A new shopping center. A beautiful park. Cafés, wine bars and pet salons along a block.
All these amenities signal more than just a hip, urban neighborhood: they can be the signs of gentrification taking over a community. A businessperson takes their designer dog out on a walk through the neighborhood while a family of five is forced to pack their belongings and leave. The decades-old grocery store is replaced by a Whole Foods to attract new residents.
Within and outside of South Lawndale are organizations that are dedicated to community improvement and actively combatting the structural factors that create gentrification and displace residents. Gentrification may be masked under the guise of community development or improvement, but it almost always comes at a cost.
Supporters may point toward lowered crime, beautified areas, or economic prosperity as indicators of positive change. Despite this, however, a reality exists of native, lower-income individuals and families becoming displaced due to rising costs of living, lack of beneficial or wanted resources, and an overall shifting demographic of their once-cherished community. The goal of organizations that fight gentrification is to act against measures, plans or ideas by government leaders that would harm current residents, while at the same time ensuring that beneficial investment and development strengthens underprivileged communities.
LISC Chicago is one of those organizations helping to enact beneficial change in South Lawndale. A nationwide non-profit operating out of New York since 2001, LISC has a Chicago branch that has worked with communities to economically strengthen them, their residents and their businesses. Their connections in political and social spheres are also utilized. In 2005, the organization teamed up with Enlace (an organization within Little Village that works to “confront systemic inequities and barriers to economic and social access,” according to its website), alderman Ricardo Muñez and other local groups to form a quality of life plan for South Lawndale. That plan was given an update in 2013.
“Our model,” Jake Ament, LISC Chicago’s Neighborhood Network Director, said, “is to identify a local organization in a neighborhood that can help convene stakeholders, put together what’s the long term vision that stakeholders within the community have for the neighborhood over a sort-of five-to-ten-year range, and then help put a plan together around that that lays out our priorities and strategies for achieving that vision.”
One of the ways the group works toward that vision is through its support toward companies and workers. The organization has economic and financial programs, the latter of which features ten Financial Opportunity Centers throughout Chicago, which together are intended to help individuals and groups take charge of their lives through job connections, business and personal wealth accumulation, and more.
To help make their efforts into a reality, the institution also operates as a community development financial institution (CDFI), or a non-profit bank, that gives loans for the benefit of both businesses and real estate projects.
“We try to line a lot of that work as much as we can around those community plans.” Ament said. “So how can we focus on making loans or other investments that help move those priorities forward, but also [go] where there are affordable housing projects, or economic development projects or small businesses in other communities around the city that we can help support and move forward.”
The organization is aware of gentrification and how, over time, communities have changed their ideas on how to foster development, from wanting simple funding to needing careful investment.
Investment into a community is often viewed as a good thing, necessary for the economic advancement of the area. During the 2000s, Ament said that most community stakeholders in marginalized communities were focused on securing outside investment into their neighborhoods, but that has since changed. Investment can negatively impact certain residents and force their withdrawal from a neighborhood if the consequences are not considered.
“[Public stakeholders’ wishes] changed probably starting around just after the foreclosure crisis in [the] recession,” Ament said. “As the economy has picked back up, many more are talking about…anti-displacement strategies. Kind of flipping that script and saying, ‘Actually, we don’t want to convince you in the private sector or in the public sector to just bring dollars here and invest, we actually want to make sure that we have ways that we could make it a more inclusive process.’”
This is obviously a complicated issue. The old saying “beggars can’t be choosers” seems to apply here; it is difficult for a low-income community to secure investment in a way that both is economically beneficial to it and doesn’t displace current residents.
Ament acknowledges that it is not within the interests of LISC, the neighborhood organizations they work with or the community stakeholders within them to completely halt neighborhood change.
“From LISC’s perspective, we’re certainly not looking to stop any sort of movement in the city,” Ament said. “It’s not a reasonable idea to say that the people who live here now are always going to be the people who live here. I think what we’ve seen is that once the private market changes and starts to invest, it does it at such a scale that lower-income communities of color are just shut out of the process.”
The problem, then, becomes securing investment for the community while at the same time allowing current residents to capitalize on the wealth and growth that that investment brings.
By putting together land trust and co-ops, organizations like LISC try to ensure that residents within neighborhoods like South Lawndale own a stake in the property of their neighborhood and thus are not hampered by the rising property taxes and prices that come as a result of investment.
“Many of the neighborhoods that we work in on the South and West Sides have a lot of vacant land, vacant houses and would certainly rather see people move in and invest and have those be homes again,” Ament said. “But, they just want to make sure when that happens that that then doesn’t raise their property taxes or make it so their kids or their family members don’t have an opportunity to buy in the neighborhood too, and it’s a tricky balance sometimes.”
For a neighborhood like South Lawndale where 30 percent of its community is made up with people under 18 years old, that latter half of Ament’s statement becomes supremely important. Enlace’s updated 2013 plan directly tries to address the issue of affordable housing in a community that houses nearly 80,000 people in just 21,100 units.
This plan featured many organizations combating housing affordability and foreclosure crises to improve community access to loans and housing counseling. In addition, the nonprofit housing developer Mercy Housing Lakefront purchased a 206,000 square-foot vacant building to convert into 148 affordable apartment units with green space and in-house amenities.
These actions implement the 2013 Quality of Life plan’s goal to address community-wide problems of high foreclosure rates, expensive rental fees and new housing options for varying income levels. Other steps included educating renters on tenant and housing rights, addressing housing needs for undocumented residents and preserving home values in the community. This plan helped improve housing affordability, quality and quantity while maintaining contemporary property tax levels.
With continued political and social action and quality-of-life planning, non-profit organizations like LISC and Enlace are working to simultaneously secure the economic development of underprivileged communities – South Lawndale in Enlace’s case – while keeping them from going the way of the South Loop; that is, having a wealthy, white population move into the community at the expense of its low-income residents.
“You always need new folks because there’s always people moving in and out,” Ament said. “What we want to see and what our partners are always pushing for is that there’s always an opportunity that even if you don’t have the money to buy a $500,000 house, you have a way that you could live in that neighborhood and that you have a way that you could be an owner in some way in that neighborhood.”
Grassroots Organizations Drive for 'Community Improvement' 