Not too long ago, just a couple of years, actually, the east side of Bensenville was what should have been the showcase for everything that affordable housing advocates hold dear.

It was a peaceful, neat, leafy and thriving neighborhood of more than 600 families, living in modest, yet well-maintained homes and townhouses. The neighborhood, helped along with some federal infrastructure subsidies, the guiding hand of the DuPage County Housing Authority and the loving attention of Bensenville officials, demonstrated that the agency’s goal of “decent, sanitary and affordable housing” in the suburbs was achievable.

This well-established neighborhood was multi-ethnic, following the near-utopian model of activists who sought to bring perfect diversity to all suburbs. It provided shelter for those who wanted to escape the violence of city gangs. It was located close to the job-rich Elk Grove Village and other northwest suburbs, a fact that should have delighted urban activists who bemoan the fact that many low- and moderate-income families in the Chicago region don’t have easy access to those jobs. It provided those families opportunities for home ownership, without the hidden risks of a collapse of the home mortgage market. It was near shops, schools, parks and churches, making it the kind of suburb that urbanologists beatify in these days of spiraling energy and transportation costs.

It’s gone now.

Or about to be gone, to be scraped away by Chicago’s bulldozers. That will delight Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who hypocritically fancies himself as a leading advocate of housing for low- and moderate-income families. And it will be gone because not a single affordable housing advocate to my knowledge raised a finger to fight against Daley for the neighborhood’s preservation. (See the betrayers’ list below)

How can this be?

Easy. Everyone, and I mean everyone, capitulated to Daley’s obsessive craving for more jobs and contracts for his political machine by spending billions of our money for a loopy O’Hare Airport expansion project. The entire east side of Bensenville, this wonderful neighborhood, stood in the way of Daley’s new far south runway, a runway that couldn’t be squeezed into the airport’s 1950s footprint; whose need is arguable at best; a runway that isn’t scheduled to be built, if at all, for years, and a runway for which no financing is in even distant sight.

The region’s affordable housing advocates should be ashamed.

They, just as nearly everyone else, stood by while all this was happening, including the neighborhood’s latest blow: A decision on Thursday by DuPage County Circuit Judge Kenneth Popejoy that the massive demolition of more than 500 homes now owned by Chicago poses no environmental hazard, and thus could be demolished forthwith. (Chicago pried title to the homes from the hands of their homeowners by the threat of condemnation, under the extraordinary power granted to one municipality—Chicago—to condemn land in another municipality by a compliant state Legislature, but that’s another story.)

Popejoy cited an opinion by Democratic Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan (I guess she’s an aviation expert in her own right) that the expansion is “vital to the public interest,” and therefore of greater importance than DuPage County’s largest and most vital community of affordable housing. That could be true if the expansion plan were not so demonstrably dangerous and ineffective.

The odd thing about all this is Daley’s craving to demolish the neighborhood immediately. A runway can’t be built on the land until a major highway, Irving Park Rd., is relocated, and that’s not even close to happening. A cynic might suggest that the rush is Daley’s way of retaliating against Bensenville Village President John Geils who has been one of the most determined and effective fighters to save his community from the ravages of the airport expansion. But who would say such a thing? Everyone knows that the mild-mannered Daley has no desire to get even with anyone who dares to stand in his way. Asked “why all the rush,” the city now has to fall back on the dubious claim that, well, we need the land immediately for staging, storage and other vague purposes.

Bensenville plans to appeal the decision, so it’s not clear when the demolition will actually begin. Fearing a Meigs Field-style sneak attack in the dark of night, the village has increased its police presence in the neighborhood. Most of the neighborhood now consists of boarded-up homes formerly owned by families that had given up the fight and decided to get out while the getting’s good. Some stalwart families remain, determined not to give up the fight, even though their neighborhood will look more like obliterated Berlin after World War II.

Perhaps there is no legal way to preserve this neighborhood based on the argument that the public good is better served by the presence of this community of affordable housing than a cockamamie airport engorgement that is demonstrably calamitous. But a public outcry by affordable housing groups might have helped. So, just for the record, here are some of the affordable and fair housing, as well as other public interest, groups that failed to extend their principles and passion to the very people they insist they serve. Bear with me, because the list is long:

DuPage Housing Action Coalition; Housing Action Illinois; HousingMatters.net; Illinois Housing Roundtable; Community Housing Association of DuPage; DuPage County Homeownership Center; HOPE Fair Housing Center, and DuPage Housing Authority.

Here are some groups that deserve special mention:

• Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA), which is charged with the enforcement of the Illinois Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act, a law that requires municipalities to plan to make 10 percent of their housing stock “affordable to working families.”

• Business and Professional People for the Public Interest and the Illinois Municipal League, two organizations that supported enactment of the law and worked with the IHDA to develop lists of municipalities needing to increase their stock of low- and moderate-income housing. Their high-minded determination to “address several serious social and economic problems, such as high commute times for municipal workers and a shortage of homes for teachers, police officers, the elderly and for young families that want to stay in the communities in which they were raised and lived” now rings hollow.

• The Metropolitan Planning Council, a civic group that works for everything good and true, including “the challenges and opportunities for affordable housing in northeastern Illinois”

• Chicago Metropolis 2020, a group of the region’s noble, upstanding and clout-heavy corporate and civic leaders that has studied and published a bunch of recommendations for increasing the region’s “housing options.”

I could go on, but what’s the use? They all have no shame.

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Dennis Byrne is a member of the Chicago Daily Observer editorial board and a former consultant to northwest suburban communities, including Bensenville, that continue their lonely, but heroic, fight against O’Hare expansion.