New Communities Program News and Articles

La Casa will be ‘mi casa’ for college students

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:33:35 CST

[Articles]

Communities like Pilsen, Little Village and Back of the Yards have higher-than-desirable high school dropout rates and lower-than-desirable college retention rates. Those who attend college are often the first in their families to do so, lacking the benefits of parents with campus experience, and they’re often commuters.

For all these reasons and more, NCP lead agency The Resurrection Project has teamed with several partners to construct La Casa, a community-based college dormitory and “Live-and-Learn Educational Center” for students from any institution of higher learning that will open its doors for the fall semester. The 27,000-square-foot, six-story building will house 105 students, who are expected to mostly hail from Near Southwest Side but could be from anywhere.

La Casa will provide mentoring for college students who, in turn, will be invited to help mentor high school and middle school students from Pilsen and surrounding neighborhoods.

Photo: Ed Finkel

“We’re responding to a student who would otherwise live in a crowded, two-bedroom apartment where the only quiet space they have to study is the bathroom or the kitchen, at midnight,” says Julio Guerrero, vice president of marketing and resource development at The Resurrection Project (TRP). “It’s kids who would otherwise live at home. We want student to have a conducive learning environment [of the sort] that their peers might have on campus.”

La Casa’s opening reflects the patient planning and dogged determination that TRP displayed more than six years ago, when it identified the development as a priority during its quality-of-life planning. That plan, completed through TRP’s engagement with NCP, includes a section designed to “develop paths to higher education for youth and adults,” noting studies that showed only 6 percent of entering college freshmen citywide would attain a degree by their mid-20s.

The study, by the Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, found that Latino students had even lower rates of college attainment. TRP figured that La Casa, to be built on the site of the former St. Adalbert’s Convent, would allow some students to live closer to home in a supportive environment, which might then increase their chances of graduating.

The top five floors of the building, at the intersection of 18^th Street and Paulina Avenue, will house the students in two- to three-bedroom suites with a living room and a kitchenette, with one resident advisor to a floor. The first floor will contain 1,460 square feet of leasable commercial space and a 1,200-square-foot resource center that will be operated by Instituto del Progreso Latino, a close partner of TRP in the NCP process as well as the Pilsen site for LISC Chicago’s Centers for Working Families.

'Es calara'
Guerrero anticipates college students who live in the building will participate in that programming aimed at middle- and high-school students, called es calara (“the ladder”), aimed at providing mentorship, academic enrichment, leadership skills and information about applying to college and gaining financial aid.

“The workload demands and expectations are completely different" in college, says Julio Guerrero, vice president of marketing and resource development at The Resurrection Project. “We’re providing wraparound support services for them. Our on-site staff will organize and create workshops [about topics like] what it means to read at a college level.”

Photo: Ed Finkel

“Our community has a significant high-school dropout rate and low college retention rates,” he says, noting 2010 citywide figures that show 35 percent of Latinos dropped out of high school—but only 8.9 percent earned a bachelor’s degree. “We want to make progress in breaking those trends.”

In turn, La Casa will provide mentoring for its resident college students to ensure that they succeed, given that relatively few family members or friends will be able to relate to their experiences, Guerrero says. He cites research showing that “while students may have been succeeding in high school, they were not well-prepared for the rigor, discipline and demands of college life.”

“The workload demands and expectations are completely different,” he adds. “We’re providing wraparound support services for them. Our on-site staff will organize and create workshops [about topics like] what it means to read at a college level.”

An adjacent 6,000-square-foot building on 18^th Place will contain an educational resource center, lounge, fitness and recreational space, classroom and meeting space where these workshops for the resident college students will take place. Led by a new program manager from The Resurrection Project, those will cover everything from how to be successful academically in college, to how to apply for admission and financial aid.

Other pieces of the “wraparound services” provided will be links to internship opportunities at TRP and area businesses, along with connections with young professionals from the community who can answer questions and help the college students navigate their new waters—much as the college students will be doing for middle- and high-school students through IDPL’s program, Guerrero says.

The Resurrection Project envisions a former convent as a home for Latino college students.

Photo: Cesar Nu�ez

The $11.3 million project has received an $8.4 million capital grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity along with additional support from the Polk Bros. Foundation, JP Morgan Chase – Facebook Community Giving Campaign, Field Foundation of Illinois, John and Kathleen Buck, Jim and Kay Mabie, Cody and Deborah Engle, and Vive La Hispanidad.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held for the facility in March, at which point a model unit will be on display for marketing purposes in anticipation of the fall semester opening. TRP is partnering with several area universities to raise awareness of the facility and to work jointly on academically strengthening student performance, Guerrero says.

“We think we’re positioned, given our track record in the community, and our reputation and success, to be that trailblazing model—to show that this type of situation, especially for commuting students, can increase our [college] retention,” he says.

For an earlier story about La Casa, please click here.

Connecting the dots

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:32:55 CST

[Articles]

The Green Exchange, on West Diversey Avenue just east of the Kennedy Expressway, is getting lots of attention these days, and for good reason.

The Green Exchange is blooming on West Diversey Avenue just east of the Kennedy Expressway.

Photo:

Coyote Logistics, which coordinates trucking capacity with national haulers, moved its headquarters to the former Cooper Lamp factory last year and recently announced that it’s hiring 400 more workers to join the 600 already on site. Jobs, jobs, jobs.

“Coyote is an example of the best that Chicago has to offer,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel on a recent visit to the building. “A cutting-edge firm that hires talented young people and gives them opportunities to advance and contribute to the city’s business fabric.”

Meanwhile, GreenChoice Bank has opened offices in the meticulously rehabbed early 20^th century building at 2533 W. Diversey Ave., and other new tenants – from architects to event planners – are filling up the space. All claim to be environmentally conscious.

What’s not to like? A heretofore obsolete century-old factory building in a mainly residential area that’s home to well-paying, clean energy jobs is boosting the neighborhood’s tax base and enhancing the civic realm.

The old Cooper Lamp factory, in 2006, before renovation began.

Photo: Juan Francisco Hernandez

Goes to show that NCP lead agency the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA), developer David Baum, and a few others knew what they were doing back in 2005, when Cooper Lamp announced it was shutting down and that its 240,000-square-foot building was up for grabs.

At the time, LSNA, with help from LISC/Chicago, was completing its quality-of-life plan for the neighborhood. Among its recommendations was to “work with local industrial councils to protect manufacturing jobs” and to “organize and advocate for industrial retention.” It mentioned the Cooper Lamp building in particular.

Crazy talk, right? Back then condos, not jobs, were the coin of the realm, and developers wanted to convert the property into hundreds of residential lofts. That was before subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations and 10 percent unemployment were facts of daily life.

Developer David Baum worked closely with NCP lead agency Logan Square Neighborhood Association to get the project rolling back in 2005.

Photo: Gordon Walek

Against the tide of market forces, the Cooper Lamps Task Force – an alliance of neighbors, veteran Cooper workers, LSNA leaders and the LEED Council (an agency that promotes industrial retention) - persuaded then-Ald. Manny Flores to support commercial use and Baum Development outlined its proposal for a renovated factory that would house showrooms, offices, retail shops and space for start-up companies.

“We don’t need more condos,” said Task Force leader Juan Gonzalez. “But we do need space for good jobs.”

Gonzalez, speaking a couple of years before the arrival of the greatest financial calamity to afflict the nation since the Great Depression, couldn’t have been more prophetic. Ditto for his colleague, Sandra Castillo.

“When the history of the Green Exchange is written,” she said, “it will not only be a story of environmental and business innovation. It will also be the story of how strategic economic development preserved a diverse, working-class neighborhood.”

Establishing a cause-and-effect relationship in neighborhood redevelopment isn’t easy. Projects often take so long to complete that by the time they’re done, the people who started working on them are long gone and unavailable to provide that critical first draft of history. Not so with the Green Exchange.

"This was a bottom-up project," says Joel Bookman, LISC/Chicago's director of programs.

