This winter, Mayor Richard Daley and some of the city’s busiest neighborhood rebuilders gathered around Rev. Leon Finney to witness a victory for this South Side non-profit developer: groundbreaking to build Homes at Blackstone, 30 townhouses under way at 63rd Street and Blackstone Avenue in Woodlawn. The 2,500-square-foot townhouses each are selling for $225,000.
The Pastor of Christ Apostolic Church, and a developer who’s built about a baker’s dozen housing projects in Woodlawn since 1968, Finney had a vision of these particular homes for three decades.
Within a month of groundbreaking, Finney’s Woodlawn Community Development Corp., development arm of The Woodlawn Organization, had six contracts on those townhouses–units with features from 18-foot vaulted living-room ceilings to optional 225-square-foot solariums.
Finney’s long-time dream was fulfilled in that the Homes at Blackstone are selling at market rates–homes built for ownership, without a dime of federal, city or state subsidy to builder or home buyer.
Finney’s dream is like others being fulfilled in a handful of long-neglected Chicago neighborhoods. The building of market-rate housing is the financial and psychological sign that communities like Woodlawn, Grand Boulevard and South Shore are turning the corner from sickness to health. Neighboring communities such as North Kenwood, Oakland and Douglas already have seen market-rate new construction and that trend is continuing.
Over 30 years, Finney and other builders in Woodlawn set the foundation for his current success.
“In the ’60s and ’70s Woodlawn looked like a pyromaniac lit all the buildings there,” recalls Finney, who grew up in the neighborhood and attended Hyde Park High School.
“The Blackstone Rangers (gang) had been headquartered there. They eventually moved out of the area, but there were other obstacles. We were hit by redlining from Realtors and insurance companies. It was far from the community of choice and while I knew nothing about construction or rebuilding, we just had to start somewhere.”
Most community planners, leaders and homeowners prize the arrival of market-rate housing as vital–along with subsidized affordable housing–to well-balanced redevelopment.
“If you don’t have market forces within a neighborhood, that eventually are self-sustaining, then you cannot say in the long run that you have a truly healthy community,” says Andrew Mooney, senior programs manager at Local Initiative Support Corp. (LISC), an investor-funded lending institution that lends to non-profit developers like Finney, and to market-rate developers who’ve partnered with non-profit builders.
Most of all, market-rate housing is regarded by many as a signal that their communities have overcome decades of under-investment, that they have turned crucial corners toward investment worthiness. It also is assurance to local homeowners that real estate stability is at their threshold.
Dyeatra and Harold Williams resisted four years ago when a general contractor sought to build affordable housing on 38 lots that the Williamses had assembled from Grand Boulevard’s many vacant lots over 15 years. Those houses would have sold for $100,000 to $120,000.
“But my husband always had a vision to revitalize the area with market-rate housing and we felt the surrounding community was stabilizing,” says Dyeatra Williams. “And community residents wanted market-rate rather than affordable housing because it would be stabilizing.
“They also wanted new housing to accent the historical aspect of the neighborhood, a presence that draws on the area’s sense of history.”
This spring the Williams’ Communitas Inc., a South Side real estate firm, will begin selling the first of 38 market-rate homes–2,900-square-foot single-family houses, and 3,500-square-foot two-flats–to be built by Potter Construction. They’ll market the houses, for prices from $210,000 to $269,000, from two models at 455 and 457 E. 41st St.
Immediate surroundings say little to developers who are trying to estimate which communities are ready to draw market-rate buyers.
South Side lakefront neighborhoods reflect varying stages of redevelopment, with under-invested pockets lying directly adjacent to up-and-coming areas. Yet developers building in communities from Douglas to South Shore seem to ponder less about whether market-rate home buyers will come, than about how much those buyers will pay.
Perhaps most forcefully pushing the housing-price envelope is developer Jerome Wade. As he prepares to build seven detached homes at Lake Meadows, the community along the Douglas area lakefront, Wade say’s he’ll market the 3,000-square-foot brick houses–with features such as marble floors and granite counters–for $450,000.
He harbors little doubt that he’ll find buyers at that price, citing the lake as a powerful amenity.
“It will draw North Siders to the South Side,” he says. “The same houses built at 3200 North would sell for $800,000. On the South Side, even with housing prices rising, you still get more home for your money.”
Wade’s houses will go up at 32nd Street and Rhodes Avenue, an interior thoroughfare in the 72-acre Lake Meadows complex.
