An initiative designed to boost affordable homeownership across the South and West sides was recently awarded the third Chicago Prize, a $10 million grant competition established by the Pritzker Traubert Foundation to help revive neighborhoods that historically suffered from disinvestment.
Community organizations and developers from South and West sides formed Reclaiming Chicago, a coalition that plans to leverage the prize money, draw in more investment, and eventually create about 2,000 new for-sale homes throughout the Chicago Lawn, Roseland, Back of the Yards and North Lawndale neighborhoods. The coalition is convened through United Power for Action and Justice, a Chicago-based community organization.
Instead of building individual homes on scattered sites, Reclaiming Chicago aims to transform whole neighborhoods at once, sometimes taking over large vacant lots and planting groups of more than 100 affordable homes.
“It will help further stabilize vulnerable neighborhoods and increase opportunities for people in rental housing to own homes,” said Jeff Bartow, executive director of Southwest Organizing Project, a community organization and member of Reclaiming Chicago. “And the large-lot strategy will allow for greater efficiency. We will be able to move faster and it won’t cost as much.”
Foundation officials say the prize competition, launched in 2019, kicks off economic activity and sparks interest from other investors in the chosen neighborhoods. Reclaiming Chicago’s homebuilding strategy is also expected to show other developers that new homes can be affordable, said President Cindy Moelis.
“Homebuilding at this scale hasn’t happened on the South and West sides in at least two decades,” Moelis said. “Finding a way to build affordable homes would make a difference in a lot of these communities in terms of density and economic health.”
Past winners of the Chicago Prize include the Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative, which built the $50 million Sankofa Wellness Village, a combination health clinic, after-school care facility, business incubator and arts programming facility.
The first prize, awarded in 2020, went to Always Growing, Auburn Gresham, an initiative that transformed a vacant, four-story 1920s-era building near 79th and Halsted streets into a community and health care hub, and turned a nearby vacant lot into the Green Era Campus, where millions of pounds of food waste is diverted from landfills and transformed into enough natural gas to heat nearly 1,500 homes.
Reclaiming Chicago will launch its development effort at the corner of 74th Street and South Talman Avenue in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood. The $10 million Chicago Prize grant and other investment will be used to acquire the 17-acre site. Coalition members Southwest Organizing Project and The Resurrection Project will develop about 125 new single-family and two-flat homes for families earning between 80% and 120% of the area’s median income.
Southwest Organizing Project has preserved or built hundreds of affordable homes in Chicago Lawn, and The Resurrection Project has developed about 1,100 affordable homes in its 35-year history.
Bartow said Reclaiming Chicago will also help change how affordable homes get built. The group will use the Chicago Prize to bolster the coalition’s existing revolving loan fund that finances new home construction. The repaid loans replenish the fund and finance the next batch of homes, reducing the need for private investment and speeding up development. Proceeds from new home sales on the Chicago Lawn site will finance new construction in the other neighborhoods including Roseland.
“We think this has to happen in more than one neighborhood,” Bartow said.
The Pritzker Traubert Foundation ultimately hopes other builders will adopt similar strategies, Moelis said.
“If we can prove out the theory that we can build housing more affordable, that could have a catalyzing impact across Chicago,” she said.
Creating dense groups of new affordable homes will also boost nearby commercial corridors, including 63rd, 67th and 71st streets in Chicago Lawn, and others in neighborhoods targeted by Reclaiming Chicago, said Shenita Muse, executive director of the Hope Center Foundation of Chicago, the philanthropic arm of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago and part of Reclaiming Chicago.
“Retail follows rooftops, and we are seeing that in the neighborhoods where we’re building,” Muse said. “We’re not just housing developers. We’re community developers.”
Carlos Nelson, CEO of the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corp., a partner in the coalition which won the first prize, said the award did more than provide $10 million. It put a spotlight on their project and the surrounding neighborhood, attracting enough additional investment to complete the Auburn Gresham Healthy Lifestyle Hub, a $52.8 million development at 839 W. 79th St., now anchored by the UI Health Mile Square Primary and Immediate Care Center.
“We didn’t have the connections to corporate America which would let us complete the project,” Nelson said. “It’s less about the capital and more about the visibility and the connections.”
Whirlpool Corp., Kohler Corp., Discover Financial Services and the Chicago Bears supported the project, which also attracted funding through New Market Tax Credits and a city Tax Increment Financing District, Nelson said.
The building had sat vacant for years, but now employs more than 100, and hosts live music in its grand lobby, along with a farmers’ market every weekend.
“It’s eye-catching, and not something you expect to see in our community,” Nelson said. “We’ve set the bar high for what is expected of Chicago Prize winners.”
About $180 million of investment since 2019 has poured into new developments within a two-and-a-half-block radius of the four-story lifestyle hub, transforming what had been a neighborhood of bricked-up buildings, vacant lots and brownfields, said Norma Sanders, director of special initiatives for the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corp.
New neighborhood developments include the Auburn Gresham Apartments, a $47 million affordable housing project built by Evergreen Real Estate Group and Imagine Group with 58 units across two buildings, the first project completed through the city’s Invest South/West initiative.
“There are a ton of things in the pipeline underway now,” Sanders said.