Photo: Gordon Walek

“You can connect the dots in this instance,” said Joel Bookman, LISC Chicago’s director of programs. “Logan Square residents, LSNA, the LEED Council, David Baum and plenty of others saw the value of preserving a work place and creating jobs, and through careful planning and organizing did just that. This was a bottom-up project.”

Not that it was easy. The building sat empty for longer than Baum or anyone else would have liked. But LISC Chicago was an early funder. In addition to supporting LSNA through NCP, it made a grant to the LEED Council to assist in the redevelopment.

It provided another grant that helped the redevelopment team attract a $500,000 federal grant. That money was used for low-interest loans and start-up financing to tenants with employees that met federal low-income standards. Meanwhile, the City of Chicago stepped in with critical financing through the TIF program.

“It is a victory in the sense that this community invested in a strategy to bring jobs to the neighborhood before the recession hit,” John McDermott, the New Communities Program organizer at LSNA, told the Sun-Times earlier this month. “But it comes several years later than we thought.”

Better late than never.

Mayor hails first fruit of foreclosure fight

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:30:53 CST

[Articles]

Alicia Ivy is fed up with the foreclosure blight dragging down her block in West Humboldt Park and was only too happy, on the sunny first Friday of 2012, to give Mayor Rahm Emanuel a walking tour of the lowlights.

“This is what we’re up against,” Ivy said, waving at a boarded-up, graffiti-pocked two-flat across the street from her nicely maintained graystone on the 700 block of N. Christiana Ave.

Activist Alicia Ivy is proud of her nicely maintained graystone but tired of the blight brought on by nearby foreclosures and was happy to give the mayor a tour of her neighborhood.

Photo: Gordon Walek

“This was my parent’s house,” she said of her place. “This is where I grew up. We can’t let this foreclosure stuff bring us all down.”

Mayor Emanuel was in West Humboldt on Jan. 6 to see the problem first-hand and announce expansion of the city’s core effort to acquire, rehab and re-populate foreclosed properties, called the Micro-Market Recovery Program (MMRP).

First announced by the mayor last August, the idea is to better focus and coordinate a multi-partner effort to acquire and rehab foreclosed buildings—especially multi-unit buildings—beginning in nine target communities.

It’s an extension of a strategy recommended early on by LISC/Chicago and its partners—a strategy that helped the city win more than $150 million from a competitive federal program to fund purchase-and-rehab of lender-owned housing.

“Nobody’s going to spike the ball on the 30-yard-line,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said of the city's efforts to date. “We’re not in the end zone. But these are the right type of strategies … to get smart and to solve the problem.”

Photo: Gorodn Walek

MMRP services will include targeted code enforcement efforts; foreclosure prevention outreach; and resources and incentives to induce developers and owners to purchase, rent or sell foreclosed or vacant properties. Also, the city will use its power to assume title to or control certain distressed properties, holding them for future development or alternative uses.

“When a home gets foreclosed on a block,” Emanuel said, seconding Ms. Ivy’s fears, “research shows every other house loses about $10,000 automatically in value. It has an immediate impact.”

'Smartened up'
The mayor ended his walk-around with an outdoor press conference at the corner of West Huron Street and North Spaulding Avenue. There, on the northwest corner, is an eight-unit red brick walk-up being rehabbed by Hispanic Housing.

The city's Micro-Market Recovery Program will provide targeted code enforcement; foreclosure prevention outreach; and resources and incentives to induce developers and owners to purchase, rent or sell foreclosed or vacant properties.

Photo: Gordon Walek

“We’ve ‘smartened up’ to the problem,” Emanuel said, conceding that, even with the federal millions, there’s no way City Hall can make a noticeable impact unless it targets specific neighborhoods.

“We were spreading the peanut butter way too thin,” he said. “Then Andy came to me, and we decided this had to be dealt with from a neighborhood perspective.”

“Andy” is Andrew Mooney, who left his position as executive director of LISC/Chicago in the fall of 2010 to help reorganize the city’s Department of Housing and Economic Development (HED). He was asked last year by newly elected Mayor Emanuel to stay on as commissioner.

Lengthy process
Asked at the press conference why the red brick walk-up at 3304-08 W. Huron St. will be just the first MMRP-assisted property to be reoccupied when it opens this spring, Mooney explained why foreclosure turnarounds are such a tough slog.

The city won a $150 million federal grant to purchase and rehab lender-owned housing thanks to a targeted, multi-partner effort of the sort recommended by LISC/Chicago and its NCP partners.

Photo: Gordon Walek

“This is a lengthy process,” Mooney said. “It’s finding out who owns the buildings, getting title through the court system, figuring out how to get the rehab work financed and done. And once they’ve been vacant for a period of time they need a lot of rehab.”

The Huron building made a good example, having lapsed into the foreclosure process after a developer tried to convert it to condominiums. Mercy Portfolio Services, which manages the funds won through the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), purchased the empty building at a deep discount last year. With financing provided by Community Investment Corporation (CIC), the finished property will be transferred to Hispanic Housing, which will act as landlord.

In addition to LISC, other MMRP partners include Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, which counsels troubled borrowers and often identifies buildings ripe for purchase; and the MacArthur Foundation, which is making nearly $20 million available through loan programs that will leverage another $50 million in private capital.

LISC/Chicago provides financing to Mercy Portfolio Services through a $4 million line of credit to cover due diligence and acquisition costs, said Susana Vasquez, who succeeded Mooney last year as executive director. To date that revolving line has fronted over $19 million to get the paperwork moving on dozens of buildings.

Organized people
LISC/Chicago and NCP provide a lot more than money to help advance the MMRP strategy. Early NCP organizing efforts will help the city hit the ground running in five of the nine neighborhoods targeted by the city that are part of New Communities: Chicago Lawn, Woodlawn, Auburn Gresham, Englewood and Humboldt Park, which includes West Humboldt.

One stop on the mayor's tour was this building on Huron Street, rehabbed through the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program that's managed locally by Mercy Portfolio Services.

Photo: Gordon Walek

There the NCP effort is led by Bickerdike Redevelopment Corp., which, like several other NCP communities, already had organized a foreclosure prevention program and, with partners like Neighborhood Housing Services, was in a good position to identify blocks—and clusters of blocks—where the city and Mercy could focus their efforts for maximum effect.

Joy Aruguete, Bickerdike’s executive director, attended the mayor’s press conference and said her group, which operates several affordable-rent buildings nearby and even oversees its own construction subsidiary, hopes to take possession of other buildings via MMRP.

What LISC and NCP contribute most to the foreclosure fight, though, might just be engaged people like Alicia Ivy. She’s been active with Bickerdike, with the West Humboldt Park Development Council, with Ald. William Burnett’s 27^th Ward office, and with the West Humboldt Park Farmers’ Market and Bazaar.

Emanuel thanked Ivy for leading the tour of her block, but then cautioned the press that Chicago, with nearly 10,000 bank-owned residential properties, is only beginning to turn the corner.

“Nobody’s going to spike the ball on the 30-yard-line,” the mayor said. “We’re not in the end zone. But these are the right type of strategies … to get smart and to solve the problem.”

Closing a condo-Cabrini chasm

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 23:30:27 CST

[Articles]

After months of working around it, time had arrived to talk about the elephant in the room.

For a year now, at monthly meetings of the Near North Unity Program, area residents have discussed the need for more youth activities, safe-feeling public spaces and meet-your-neighbor events. Together they helped plan last summer’s jazz-in-the-park concerts, a Friday afternoon basketball league, even a neighborhood clean-and-green patrol.

Are these guys just hanging out--or about to cause trouble? The mostly African American lower-income residents of Parkside say they sometimes feel overly watchful eyes on them when they're in common areas of the complex.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

Still, something didn’t feel quite right … didn’t feel, well, neighborly. Just below the surface there seemed an unspoken tension in the NNUP meeting room. Nearly everyone knew what it was, but none dared give it voice: It’s the tension between public housing tenants whose families have lived in the Cabrini-Green area for decades, and newcomers who’ve purchased condos and townhouses in the new mixed-income developments.

