Bringing Investment to West Woodlawn, A Whole Block at a Time

By Lamell McMorris and Sean Harden

Three years ago, the area around the 6500 block of South Evans in the West Woodlawn neighborhood looked like a lot of blocks in Chicago’s disinvested South Side communities: abandoned homes, boarded-up windows, and empty lots strewn with debris.

Today, eight of the previously empty lots in that neighborhood are now the site of brand-new homes. They are part of a quiet but steady rejuvenation of West Woodlawn that will bring more economic investment into the community and help it realize its potential for the people who live there. We know because we’re the ones who built those homes.

This isn’t a typical story of a large developer who sees an early opportunity to capitalize on a struggling community. We’re two friends who grew up on the South Side. We know the small business owners who are the lifeblood of West Woodlawn’s local economy and the residents who call it home. We’ve spent the last decade as independent community developers, rehabbing abandoned houses into homes where families can spend their lives and grow their wealth.

Not long ago, this wasn’t possible. Throughout much of the 20th Century, discriminatory housing practices prevented Black Chicagoans from owning their own homes. Redlining, one of those practices, entailed the federal government’s color-coding of maps by racial demographics, designating which neighborhoods were worthy of investment and which were too “risky.” Neighborhoods filled with white residents were marked in green on the map, which effectively gave banks the green light to lend. Majority-Black neighborhoods, on the other hand, were marked in red—a figurative stoplight for banks and the dollars that could have secured those communities’ futures. No mortgages, no small business loans, no economic development.

Today, those communities still bear the scars. Although redlining is no longer a legal, formal practice, the attitudes that created it still drive banks’ lack of investment. An investigation last year found that Illinois banks had invested more in mortgages in one North Side neighborhood than in all of Chicago’s majority-Black neighborhoods combined.

A common approach of small, community developers like us is to rehab houses or build on empty lots here and there. Through the Cook County Land Bank Authority, more than 400 of us have taken that approach and made a measurable difference throughout the County, helping to create more than $100 million in community wealth over the last eight years.

But we realized that we could make a bigger difference if we concentrated our efforts in one spot. We decided to pour our resources into one area where we would build many homes. When you create a spot for families to thrive, families come—and investment in the surrounding community will be sure to follow.

We hired guys from the block who needed work but couldn’t always find it the traditional way, often because they were returning citizens. Together, we built Woodlawn Pointe, a new community on the 6500 block of South Evans.

Our goal is to build more homes in West Woodlawn and continue what we’ve started, sparking a renaissance of this community—something we believe is possible in the near future. Because if our time as community developers has taught us anything, it’s that we’re not just building homes. We’re building generational wealth and all the hope that comes with it.

Lamell McMorris is the owner of Greenlining Realty USA. Sean Harden is his business partner.

About Post Author

Comments

From the Web

Skip to content