Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration is set to launch several development projects in the West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale, but a coalition of local community groups and developers said Monday the area’s economic troubles have deep roots, and though the mayor’s initiative is welcome, it won’t be enough.
“We love the mayor’s INVEST South/West program and think it’s great, so we thank the mayor for that,” said Richard Townsell, executive director of the Lawndale Christian Development Corp. “But since the riots in 1968, North Lawndale has been on a downward trend in terms of population, and one thing is not going to solve it.”
Townsell’s group, along with partners North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council, North Lawndale Employment Network and Sinai Community Institute, unveiled a report at the City Club of Chicago from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, detailing both the challenges facing the West Side community of nearly 35,000, and how to reverse decades of disinvestment.
North Lawndale was once the home of Sears, which ran its national mail order business out of a 55-acre complex that stretched across the neighborhood, a beehive of activity that provided thousands of jobs. Sears headed downtown in the 1970s, and other manufacturing giants such as International Harvester and Western Electric also left. Unemployment soared in the ensuing decades, leading to population decline and a deteriorated housing stock. Smaller local businesses also shut their doors, leaving behind a neighborhood with several thousand vacant lots and little economic activity.
“My mother escaped sharecropping by moving up from Tennessee in the ’50s to North Lawndale, where she went to work,” Townsell said. “But when you take a business, you lose not only that business, but also the businesses that fed off it, the coffee shops, diners and car washes.”
North Lawndale now sits in the middle of a food desert, a region with no sizable grocery stores, forcing residents to spend their money outside the community, according to Teresa Córdova, director of the Great Cities Institute. That’s not just a matter of convenience. Unless those dollars stay in North Lawndale, commercial spaces will stay empty, cutting out an important source of jobs.
“The most basic rule of economic development is you have to have dollars circulating in your community,” she said. “North Lawndale residents have to leave the neighborhood for almost everything because almost every category of goods and services is not available.”
North Lawndale residents spend $124 million of their wages outside the community each year, researchers found. Furthermore, businesses did add about 3,000 jobs to the neighborhood between 2010 and 2018, but most went to nonresidents. That’s partly because more than 20% of the jobs require a college degree, a credential held by just 12.7% of North Lawndale residents. Overall, white workers hold more than half of neighborhood jobs, while making up only 2.3% of North Lawndale residents. The mismatches help explain why nearly half of local households are forced to pay 50% or more of their incomes toward rent, leaving little or nothing for savings.
“What is needed right now is to plug the leaks,” Córdova said.
LCDC and its community partners planned for years to bring in affordable housing, new retail and other economic development, Townsell said, but having such a detailed analysis will help set priorities and ensure future development benefits residents.
“We knew money was leaking out of the community, but we didn’t know quite how much,” Townsell said. “And it was sobering to see in the richest country in the world how much people were spending of their hard-earned incomes just to find housing.”
Lightfoot kicked off her INVEST South/West initiative in 2019, targeting 10 communities on the South and West sides. According to the mayor’s office, in the first two years it mobilized more than $1 billion of private and public funds for a series of mixed-use developments, including Lawndale Redefined, a $31.4 million project in North Lawndale. A joint venture of GRE Ventures, Imagine Group and 548 Development, it will replace a vacant plot on Ogden Avenue with dozens of apartments and town homes, retail and restaurant spaces, as well as a community center. In addition, earlier this year, the city selected 548 Development and Related Midwest to develop at 4300 West Roosevelt Road the $38.4 million Lawndale Innovation Center, a collection of solar-powered industrial buildings and community centers. The vacant 20.8-acre site was once an illegal dumping ground made infamous in the 1990s by the federal Operation Silver Shovel investigation, which led to the convictions of several aldermen.
Townsell said the community would also like to see the city appoint an ombudsman for North Lawndale, someone who could cut through any red tape that might delay new development projects. The Great Cities report also shows the neighborhood needs a construction loan program for new, affordable single-family homes, and a flexible emergency fund to help those seeking employment pay for child care or work supplies.
“Even though the unemployment rate in North Lawndale is three times higher than the city of Chicago, that’s not a reflection of people’s desire to work,” said Brenda Palms Barber, president and CEO of North Lawndale Employment Network.
Above all, to improve the quality of life, the neighborhood needs grocery stores, Townsell said.
“We found out during the pandemic how important health was, and we need people to have access to healthy, affordable options for produce.”