With plans to eventually have 60 upscale, detached houses built there, Lake Meadows landowner Draper & Kramer is planning to access the development site with a thoroughfare from Martin Luther King Drive to Rhodes Avenue. Wade is marketing his units from a model at 600 E. 32nd St.
Some developers say perfect timing is a matter or reading marketing successes around their sites. The Williamses took their cue from ample home rehabs under way around them.
As Shorebank Development Corp. markets its 87-unit LakeShore Pointe townhouses this spring, Cindy Hollar, project manager and chief operating officer of Shorebank Development, says the warming real estate market she and other Shorebank Development officials observed was just one sign the timing was right to build on land the bank had assembled and held for a decade. The vacant lots are located across from the South Shore Cultural Center.
“Very warm markets and surging land value appreciation along the lakefront provided part of our motivation for moving ahead with this development,” says Hollar. “But also, the city’s readiness to move forward with plans to revitalize 71st Street. . . .”
“Anything with proximity to the lake is commanding. But also, the bank has invested quite a bit in South Shore . . . We have superior knowledge of the land and property value in South Shore, know many of the area’s landlords and the quality of their buildings,” adds South Shore Bank’s president, Margaret A. Cheap.
LakeShore Pointe’s homes are base-priced from $139,000 to more than $300,000. The two-bedroom flats to four-bedroom townhouses with features including lake-facing rooftop decks will range from 1,500 to 3,000 square feet.
Just about the same time that Finney began his work in Woodlawn, George Thrush bought eight abandoned buildings around DePaul University and now recalls his experiences pioneering market-rate housing in that North Side neighborhood.
“There was an active street gang there and you’d feel uncomfortable walking around there at 6:30 in the evening,” says Thrush, recalling the first time he pioneered market-rate housing in a declined community.
By the time he ambled into Woodlawn, his instinct for investment readiness in such communities was well honed. Before his Thrush Development partnered with the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp. to build Plaisance Place, at 61st Street and Ellis Avenue, Thrush asked Woodlawn residents he met if their neighborhood was better or worse than it had been five years earlier. It was a question he’d asked years before in numerous North Side neighborhoods.
“If it’s worse, it’s hard to turn around,” says Thrush. “If a community has started recovery, just a bit, it’s easier to accelerate that progress.
“Woodlawn was in pretty bad shape when I first went there, but (Rev. Arthur) Brazier and other non-profit leaders building in the community had gotten people together, thinking a little more positively about the neighborhood. The area had an alderman (Arenda Troutman) you can sit down and work with, all providing the little bit of spark you needed,” says Thrush.
Five years after Plaisance Place started selling its townhouses and condominiums, prices have shot up. Units comparable to those that sold for $139,000 in 1994 now sell for $250,000. Currently, Thrush says he’s working on five projects in Woodlawn, and half of them are market-rate developments.
Now Thrush Development is launching another large townhouse development to the north, in the North Kenwood community, and once again says it was dynamic resident involvement in restoring the area’s housing stock and strong leadership that attracted him to the area.
In 1990, the area’s alderman, Toni Preckwinckle (4th), took up neighborhood house cleaning, using Department of Housing funds to rehab troubled multi-family buildings in pivotal areas of the community. Then she and local residents approached the Chicago Home Builders Associaton, Preckwinckle said, arguing the community was ripe for a Parade of Homes, the builders’ annual showcase of housing. The 1994 Parade that resulted is oft-cited as the community’s turning point toward revitalization.
While market-rate houses have sold in North Kenwood’s eastern portion ever since, and often at prices beyond $300,000, Thrush’s Shakespeare Townhouses extends revitalization several blocks west.
The Shakespeare development, at 46th Street and Greenwood Avenue, has 105 units from one- to three-bedrooms with base prices of $155,000 to $311,000.
Across from Thrush’s Shakespeare and directly adjacent to the Shakespeare School, New Kenwood LLC, a partnership between Davis/Ditton and private developer Tony Rezko, prepares to build another 40 townhouses, estimated to sell in the $200,000s to mid-$300,000s.
“Detached houses are already selling for those price ranges in the area and housing prices in the area have increased 150 percent over the last few years,” says Howard Stanback, a manager at Davis/Ditton. He expects groundbreaking after the company’s marketer, Mogule & Kennedy Real Estate, finishes marketing several detached single-family houses under construction on Oakenwald and Lake Park Avenues.
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