Johnson Administration Breathes New Life into INVEST South/West Developments in Englewood

INVEST South/West, a community development initiative steered by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, was bold in its intentions to create a standard for what community investment could look like for the city’s long underserved neighborhoods. Under Mayor Brandon Johnson, the program is going through a revamp and new policies are making their way to City Council in order to bolster efforts to increase the supply of affordable housing and advance a greater number of community development projects. 

Lightfoot’s stated goal with INVEST S/W was primarily to invest in key neighborhood corridors in ten different neighborhoods throughout the city that hadn’t gotten as much attention from private investment. The funding was pooled and community stakeholders were identified, yet some of the chosen projects and rollout of funding has been criticized as being biased and slow. Residents have reportedly felt that “bigger developers” generally won out in these competitions and had insufficient neighborhood feedback. 

In the city’s three-year update for INVEST S/W, multiple projects were deemed successful, like the Montclare Residence, The Racine Village, transitional housing for returning citizens at The Regenerator, Thrive Englewood’s mixed-income workforce housing, military veteran housing at Hope Manor, and other projects funded by the program, amounting to over $100 million investment.

But these specific projects, which place housing at the center of their proposals, do not take up that large a piece of the overall pie. At the three-year mark for INVEST S/W, there was $2.2 billion in investment from private and public investors, and housing made up a total of just $536 million.  

The Cut The Tape Report has over 100 recommendations to streamline the application, evaluation, and approval processes for community development projects in hopes to create more equity. This report also created a task force of forty-nine stakeholders, which includes the developers and nonprofits that lead these projects.

In Englewood, The Earle School Family Residence project, an affordable housing redevelopment of a shuttered elementary school, is now being coined an adaptive reuse historic project and is an example of a project in the original INVEST S/W pipeline. The data shows that Englewood has a median income ($22,127) that fits the qualifications for an affordable housing program. The citywide median income is three times greater.  

The INVEST S/W report doesn’t disclose the actual cost of a unit, but in a Finance Committee meeting in March 2024, the Earle School Family Residence showcased their estimates. The development would be one hundred percent affordable, with fifty total units.  Depending on the type of unit, which range from one to two-bedroom apartments, people making up to 43.2 percent of the area median income (AMI) would qualify for an apartment. Forty-eight percent of those units would also offer rental assistance in the form of housing vouchers.

One of the community partners that took part in the community engagement process for multiple proposals in Englewood was R.A.G.E. (Residents’ Association of Greater Englewood), a community organization focused on building power and economic self-determination in Englewood. 

Nikki Patin is program director at R.A.G.E, where she has worked with the Chicago Recovery Plan. One of her tasks was mapping vacant lots and vacant properties in order to assess and catalog for redevelopment and to help create community safety. 

“Part of that is also to develop community-led real estate work, where we are looking at blocks that may have five or more properties on what some people call superblocks, where we are looking to rehab properties [and make them] affordable for purchase,” Patin said.

Patin outlined the different programs that can help with the purchase of a home, like the IHDA grant, the CHA downpayment assistance program, FHA loans, as well as RAGE’s Buy The Block Program, which completed its eleventh cohort earlier this year. In summary, she said, “There is no magic bullet for buying a home,” which she felt was part of a holistic approach when creating affordable housing in communities like Englewood.

From a developer’s point of view, the idea of investing in a disinvested community can be seen as counterintuitive. A key objective of INVEST S/W was to attract developers. Gorman and Company was one such developer, taking lead on the Earle School Family Residence project, and also as the developer of the Regenerator project. But if INVEST S/W’s goal was to get private capital to follow development proposals, there needed to be vehicles for sustainable investment. 

“The challenge under Lightfoot was getting the money to the table,” said Ron Clewer, the Midwest market president for Gorman and Company. “Johnson, however, was able to get the council to agree to [a] bond and creating a pool for affordable housing and housing development adjacent to economic development, not either-or.”

RAGE was a part of the outreach for both the Go Green on Racine Project and the Earle School Family Residence project, and has participated in both administrations’ community engagement processes. Englewood is a community that has a collaborative relationship with alderpersons David Moore and Stephanie Coleman, an active Quality of Life plan, and strong community involvement that former Commissioner Maurice Cox recognized. 

Patin talked about what community development looked like and how that would help create affordable housing opportunities. She believes there is always more room for equity, stating, “When the process is made more accessible, the pool of people tend to reflect that.” 

Patin believes moves like this allow the strongest applicants by creating accessibility for all community stakeholders. “An example I can give was when I started to see a trend where [the city] didn’t require the answer to every question to be written. They started offering the ability for people to submit audio”. 

RAGE, along with a constellation of other community organizations, did the community engagement part of finding out what Englewood needed and wanted. 

During the March Committee on Finance meeting, Clewer stated, “I understand that people in Englewood may not look like me,” as his opening statement to going over all the wraparound services being offered by the project. 

The AMI of Chicago is a significant measurement of affordability, but what’s more critical is Englewood’s actual income. Gorman and Company presented Englewood’s median income at $22,127.

“If we look at Chicago median rents and median incomes, the concern we had is that the Chicago median income is significantly higher than the Englewood median income. If we built an affordable project using that, people who don’t live in Englewood could come into Englewood and be housed in Englewood”, Clewer said, later adding, “we could literally not be servicing anyone in Englewood.” 

Clewer referenced an example of a project in Gary, Indiana as the basis for the project in Englewood. That project used small area income to advise the project in Gary, where a fair market rate apartment is under $600. Using this model in Englewood, without vouchers, prices could range from $1,000 to $1,220 for studio, 1-bedroom, and 2-bedroom apartments. 

The developers dealt with this dilemma by utilizing the small area income estimates, low-income housing tax credits, historic tax credits, and MAUI vouchers. Clewer pointed out what could have happened: “We could be greedy and say we want 100 percent vouchers on this project and want every unit renting for $2200, still taking 30 percent [from the tenant] with the government paying the rest… that’s really unfair.” 

Clewer explained that each of these proponents services different people on Englewood’s income ladder while still prioritizing the lowest-income residents. 

Clewer and Patin both worked with the city and other government agencies on these different projects. Patin views translatability as an important element for any city-led program. “It’s a matter of how you connect these [processes] to people and how you make them translatable for people, and that also depends on your goals and values as an administration.” 

The vision of Lightfoot, the conditions of the pandemic, and progressive policymaking of the Johnson administration have created opportunities for community investment in the neighborhoods that need it most. Mayor Lightfoot and Johnson have found multiple ways to do community development, partnering with city government, community stakeholders, and private equity to invest in communities. 

Lightfoot started a snowball effect that changed the dynamic of developers’ approaches to communities like Englewood, and Johnson is creating a more streamlined process that can meet the community’s expectations.

Cordell Longstreath is an Army veteran, writer, community advocate and activist, and teacher. He last interviewed South Side writer and actor Diallo Riddle for the Weekly.