CHA tenants feel they’re being monitored and regulated like second-class citizens even though it’s their longtime neighborhood. Homeowners feel they’ve invested their hard-earned money in a “new” neighborhood … and don’t want that investment—or their sense of decorum—threatened by what some consider low-class behaviors.

“There’s an undercurrent going on here,” acknowledged Stanley Merriwether, who was brought in by LISC/Chicago to guide meetings and help plan events. “There’s animosity in some cases,” she shared at a recent gathering, “but mostly it’s fear and uncertainty—and we need to talk about what that is.”

The redeveloped mixed-income complex where Cabrini-Green once stood, developed by Peter Holsten and Holsten Real Estate Development Corp., is a mix of market-rate homes, subsidized rentals and leased public housing units.

Photo: John McCarron

And so they’re talking. At several sessions this fall Merriwether has presided over what she calls “a great and candid conversation.” The meetings were even split into morning and evening sessions to accommodate folks who work days … and seniors who prefer to be out-and-about in the a.m.

“The goal was never to solve this,” Merriwether opened a recent session at Park Community Church, “but to begin a dialogue. If we’re really serious about moving forward we have to be willing to deal with issues that are barriers to moving forward.”

National import
The conversations have been up close and personal … but reflective of an important dynamic that’s also taking place in dozens of cities across America. From Atlanta to San Francisco, from Seattle to Miami, untold thousands of city-dwellers are trying to understand and overcome frictions triggered by the abrupt juxtaposition of middle-class homeowners and public housing renters.

It’s all part of the federally-funded Hope VI (“Hope 6”) program, a massive undertaking launched by Congress in 1992 to replace much of the nation’s worn-out and socially isolated public housing with privately developed complexes of townhouses and mid-rises. A third of the new homes are being sold to middle-class families, a third rented to moderately-subsidized renters, and a third leased long-term to local public housing agencies for sublet to their low-income tenants.

Ald. Walter Burnett (27th), who grew up in Cabrini Green, asked LISC/Chicago to develop the Near North Unity Project to bring together residents of different races and economic strata.

Photo: John McCarron

Chicago received its first Hope VI grant in 1994 to begin demolition and replacement of the Cabrini-Green high-rises, where more than 2,000 African-American families had long endured slipshod maintenance, broken elevators and safety issues that kept decent stores at a distance and playgrounds unused.

But the old Cabrini was home to the good people who lived there. And with a series of legal actions organized tenants managed to block demolition until 2000, when City Hall and the Chicago Housing Authority committed to a Plan for Transformation that is remaking not just Cabrini but public housing across the city.

Resentment vs. annoyance
This contentious history helps explain the lingering resentment among Cabrini-area tenants over demolition of the high-rises and the personal upheavals that resulted. Some tenants took federal rent vouchers and moved to other neighborhoods; others moved to CHA developments on the South or West sides. But more than 500 displaced families moved to new apartments built on or near the old Cabrini-Green site, such as Parkside of Old Town, a 718-unit campus being developed by Holsten Real Estate Development Corp.

There they live down hallways and across courtyards from condos and townhouses purchased by young couples—most, but not all, whites with double-incomes—for $200,000 and up. Some bought because they believed in the Transformation Plan’s goals of racial diversity and economic integration. Others just saw a good deal, what with Parkside’s public subsidies—from steeply discounted land to an assortment of local tax breaks—lowering purchase prices some 20 percent below those for comparable properties on the North Side.

According to developer Peter Holsten, some buyers intended to “flip” their units for a profit, or move elsewhere once their children reached school age. But the collapse of the housing market in 2007-08 all but negated those options, and now some owners with no intention of participating in a grand social experiment find themselves, reluctantly, in the middle of one.

Meetings of Parkside condo owners are closed to the public, but sources say owners’ complaints often include shouting, cursing, loud radio playing, roughhousing and “hangin’ out” in lobbies or common areas. Complaints also have been lodged against barbecuing on balconies and front porches and overly frequent visits by relatives, boyfriends and so forth.

Facilitator Stanley Merriwether (standing) says one frustration of the meetings has been that the most annoyed market-rate residents have not attended--but she's optimistic that some common ground is being built among those who do.

Photo: John McCarron

One frustration, says Merriwether, is that the most annoyed condo owners haven’t been coming to NNUP meetings. Instead it’s the peacemakers. But by creating opportunities for people to get together, she argues, word will get out and more owners will learn how to work out their differences with renters. And vice-versa. After all, renters have their own complaints: from uncollected dog feces to snooty looks and a lack of eye contact.

Expert testimony
Especially useful have been the contributions by Hope VI “experts” who may not live in the Cabrini area but have deep experience with its clash of cultures.

Ald. Walter Burnett (27^th) grew up in the Cabrini rowhouses—146 of which have been rehabbed and re-populated with CHA tenants—but has moved since to a more affluent part of his ward.

“Sometimes our mom wouldn’t let us kids leave the front porch so she could keep an eye on us,” Burnett shared at one meeting. “So even now you go to the [CHA] row houses and you see a lot of people on the front porches. That’s just what we do. That’s how we grew up.”

Burnett, who originally approached LISC/Chicago about starting NNUP, challenged condo owners to have a little more understanding about why black kids “hang out” in front of where they live. “Folks say they’re loitering but the truth is we are different, and we have different cultures.”

Longtime residents who considered Cabrini Green home challenged the proposed demolition of the old high-rises in the 1990s in court, which begat the mixed-income Plan for Transformation.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

The alderman acknowledged, however, that owners sometimes have a point, as when his own nieces and nephews come visiting to Burnett’s house and do things like bounce balls off walls or swing on a fence gate.

“I said, man, don’t swing on that fence. You’re going to break it and I [not some distant landlord like the CHA] have to pay for that. But when I told them that, they changed. So the challenge is that a lot of us have high expectations, and a lot of us don’t know what to expect. But, if we communicate, we can change some things…. We just need to understand each other.”

Earnest Gates, executive director of the Near West Side Community Development Corp., shared his experience at West Haven Park bringing together condo owners and tenants transferring from nearby CHA high-rises at Henry Horner Homes.

“Be honest”
Gates was especially candid about the worldview of some buyers.

“There is a resentment,” Gates said, “when someone has to spend $300,000 for a condo, and there’s someone next door who didn’t have to spend anything. And that person has to go to work, to a job he or she probably doesn’t like, and then they come back and deal with the reality of someone who, they think, is living on their dime.”

“If people can be honest about that, that’s where you start. I’ve sat in these meetings for years, hearing the same arguments, watching the same activity. You have to be honest about what’s going on in your buildings and in your developments.”

“We’re all part of this grand experiment,” summed up Gates, who served on the CHA’s governing board during Transformation’s early stages. “Originally, it was all about bricks and mortar. There was no conversation about the impact of suddenly bringing 300 families into a ‘new’ neighborhood that didn’t really exist … the impact on the people already there, the impact on the people moving in.”

Parkside's new condos and townhouse units start at $200,000 for market-rate buyers.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

“Some of this stuff we’re not even aware of because we’re dealing with it on a gut level,” Gates said. “That’s why you have to put it on the table. Be honest about it and push toward resolution.”

More information:
Keri Blackwell, LISC/Chicago, 312-422-9558, KBlackwell@lisc.org
Stanley Merriwether, 312-504-4706, smerriwether@gmail.com

Raising up teachers in your backyard

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:53:20 CST

[Articles]

Nancy Ballesteros is completing a remarkable three-year journey from being a low-paid single mom of two kids to being a full-fledged Chicago Public Schools teacher … and all-around inspiration to kids in her Little Village neighborhood.

“I can say to my students, hey, I know what you’re going through. I know how you feel. I grew up in this neighborhood.”

Nancy Ballesteros has completed the life journey from low-paid single mom to Chicago Public Schools teacher.

Photo: John McCarron

Ballesteros told her story Nov. 10 to a group of college professors and education majors gathered to learn about a potentially game-changing innovation in urban education developed right here in NCP neighborhoods. And they celebrated a new book on the phenomenon: Grow Your Own Teachers: Grassroots Change for Teacher Education,published by Teachers College Press at Columbia University.

