport five-flat. “I’ve got tenants that have lived there longer than I’ve owned the building. I mean one guy raised a family there. I’ve bought subsequent buildings since then, mixed use. Usually apartments above a storefront. Six buildings, about thirty-five units. There are a couple that are purely residential. I’ve renovated, invested in Wicker Park, east Humboldt Park, right here in Logan Square, Avondale. This is also where I live.” Along with managing his properties, he’s still a realtor.
That’s how Nick Katsafados built an economic life for himself. Developing credit. Tightly controlling expenditures. Saving. Taking on debt carefully, to make investments. Buying into something he knew and could see and improve. Creating multiple revenue streams through his sales commissions as a realtor and his growing portfolio of apartments and storefronts.
For Nick it all began after failing honors algebra in high school. By deciding to use summer school not just to make up that one class, but also to finish high school early. He says that happened “not because I was some genius. But because I was highly focused.” Everything from there proceeded “pretty much in a straight line.”
Nick Katsafados had no advantages, no privilege. He saw his father literally drive himself into the ground at an early age. He didn’t waste time feeling sorry for himself.
He redoubled efforts to plan for his future and make it successful. He set goals, stuck to them, achieved them. Nothing out of the ordinary.
He had what might seem like an exceptional focus on his own economic education, but the principles he espouses are timeless. Build credit. Earn, save, and invest. Rinse and repeat.
Nick saw property as a form of investment that made sense. It’s tangible, you can improve it and monitor its condition.
The takeaways from his life for whites, blacks, Latinos, and others, are straightforward: this is what real equity looks like. It’s earned, not given.