Starting more than a hundred years ago, Sears used to print its catalogues on Chicago’s West Side in a giant brown-brick structure, a few blocks south of where the Eisenhower Expressway now runs. Sears closed the building in the early 1970s, and it sat vacant for more than 40 years. This week — as the company lays off hundreds of people — developers cut the ribbon on an affordable-housing complex in that structure.