“I do believe that Grow Your Own is the future of teacher education,” said Dean Maureen Gillette of Northeastern Illinois University’s College of Education, who moderated a panel that included Ballesteros.

LSNA the hotbed
The unconventional idea that moms and dads of children in predominantly minority schools could be directly involved in the classroom—and in some cases even become certified teachers—traces its beginnings to Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.

The Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) was active in the school reform movement well before coming aboard NCP as a lead agency in 2002. For a decade prior to then, LSNA had campaigned successfully to relieve overcrowding with new and expanded school buildings and to win places for Hispanic parents on reformist Local School Councils.

But in 1995 LSNA took it a step further.

“We developed a vision of opening the doors of ‘fortress’ schools and helping them function as centers of community,” remembers Joanna Brown, LSNA’s lead education organizer. It began at Funston Elementary when an innovative principal OK’d an LSNA proposal to train some Spanish-speaking moms in tutoring skills so they could supplement classroom instruction, often by pulling out kids in need of one-to-one or small-group sessions.

Charlene Campbell, 51, who raised seven children and chaired the Local School Council at Reavis Elementary, has entered the Grow Your Own program and hopes to teach at Reavis once she's finished.

Photo: John McCarron

The Parent Mentor Program worked so well that other Logan Square principals were quick to sign up, and even to add new wrinkles developed by LSNA. These included Literacy Ambassadors—parent-teacher teams that call on homes of students who are truant or falling behind—and Community Learning Centers, where parent-tutors provide after-hours help and enrichment to kids while their parents take GED or ESL classes elsewhere in the school.

The benefits proved two-fold. Parent involvement increased dramatically the academic performance of the children, a result confirmed by standardized tests. But just as important, it brought out the latent leadership abilities of hundreds of immigrant parents, especially of mothers who were isolated by language and culture from mainstream community life.

Little wonder other NCP communities and lead organizations—such as Enlace in Little Village and Southwest Organizing Project in Marquette Park—have sought LSNA’s advice in launching their own Community Schools programs. And little wonder other neighborhoods have been quick to recognize the potential of LSNA’s next big step—helping standout parent-mentors go on to attain the formal baccalaureate education it takes to be certified as a CPS teacher.

Grow Your Own
The parents-to-teachers process began tentatively in 2000 with a federally funded pilot partnership between LSNA and Chicago State University. Early success then bred formation of a statewide Grow Your Own Task Force that drafted and won passage of a GYO Teachers Education Act.

According to Anne Hallett, director of a successor organization called GYO Illinois, the 2004 law aims to: reduce teacher turnover; create a pipeline for teachers of color; and prepare teachers for hard-to-staff positions at schools with many low-income students. With the help of state scholarships and forgivable loans, a goal was set to prepare 1,000 GYO teachers by 2016.

That is requiring a scale-up of recruitment and resources, which is one reason behind GYO Illinois’ Statewide Learning Network Meeting, held Nov. 10-11 at National Louis University, located at 122 S. Michigan Ave.

Attendee Chris Brown, who oversees educational programming for LISC/Chicago—and who was named recently to succeed Susana Vasquez as director of the NCP—said LISC is right in the middle of the scale-up. For instance, the Elev8 middle-school enrichment program funded by Atlantic Philanthropies and managed here by LISC is making a $52,000 grant to expend parent-mentor activity in five NCP neighborhoods.

“We’re already doing Grow Your Own at Marquette School in Chicago Lawn,” Brown said of the hoped-for progression. “We’re trying to get parents more involved in Elev8 and GYO is a way to do that.”

Parents transformed
The transformative potential of that involvement is illustrated by Maria Trejo, a certified teacher and director of the Elev8 program at Ames Middle School in Logan Square. She was one of GYO’s first graduates and the first in her family to graduate from college.

Elizabeth Skinner (left), assistant professor of education at Illinois State University, is co-editor of the book, Grow Your Own Teachers: Grassroots Change for Teacher Education, which drew in part on the lessons learned by grow-your-own pioneers at Logan Square Neighborhood Association, led by Nancy Aardema, executive director.

Photo: John McCarron

“I did my [college] homework sitting next to my daughter at the dining room table,” Trejo told the GYO conference. “Now, 13 years later, that daughter is 20 years old and in her second year at Western Michigan University. My youngest is in her first year at Western Illinois. ... I’m very proud of my girls.”

A similar story was told by Nancy Ballesteros, who got involved with GYO through Enlaceand hopes to start teaching language arts soon at Madero Middle School on 28^th Street, a few blocks from where she grew up.

And new GYO stories are waiting to be written, like that of 51-year-old Charlene Campbell. After 21 years working as a practical nurse at a downtown hospital, and after raising seven children, she’s been accepted to GYO and hopes eventually to teach at Reavis Elementary, where, as a parent, she chaired the LSC.

Now three of her children are in college, and Campbell says her goal as a teacher will be “to give all the kids at Reavis a college vision.”

Ripple effects
Elizabeth Skinner, assistant professor of education at Illinois State University and a co-editor of the new GYO book, told the gathering that, when she started 10 years ago teaching GYO’s teachers-to-be, she could hardly imagine what the program has become.

She cautioned there is much work ahead and challenged schools of education to support GYO candidates “when and where they need it.” For example, participating colleges actually bring classes close to GYO students at venues such as Malcolm X College and Little Village High School.

It’s the ripple effects, though, that ultimately make schools programs like GYO the secret weapons of community development work.

Said Nancy Aardema, who fostered the GYO concept from the start as LSNA’s executive director: “We didn’t want our schools to be separate from the community. Now our schools and our community are doing better as a result.”

More information:
Anne Hallett, GYO Illinois, annehallett@sbcglobal.net www.growyourownteachers.org

Joanna Brown, LSNA, jbrown@lsna.net, 773-384-4370

Buy the book: http://store.tcpress.com/0807751936.shtml

See more photos of the Nov. 10 event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deborahmccoy/sets/72157628119640592/

BYNC launches early action project for quality of life plan

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:01:50 CST

[NCP in the news]

The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) in partnership with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), launched an early action project as part of the Great Neighborhoods Community Planning initiative last Saturday Nov. 12.

Its overall purpose is to engage residents, business owners, institutions and other stakeholders to improve the quality of life in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.

This initiative, according to Irene Lopez, Great Neighborhoods Project director at the BYNC, will address the community in a comprehensive manner, including housing, industrial and commercial development, community facilities, education, youth and recreation.

To mark the beginning of a sequence of community projects, Saturday’s event invited residents to pick up paint and brushes and move along neighborhood alleys to cover up graffiti painted on garages.

Moving forward, the Great Neighborhoods Community Planning initiative will also take a comprehensive approach to community development – in addition to physical improvements, including good schools, parks, health and child care, safety, social services and opportunities for economic advancement. Promoting collaboration between neighborhood organizations is a priority through the initiative.

“We’ve been trying so hard for a long time to unite the community but we really haven’t achieved a satisfactory outcome,” said Lopez. “This time with the Quality of Life plan and through LISC, we’re trying to get everyone to the table to work for the same goal, which is making the neighborhood a better place.”

Neighborhood organizations have already begun to work together. A clear example of that, according to Lopez, is the recent partnership between the Neighboring Housing Services and the Resurrection Project to rehab foreclosed homes in the neighborhood and encourage residents to stay in the Back of the Yards and value their community.

“The Great Neighborhoods Program will help the Back of the Yards plan for its long term future. Instead of reacting, Back of the Yards is being proactive,” said Raul Raymundo, Chief Executive Officer of the Resurrection Project. “We are going to highlight the assets of Back of the Yards to attract new life as well as investment and opportunities.”

Photo by Magali Rangel

One of the Resurrection Project’s main goals is to return home ownership to the neighborhood. “We are committed to working with many organizations in Back of the Yards to strengthen the community,” said Raymundo.

To ensure overall program success, the BYNC has organized a task force responsible for communications, outreach, scheduling and preparing bilingual materials. The role of the task force is to advise other community leaders, participate in meetings, provide feedback on findings, speak at planning meetings and coordinate the implementation of the plan.

