Community development initiatives in Chicago

Church building houses in its neighborhood | Ground up revitalization program in the Roseland neighborhood.

Some churches build, others acquire, hold, and let languish.  Chicago also has the best practice church related CDC in Bethel New Life, according to the Asset Based Community Development Institute ("Bethel New Life, Chicago: A case study of community transformation," Healthcare Forum).

Neighborhood revitalization programs need focus, and capital.  This is a great way to convert vacant lots into viable elements of the neighborhood, and increasing tax revenues too.

"Rev. James Meeks' effort to rebuild Roseland housing is taking shape," Crain's Chicago Business 

Key and Franklin own two of the first 11 houses built by the Rev. James Meeks as part of his effort to bring hundreds of new homes to the neighborhood where he preached for decades. Meeks announced his plan in late 2022, and since getting started the next year, his Hope Center Foundation and its partner, Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, have completed the first round of houses on church-owned lots, sold six of them and started work on 10 more, on lots acquired from Cook County.

The goal, Meeks told Crain's shortly after he retired, is to repopulate the neighborhood, where on some blocks vacant lots outnumber existing homes. At a recent groundbreaking on the former county-owned lots, Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle described Meeks' group as being like a dentist working to fill the gaps between healthy teeth.

Restaurants are already signing up to be part of Meeks' overall community development effort. Chick-fil-A opened in April in Pullman Gateway, a few blocks from the House of Hope, Meeks' former pulpit. Construction on buildings for Jimmy John's and Chipotle is expected to start by the end of September, and a Black-owned pizza chain from Nashville, Tenn., Slim & Husky's, has committed to coming in the near future, according to Shenita Muse, executive director of the Hope Center Foundation.

"We've built these 11 houses and we're building more," Muse said, "but what we're really doing is building the community. You’re going to see all these blocks filled."

Also on the board is an apartment development adjacent to the planned 115th and Michigan station on the Chicago Transit Authority's Red Line extension, about six blocks from where Key and Franklin live. There's also a grocery chain interested in coming to Hope's developments, Muse said, but she declined to name it.

... With houses now built on all of the church-owned lots, Hope in recent months has acquired 40 vacant lots from Cook County, with immediate plans to build on 10 and longer-term plans to fill them all with houses. The lots are all within a six-block radius of 118th Street and Indiana Avenue. The first 11 are factory-built modular homes. Muse said the next group will be conventional stick-built homes, in part to offer diversity rather than line the blocks with identical houses.

By contrast, many programs designed to revive vacant properties tend to be city-wide rather than focused.  And programs working with individuals rather than organizations find the process to be more difficult, time consuming, and more prone to failure because financing and the difficulty of rehabilitating properties can be overwhelming.

Chicago philanthropies pool funds to support regional food systems, which is especially needed after massive cuts at USDA ("Trump radically remade the US food system in just 100 days," Grist).

-- Chicago Regional Food Fund

-- Fresh Taste

Local college aims to create a "town center," adjacent to the school.  In Baltimore, a similar college, Morgan State University, lacks a real "college town" center, as does the University of Utah--well it has a couple blocks.  

Many years ago, Ohio State University initiated the High Street commercial district revitalization initiative to improve that area next to the University.  Among other examples, Mercer University had a program focused on revitalization of neighborhoods adjacent to their campus.  The Lincoln Land Institute has a program assisting colleges in dealing with real estate development issues.

The lesson here is you won't go far without a plan and money behind it.  Otherwise, it's trickle down economics.

"Chicago State hopes to make a college town out of 95th Street," Crain's Chicago Business

In 2023, CSU published an economic development plan for the 95th Street corridor. The plan calls for developing hundreds of units of housing, from studios to family-sized units, to create a "college town experience" that is lacking in the mostly commuter school now.

It also calls for fostering arts outlets and retail stores, improving public safety and developing green spaces that invite community use. Adding street-level bookstores and coffee shops with apartments above to the north edge of the CSU campus "all sounds so good," Small said, "and it's long overdue." As it stands now, "you have to be intentional about going and finding your coffee shop and your bookstore" in other South Side neighborhoods.

... Serving up unused slices of its 161-acre campus for privately funded development could help stabilize the school's future. It has a long past, dating to the 1867 launch of a teacher-training institution, the Cook County Normal School, in Englewood. Branches of that school became both Chicago State and Northeastern Illinois University, on the Northwest Side.

The university's enrollment has dropped significantly in the last 20 years and they are doing this in part as a student retention and recruitment effort.  Given that many small colleges and universities are failing ("Small college economic issues threaten their ability to function as a community asset"), this is a proactive step.

Another Chicago initiative, focused on the redevelopment of vacant lots into "middle income housing."

"City taps six developers for $39M 'Missing Middle' housing push on South Side," CCB

The city has selected six developers to build more than 100 market-rate homes on city-owned lots on the South Side, continuing a program that aims to spur the development of smaller residential buildings in disinvested areas. 

The projects comprise the second round of the Chicago Department of Planning & Development’s Missing Middle Housing Initiative, a program meant to address a dearth of multi-unit buildings that fall between single-family homes and mid-rise apartment towers.

The initiative is expected to support the construction of more than 750 new homes on the South and West sides, based on available city funding, with more than 100 units now in progress in North Lawndale.

Same kinds of conclusions as for the first mention.  Focus and rehabilitate an "area" rather than just a "lot."

Revitalization initiatives are under threat from Trump Administration cuts, and must focus on making their case.  The Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives program released the results of an economic development study showing the impact they've had on the Pullman neighborhood in Chicago.  Also see the past blog entry, "Revitalization in a distressed residential-industrial neighborhood: Pullman, Chicago, Illinois."

"Pullman developer touts impact amid uneasy times for low-income community funding"

Nonprofit developer Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives this week unveiled the results of a study it commissioned to measure its influence on blighted parts of the city's South Side, holding up what it frames as a shining example of the possibilities for the city's disinvested areas.

AEG analyzed data from the developer's projects and the U.S. Census Bureau between 2010 and 2023 to conclude that CNI is responsible for nearly $1.5 billion in economic impact and 7,800 new jobs created during that span across the Pullman, West Pullman, Roseland and Riverdale neighborhoods. Pullman's unemployment rate dropped to about 13% from 21% during that span, the study showed. Median household income in the neighborhood rose by 48%, including at a faster rate than that of the entire city of Chicago from 2019 through 2023, AEG found. 

The numbers add analytical heft to Pullman's turnaround, a nationally recognized case study in revamping a community whose vitality vaporized with the loss of an old-line industry. High-profile projects like Whole Foods and Amazon distribution centers and an SC Johnson warehouse in Pullman Park have stood as symbols of corporate buy-in to a Far South Side area plagued by poverty, population loss and real and perceived issues with crime.

The funny thing is after all this investment, going around the neighborhood you might say I don't see the impact of all of this investment.  That was my experience getting a tour of the City Heights neighborhood investments by Price Philanthropies.  It made me realize that sometimes we need a lot more resources than we imagine for revitalization effects to succeed.

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Many past entries are negative on community development corporations, because of their relative failure to be successful in DC.  It could be that I was looking at that reality too narrowly.  Yes, the programs didn't have comprehensive community economic development plans.  And no, building better housing for poor people doesn't necessarily improve the local microeconomy.

-- "The community development approach and the revitalization of DC's H Street corridor: congruent or oppositional approaches?," 2013

OTOH, they're underfunded, and at least in DC, not working with good plans.  The initiatives in Chicago are better models.