Some of the expected outcomes include the creation of the data book containing community maps and secondary data (i.e. demographics, facilities, city-owned properties, building conditions, land use, housing and crime), along with community strengths and a list of proposed projects as well as up-to-date information relating barriers to progress. The initiative, though new to many residents, calls for unity and engagement.

After Saturday’s event a number of residents asked Lopez if they could be provided with paint to continue painting over the graffiti in the area and some want to get involved in future initiatives.

“I know the graffiti is going to continue to show up,” said Lopez. “But just seeing the community come together on the block to beautify their own communities, demonstrates that the interest is there and it’s instilling them to want to continue to build upon it."

"Moving Forward Together" to revive housing

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:57:15 CST

[Articles]

The one-two punch of the foreclosure epidemic and Great Recession is teaching community development practitioners to build more effective partnerships, get closer to local conditions … and maybe even redefine what’s possible.

There’s a new reality out there, and its lessons are coming fast and hard.

About 400 community development professionals – from bankers to neighborhood organizers, from contractors to foundation executives – attended Mercy’s “Moving Forward Together” conference, held in Chicago on Oct. 19.

Photo: Courtesy Mercy Housing

“Building community is getting a lot harder,” said Cindy Holler, president of Mercy Housing Lakefront. She welcomed some 400 community development professionals – from bankers to neighborhood organizers, from contractors to foundation executives – to Mercy’s “Moving Forward Together” conference, held in Chicago on Oct. 19.

“Some of the best community work in housing has come from Chicago,” she said. “But the world has changed.”

The nation is becoming more divided both economically and politically, she explained. “We’re losing our ability to get to the middle … community development is about negotiating and getting to the middle … moving across sectors and across organizational silos.”

LISC/Chicago Executive Director Susana Vasquez said the important question “is what, at the margin, can we change that might stimulate the private economy and bring more investment? Sometimes, it’s a single discreet investment that will begin to turn things around.”

Photo: Courtesy Mercy Housing

Conference keynoter Mercedes Marquez, assistant HUD secretary for community planning and development, seconded Holler’s call for a deeper kind of “community engagement.” She observed that the complexity of structuring affordable housing – deals involving complex federal tax credits and multi-layered financing – tends to focus practitioners more on “the deal” and less on the neighborhood itself.

“That’s a problem,” said Marquez, and she promised that within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the same “technocratic” trend is being replaced by a less theoretical and “more of a practitioners view” to actually “help people get it done” at the local level.

Cuts = targeting
“We have an unbelievable lack of capacity” at the local level, Marquez said, caused in part by 20 years of a federal block grant system that doesn’t give cities and states sufficient wherewithal to develop in-house capacity to plan and, and especially to target areas where need is greatest.

Targeting is key going forward, she said, because the foreclosure crisis has made it clear that many cities, such as Detroit, “have to get more compact” and in some areas move to other land uses besides housing. Marquez conceded, however, that local officials often “don’t want to talk about that because it’s very difficult politically.”

Mercedes Marquez, assistant HUD secretary for community planning and development, said her department is becoming less technocratic and theoretical, and more practitioner-oriented.

Photo: Courtesy Mercy Housing

Another reason for getting better at targeting, said Marquez, who once ran the housing department for the City of Los Angeles, is the expected budget bloodletting as Congress sets out to curb the federal deficit.

“The dollars are shrinking,” she said, but “NSP shows that it [targeting] works.” She referred, of course, to the three-year-old Neighborhood Stabilization Program, the nationwide foreclosure purchase-and-rehab program managed in Chicago by Mercy Portfolio Services.

Rather than scatter NSP funds across all impacted neighborhoods, the city and Mercy Portfolio targeted blocks with sufficient other strengths – proximity to schools, say, or a new public library – so that rehab of a cluster of bank-owned properties would arrest overall neighborhood decay.

“But it’s hard,” Marquez said of the upcoming budget flail. “So many of them [members of Congress] lack real knowledge about the votes they’re going to take and what they’re going to cut.”

“We are all in this together,” she said of the budget battle, “whether you’re a for-profit, a bank, a non-profit or in government. We will not survive the next round [of federal budget cuts] unless we hang together and learn each other’s language … and challenge one another on these very difficult issues of integration, of targeting, of leverage.”

Redefine “scale”
Next a panel of senior community development executives took up the question of what’s being learned – and what needs to happen next.

Rentals must be a part of any effective rehab strategy, but potential landords may need training on how to screen tenants or manage property well, said Ed Jacob, executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago.

Photo: Courtesy Mercy Housing

Susana Vasquez, executive director of LISC/Chicago, suggested community development practitioners may be asking too much of themselves and of their partners if they think they, by themselves, can produce neighborhood turnarounds.

“We really need to redefine scale,” Vasquez said. “Change happens at the margins. If we worried about scale at the front end, no one would be working with us in an Englewood” or other high-poverty areas.

Vasquez previously headed NCP, which is redefining what success looks like in the face of widespread economic setback. The important question, Vasquez said, “is what, at the margin, can we change that might stimulate the private economy and bring more investment? Sometimes, it’s a single discreet investment that will begin to turn things around.”

Panel moderator Stephen Friedman, president of SB Friedman Development Advisors, observed that foreclosed and abandoned properties have become an “unavoidable” problem that, in some neighborhoods, afflicts 15 to 20 percent of the housing stock. What, he asked, does recent experience say about our best strategy?

Rehabs for rent
“It feels like we’re running faster and faster on the treadmill and we’re losing ground,” answered Ed Jacob, executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago. “With NSP we rehab a home, get it sold, and now there’s two more vacancies on the block … so first of all, we’ve got to keep people in their homes.”

The nation's economic and political divisions have made community development more challenging, said Cindy Holler, president of Mercy Housing Lakefront.

Photo: Courtesy Mercy Housing

To that end, he praised a new effort by Mercy Portfolio to buy at deep discount troubled mortgages and negotiate a lower, more affordable, monthly payment with borrowers so they can stay in their homes (for an article about that, please click here).

Now that foreclosures are being driven by unemployment and job loss, Jacob explained, as opposed to the predatory lending that ignited the crisis, there’s a steady buildup of “shadow inventory” with some 18,000 vacant properties in Chicago alone. “So if we have 400 people here in the room,” Jacob quipped, “each one of us would have to take more than 40.”

He said rental must be a part of any effective rehab strategy. “Quite honestly, in neighborhoods where you see the most vacancies, there is no functioning mortgage market for home purchase.”

But large-scale rental of rehabbed bungalows and two-flats, Jacob cautioned, “creates a challenge on the property management side … so we’ll have to tap into expertise on the private side, including private individuals who maybe own a home on the block and would be willing to buy one down the street. But they’re going to need some training – how to find good tenants, how to manage property.”

The other panelists were: David Doig, president of Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives; Marc Jahr, president of the New York City Housing Development Corporation; and Reginald Jones, executive director of the Steans Family Foundation. Steans continues to make major investments in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, including a soon-to-be-announced $50 million community learning center.

The “Moving Forward Together” conference was a milestone on Mercy Housing’s campaign to address the foreclosure crisis in the Chicago/Milwaukee region by: building or saving 7,500 affordable homes, helping 2,000 families avoid foreclosure, and preventing displacement and homelessness for 20,000 people. Major campaign sponsors include the Pierce and Associates law firm, Bank of America, Chase, Citi, Enterprise Foundation, Housing Partnership Network, Northern Trust, MacArthur Foundation and Polk Bros. Foundation.

It’s the (local) economy
Many agreed that worsening joblessness – and a lack of job readiness – is the emerging issue underlying other problems, including mortgage failures.

But the employment problem is different for every neighborhood, Vasquez said, which is why LISC-supported Centers for Working Families (CWFs) are tailored differently in each of the 15 Chicago communities they serve.

“Fundamentally it’s about meeting folks where they’re at,” she explained. “So we’re working with our partners to address the skills gap. There are jobs out there, so it’s painful when residents can’t be connected to those jobs. Each neighborhood requires different kinds of resources and different kinds of support.”

More information: www.mercyhousing.org; chicagonsp.org; lisc-chicago.org

CWF model a national winner

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:14:45 CST

[Articles]

Ora Richardson isn’t part of the high-stakes political dealing in Washington to determine which “domestic discretionary” programs will have to be slashed or eliminated to trim the federal budget deficit.

But on a sunny October morning in Englewood, one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, she stood before a roomful of elected officials and corporate and foundation executives, and she showed why one program, in particular, should not be cut.

“This is smart, non-partisan government work at its best,” Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said of the Social Innovation Fund in explaining why proven programs like LISC’s CWFs were picked. “We’re focusing on evidence, not ideology; on results, not rhetoric.”

Photo: Eric Young Smith

“It has helped me become financially stable,” said the 48-year-old single mother about the new Center for Working Families at Kennedy-King College. The program helped her get a job and straighten out her personal finances. “I’d recommend these services to anyone in need.”

The officials, led by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., came there October 10 to cut a ceremonial ribbon dedicating the Center’s on-campus storefront at the corner of 63^rd and Halsted streets.

The event was especially sweet for LISC/Chicago because this expansion of its pioneering CWF model—a one-stop bundling of employment and family financial services—was made possible by winning a prestigious and highly competitive federal grant. And that same grant of $4.2 million—one of only 11 first-round winners nationally—is being used by national LISC to roll out Chicago-style centers in nine other U.S. cities.

The SIF award
Durbin explained that the federal Social Innovation Fund (SIF) is a key piece of the Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy Serve America Act, one of the first pieces of legislation signed by President Obama in April 2009.

“This is smart, non-partisan government work at its best,” Durbin said of SIF in explaining why proven programs like LISC’s CWFs were picked. “You find ideas that have already been proven to work … and put them to work back in the communities and neighborhoods where they can change lives. We’re focusing on evidence, not ideology; on results, not rhetoric.”

LISC/Chicago Executive Director Susana Vasquez thanked the City Colleges of Chicago and numerous other contributors to the 63rd Street CWF effort, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

Michael Rubinger, national president and CEO of LISC, explained that the CWF model “got its start here in Chicago. And we picked that up at the national level and are replicating it all across the country.” He called it “the most exciting and important program we’re involved in right now.”

Worth renewing
Beneath all the smiles and optimism, however, there was some unease among community development professionals about impending—but as yet unknown—federal budget cuts as the White House and Congress try to scale back the government’s overall budget deficit.

Entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare have broad-based political support, as does defense spending. That leaves so-called “domestic discretionary” programs, such as SIF, more vulnerable to the budget-cutter’s axe.

“You’re all aware that things in Washington are difficult these days for programs like ours,” said Rubinger. That’s why, he stressed, it’s important to highlight the proven cost-effectiveness of programs like Centers for Working Families. One recent study by ABT Associates, he said, found the CWF model “highly effective” at raising family incomes, credit scores and net worth.

Paul Carttar, director of the federal Social Innovation Fund at the National Corporation for Community Service, described the LISC/CWF model as “a perfect example of the kind of innovative, community-based solution that the SIF was created to grow.”

Ora Richardson has availed herself of many of the CWF's services, including job preparation and placement, computer skills training, and help raising her credit score by expunging bad, outdated information.

Photo: Gordon Walek

Like Rubinger, he acknowledged clouds on the budgetary horizon, but he urged bipartisan support for “a new approach grounded in America’s extraordinary tradition of citizen engagement and community problem-solving.”

CWFs, said Carttar, “demonstrate the power of a well-designed, purposeful partnership between communities, intermediaries [like LISC] and the federal government.”

Plenty of partners
At Kennedy-King, LISC was able to partner with—and expand to CWF dimensions—an existing job readiness program run by the Jane Addams Hull House Association. LISC is also expanding the new Center’s reach by connecting it with NCP.

The renamed “63^rd Street Corridor Center for Working Families” will take referrals from three nearby NCP affiliates: the Network of Woodlawn (formerly Woodlawn NCP), Teamwork Englewood and the Washington Park Consortium. The Center is also a Family Net Center in the LISC-supported and federally funded Smart Communities digital training and resource program.

Social Innovation Fund Director Paul Carttar (left) talks with LISC President and CEO Michael Rubinger.

Photo: Gordon Walek

And there are other key partners, according to Susana Vasquez, LISC/Chicago executive director and emcee at the ribbon-cutting. She credited contributions by the MacArthur Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Wal-Mart Foundation, United Way of Metropolitan Chicago, Walter S. Mander Foundation, Opus Foundation, Crown Family Philanthropies and the City of Chicago.

Vasquez especially thanked City Colleges of Chicago and its Chancellor Cheryl Hyman for housing the new Center as well as providing an array “in-kind” services … including refreshments from the college’s Washburne Culinary Institute.

But it was left to Louise Smith, president and CEO of Jane Addams Hull House, to introduce the most convincing evidence of CWF’s power to change lives.

Ora’s story
“I present Ms. Ora Richardson,” declared Smith, after describing how the 48-year-old mom of four was helped by the Kennedy-King center to: prepare for and get a job; advance her admittedly “rusty” computer skills; and raise her credit score by expunging bad and outdated information.

CWF participant Ora Richardson is grateful to program coordinator Ivan Ramos for guiding her along her considerable personal journey.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

Her personal journey began, Richardson said, after seeing a flyer for the Center last March on the bulletin board of her local public library. “I was looking for a job, so I called the same day, and the first person I talked to was Ivan Ramos. He’s the program coordinator. He explained what they did and told me to come in on Monday.

“I learned the importance of the interview, the importance of the first impression, and to dress for success,” she continued. “You know, the do's and don’ts, and how to make an impact answering that all-important question: ‘So, tell me about yourself.’ ”

“I took advantage of it all,” added Richardson of the Center’s package of programs, from job readiness to credit-score upgrading, to household budgeting to applying for benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit.

And she plans to take more advantage. Her temporary job with a social service agency ends this fall and she’ll again be looking, hopefully for a position where she can use her considerable interpersonal skills.

“They’ve already given me two leads,” she said of the Center, but more importantly “this has made me confident within myself.”

More information: Ricki Lowitz, LISC/Chicago, (312) 422-9559

U. of C., South Side NCPs Do Grand Rounds

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:40:58 CST

[Articles]

In the medical field, grand rounds do not typically involve dramatic reenactments of grief-induced depression due to community or domestic violence, or panelists who have had harrowing sexual experiences like becoming pregnant right out of grade school or contracting HIV from a partner they thought they could trust.

But the Community Grand Rounds program, which paired the Center for Community Health and Vitality at the University of Chicago Medical Center with several South Side lead agencies in LISC/Chicago's New Communities Program and Elev8, had a more broad-based, less medically oriented audience than the usual scenario, and the partners adjusted the format and tone accordingly.

A scene from the production of "For Colored Girls ... ," presented as part of the Community Grand Rounds project at the Power Circle Church in South Chicago.

Photo: Courtesy University of Chicago

“Typically, a grand rounds discussion is around something an inch wide and a mile deep,” says Doriane Miller, M.D., director of the Center for Community Health and Vitality, which received a National Institutes for Health grant to conduct the meetings in the 34 communities that comprise University of Chicago’s primary service area.

But when the University of Chicago met with NCP groups to discuss the Community Grand Rounds concept, they “said they didn’t want people talking at them,” Miller says. “They wanted conversations with not just university faculty but also members of the community involved in doing work in these areas.”

Brandon Johnson, executive director of NCP lead agency the Washington Park Consortium, notes that the Community Grand Rounds were based on the World Health Organization’s broader definition of health, which includes not only one’s own vital signs but those of the family and community environment.

“It’s in line with what the New Communities Program does,” he says. “Just as we’re looking at comprehensive community development, they’re looking at comprehensive health factors. What’s most encouraging is that it’s community based and focused. It’s a balance between academic health factors and community sentiment about health. It did a good job to respect community sentiment and translate that into best practices.”

Dr. Doriane Miller (center) of University of Chicago Center for Community Health and Vitality led the Community Grand Rounds project, which rolled out in South Side New Communities from October 2010 through June of this year.

Photo: Courtesy University of Chicago

The planning phase of the program, which began in March 2010, also included the Near North Healthcare Services Corp. and Northwestern University’s Alliance for Researchers in Chicagoland Communities, a clinical and translational sciences group. The partners to the effort discussed the most pressing health needs in each community and what sorts of approaches they might take to address them through community education events.

The issue of mental health in young people, specifically depression that results from the aftermath of the violence they’re exposed to, ranked top on the list. The group eventually chose seven topics to be presented in Auburn Gresham, Englewood, South Chicago, Woodlawn, Washington Park and Quad Communities. The Community Grand Rounds ran from October 2010 through June 2011.

“The community partners said, ‘Don’t do this at University of Chicago or Northwestern, but set up where we are, in the community,’ ” Miller recalls. “Each event was at a community site, whether a school, church or community center, facilitated by a community partner.”

Second-Hand Drive-By Victims
The first Community Grand Rounds, held at Perspectives Charter School in Auburn Gresham—site of that community’s Elev8 programming—featured a play that Miller wrote, titled “It Shoudda Been Me.”

Ernest Sanders, NCP organizer and communications director for Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corp., helped to coordinate--and then acted in-- a production about a teenager's murder called "It Shoudda Been Me."

Photo: Courtesy University of Chicago

The story focused on a 15-year-old whose best friend had been killed in a drive-by shooting. The formerly “rock solid” B-plus student started skipping classes, handing in sub-par assignments, and getting into minor tiffs with people he had considered friends, Miller says.

“He finds out he is suffering a grief reaction and depression as a result of the murder of his friend,” she says. “His parents start to talk about this and finally stage a family intervention to get the young man some help.”

About 175 people attended that first session, which Miller says was “timely in terms of what the community is thinking about. We had a post-play discussion that I facilitated with a pediatrician who does work with depression, plus a community-based psychologist who talked about early recognition, treatment, and resources available in the community.”

Scheduled to run from 5:30 to 7:30, the session went until about 9 o’clock, and those who missed it had the chance to see it later on CAN-TV, which broadcast the event three times during the month of November, Miller says.

“We decided to do a play and act it out, and see if folks could identify with what’s happening on the stage,” says Ernest Sanders, NCP manager and communications director at Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corp., lead agency for both NCP and Elev8. “Especially among youth, they typically don’t have an outlet. We wanted to demonstrate that and, at the same time, have folks in the room who could provide some sort of support to youth who have mental health issues.”

That focus on mental health draws from the Elev8 program in Auburn Gresham, which has discovered that the No. 1 reason why Perspectives students visit the in-school health clinic is due to mental health-related issues, Sanders says. “For me, that was just like, ‘Wow, we’ve got to do something about that.’ This is my way of engaging that, or at least attempting to provide some answer there,” he says.

Spirited discussions took place about a variety of health and wellness issues during the Community Grand Rounds.

Photo: Courtesy University of Chicago

“Folks got to hear first-hand testimonies and share their story of what they were going through,” Sanders adds. “It was an eye-opener for everyone in the room.”

Community Violence, Domestic Violence
Another session, held last November at the K.L.E.O. Community Family Life Center in Washington Park, focused on community violence, mediation and interruption.

The session looked at resources around violence mitigation, models for confronting violence, and the immediate health consequences of violence, Johnson says. Speakers included staff from the K.L.E.O. center, violence “interrupters” from the anti-violence group CeaseFire, and a person who had been paralyzed in a shooting incident.

“It was very much a dialogue,” he says. “Not only did we look at various programs and models being used to stem violence in our communities, but we heard from community members about how violence had affected them. It was a good session in that it was cathartic in allowing people to express their pains and struggles, but therapeutic in that there were options and proscriptions for moving forward, especially for parents with children affected either as victims or perpetrators.”

Placing an issue like violence in the WHO’s broader health rubric gives a community more options to address it, Johnson says. “If you have diabetes, they’re not just going to tell you to take insulin; they’re going to tell you to diet, exercise, and this is what happens if you don’t treat it, and these are the possibilities if you do,” he says. “If you diagnose the issue, you can think about it as something that can be rectified and cured.”

Panelists at a Community Grand Rounds event called "Live Life Before You Give Life.

Photo: Ernest Sanders/GADC

South Chicago NCP hosted a session on domestic and intimate partner violence, which drew upon that community’s participation in LISC/Chicago’s Building Community Through the Arts program and the subsequent inclusion of arts planning in the NCP process. “We were able to capitalize on their particular quality-of-life plan and have a dramatic presentation … around domestic violence,” Miller says.

Called “Wish You Were Here,” the monologue performance was given by a grandmother who raised her granddaughter because the child’s father had killed her mother. The performance raises questions about why doctors sometimes don’t recognize signs of domestic violence. “It’s a soul-searching investigation for the grandmother and her family, and it raised issues around how to think about this from a medical perspective,” she says.

Sexual Health, Diabetes, Asthma
Other sessions focused on sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, preventative medicine around diabetes and obesity, health issues with regard to older adults, and how to deal with asthma, Miller says, and all received enthusiastic reactions.

Brandon Johnson (right) of Washington Park Consortium saw the Community Grand Rounds as entirely congruent with the New Communities Program's comprehensive mission.

Photo: Courtesy University of Chicago

Teamwork Englewood took on two sessions, one about HIV and pregnancy and one about asthma, says Jacques Conway, executive director. “It was really good for us,” he says. “The issues they brought forth to the community are something we’re dealing with on a regular basis.”

The HIV and pregnancy session, held at Urban Prep Teen High School, brought together University of Chicago medical personnel and young men and women who had experienced both sexually transmitted disease and unplanned pregnancy. These included an athlete who had to drop out of college when he got a girl pregnant, and a girl who became pregnant at age 14, right out of grammar school.

“It got heated, too, which was good,” Conway says. But “just talking with the kids afterward, they still to a certain degree don’t’ believe it can affect them. … They still feel, ‘I know who I have sex with, I know it’s OK.’ ” The idea has arisen to do a mini-series on the topic, building on the session, since it seemed to leave unfinished business.

The asthma session, which included medical personnel, asthma sufferers and parents of children who have the disease was a bit more formal, Conway says. They discussed medicines to treat it, getting children in the habit of using their inhalers, and dealing with a combination of asthma and allergies.

“It was a great initiative by the University of Chicago,” he says. “They’ve certainly been transparent and open to comments, feedback and complaints. … Many of their administrators and doctors participated, and they were helpful and informative, and we had a chance to see them. You have an idea of what these intellectual doctors look like. When you see them outside their buildings, they look like ordinary people.”

"They didn't want people talking at them," Miller says of NCP groups. "They wanted conversations with not just university faculty but also members of the community involved in doing work in these areas."

Photo: Ernest Sanders/GADC

Miller returns the compliment to Teamwork and other NCP groups. “The involvement of our NCP partners has been absolutely spectacular,” she says. “They made sure the content we presented and the information shared with community partners was relevant to day-to-day realities, as opposed to programs that talk about the medical model of care. … The feedback we received, the results we had in terms of audience participation surveys, show that people found it to be a very valuable and important experience.”

The experience deepened University of Chicago’s ties with the communities involved, Miller says. “Universities in general come in with their own agenda,” she says. “They don’t listen to a community about their priorities. They figure out programs in a vacuum with minor consultation from communities. Partners say, ‘This could have been better if you had just talked to us in the first place.’ ”

But programs that involve people at the grassroots from the outset are more likely to last, Miller says. “It’s that level of not just community engagement but also thinking about positive community programs that are involved in health and well being and revitalization in the broadest sense is why we decided to partner with NCP,” she says. “Often times, people have the answers and solutions at hand. People often tell me, ‘I have a PhD of the streets. I understand my community’s needs and priorities. If you bring the best science and what we know, we can bring solutions.’ ”

The Center for Health and Vitality hopes to bring Community Grand Rounds to Chicago Lawn and other communities the project did not visit in 2010-11. “This is something that’s seen of tremendous value to the university, in terms of partnership,” Miller says.

“It was a very unique way for the university to set up shop in the community and not just be known virtually,” Sanders adds. “They came out into the community and made a presence. That’s one of the deliverables. Everybody sees the University of Chicago as the University of Chicago. It can’t be touched. The only way you get there is the emergency room.”

To read about another joint New Communities Program-University of Chicago project, called Asset Mapping, please click here.

Project maps South Side health, vitality

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:47:54 CST

[Articles]

What assets are in your community? Where are they? And what does that reveal about what the community lacks?

The University of Chicago’s South Side Health and Vitality Studies and several South Side NCP lead agencies are working together to map out a wide array of community assets. Focused most particularly on healthcare services, the site ranges from professional services like insurance and financial institutions, to childcare and schools, to arts and entertainment.

Students at Perspectives Charter School and others have spent summers gathering data for the asset maps, a joint project of the University of Chicago and South Side LISC lead agencies.

Photo: Ernest Sanders/GADC

Whether you want to find a dentist’s office or a home daycare, a food charity or a place to exercise, the online information center www.southsidehealth.org becomes more likely with each passing day to have your answer—thanks to a database first seeded three years ago, which continues to expand.

The effort has mapped 11 communities and eventually could expand to all 34 communities in the University of Chicago Hospital’s service area. “Everything that has a public facing, that’s what we’re mapping,” says Daniel Johnson, section chief of academic pediatrics at Comer Children’s Hospital. “Anything that exists and has a public presence … [unless] they don’t want to be publicly available.”

The Health and Vitality Studies group intentionally took a very broad view of community health, Johnson says. “It’s very important to us to have this public face and be all-inclusive,” he says. “It’s very difficult to identify what organizations are critically important to the health of a community.”

Within NCP communities, the project has been mapping Woodlawn, Washington Park, Kenwood and Grand Boulevard for three years and both South Chicago and Englewood for two, Johnson says, providing longitudinal data in those areas. Among those gathering and inputting information have been high school students who participate in the After School Matters program, dubbed the Maps Corps, he adds.

Students participating in the After School Matters program hit the streets to document community vitality.

Photo: Ernest Sanders/GADC

“We’ve realized that data collection can be done, as long as there’s appropriate supervision, with high school students,” he says. “It allows students to hold a job and gives them exposure to how research is done, how to think about data, how to think about ways to insure the quality of data.”

NCP Partners
A key partner to the effort has been the Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corp. (GADC), which has headed up the data input for both its home community and Englewood. Ernie Sanders, NCP manager and communications director for GADC, says the site ties in the agency’s efforts through LISC/Chicago's New Communities Program, Elev8 and Smart Communities Program.

When it comes to healthcare, the site provides access to local clinics so the uninsured don’t have to go to the University of Chicago’s emergency room, Sanders says, which helps the university reduce overcrowding and wait times (as well as, no doubt, numbers of uncompensated patients) and helps potential patients in a few different ways.

The asset maps plot a whole range of products and services, focusing particularly on health care.

Photo: Courtesy University of Chicago

"They don’t have to wait eight hours, or worry about who’s going to watch Pookie,” he says. “It’s a way for us to have residents become smarter about how they care for themselves. It’s also about digital literacy. Many say they can’t afford it; we put the portals in the area, or the kiosks in the area, and they can access southsidehealth.org for free and find out where to access these services.”

While sites like Google or Yelp already provide similar mapping services, Sanders says that southsidehealth.org aims to provide more information than just an address and a phone number, although getting to that level of depth remains very much unfinished. That will help people to find otherwise-hidden assets, he says.

“A church on paper might be just a church,” Sanders says. “But inside of St. Sabina Church, there’s a food pantry [and] a healthcare ministry.”

Teamwork Englewood has provided space in its offices for the asset-mappers to continue northward from Auburn Gresham, under GADC’s leadership, says Jacques Conway, executive director.

Institutions like preschools were among those added to the maps.

Photo: Ernest Sanders/GADC

“We supported them in any way we could,” he says. “We were able to get some good information out of it. We know … what we have out there. It’s nice when it’s formally surveyed and that information is made available, so we can have a realistic idea of what we have other here, and what we have over there.”

In Washington Park, community members have helped with some of the asset mapping, and the effort has done outreach to the local Chamber of Commerce and area business owners, says Brandon Johnson, executive director of the Washington Park Consortium.

“We’ve been working with them to … help the project be developed in a way that has real community benefit, that takes into account the needs of the community,” he says. “It has a lot of potential outside of the primary health use. It has a lot of potential for use by doctors, schools, businesses and residents. The challenge now is to figure out how we can really maximize that usage and utility to all involved."

To read about another joint New Communities Program-University of Chicago project, called Community Grand Rounds, please click here.

Growing green healthy neighborhoods

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:22:39 CST

[Articles]

When more folks have left than are left, it’s time for a neighborhood to draw up some different kinds of plans.

But whatever those plans call for – be it pocket parks, neighborhood gardens or more generous side-yards – it’s crucial the folks who will live-the-plan have a strong hand in the drawing.

Woodlawn, Washington Park and Englewood won't regain the population they've lost--but they would like to put the land they've gained to productive use, and urban agriculture seems like a win-win.

Photo: John McCarron

“Our neighborhoods are saying, ‘We have a lot of land,’ ” said Susana Vasquez, LISC/Chicago’s executive director, in kicking off just such a grassroots planning effort. “And it’s not all going to be filled up with new housing and new people in the short term, so let’s come up with some creative uses.”

Vasquez welcomed about 80 neighborhood leaders on Saturday, Sept. 24, to an all-morning “Green Healthy Neighborhoods Kick-off Symposium” held at the new Kennedy-King College, 63^rd and Halsted streets.

The two-year effort is a Local Technical Assistance (LTA) project run by the Chicago region’s official planning agency, called CMAP, for Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

“We always hoped, some day, that these three communities would get together and talk to each other about how 63rd Street could be mutually redeveloped as a major arterial street – a powerhouse – from east to west,” said Andrew Mooney, Chicago commissioner of housing and economic development and former executive director of LISC/Chicago.

Photo: John McCarron

Using a $4.2 million federal grant, regional land planners will work with their local counterparts to help struggling communities – city and suburban – deal with the growing problem of property abandonment and population loss.

In Chicago, CMAP wisely connected with LISC/Chicago’s New Communities Program, which has been dealing with the disinvestment problem, especially in three South Side NCP communities: Woodlawn, Washington Park and Englewood.

63rd St. Corridor
“We always hoped, some day, that these three communities would get together and talk to each other about how 63^rd Street could be mutually redeveloped as a major arterial street – a powerhouse – from east to west,” said Andrew Mooney, who helped conceive NCP as LISC/Chicago’s former executive director and now is Chicago’s commissioner of housing and economic development.

“This is a way to change official policy and move some of the great ideas from our quality-of-life plans to reality … and to scale,” said LISC/Chicago executive director Susana Vasquez.

Photo: John McCarron

Mooney stressed that the thinning-out of a neighborhood brings opportunity as well as challenge, opening the door to new kinds of land uses and new ways to reconnect with surrounding economies.

“But we have to work together on a common vision, common strategies and a common lobbying agenda,” Mooney said, adding that the steady loss of population “is something we’ve got to stop.”

Despite hard-won successes here and there, a 40-year trend line of decline has worked great hardship on the three neighborhoods. Now the recent epidemic of job layoffs, foreclosures and store closings has urban planners scrambling for a new playbook. There is a growing realization, as LISC’s Vazquez noted, that returning to the old high-water marks of population and housing is unrealistic.

The numbers tell it. Woodlawn counted more than 81,000 residents in 1960 but the 2010 Census found only 23,740. Washington Park had over 43,000 but last year’s Census found only 11,717. Englewood had over 97,000 but now only 30,654. All three communities have been bleeding housing stock apace with population. Many residential blocks have more vacant lots than surviving structures.

Open spaces
Much of the discussion at the Symposium, therefore, revolved around the need to find other uses for vacant land — uses that meet the real day-to-day needs of folks who are hanging on and keeping faith.

Urban agriculture got a lot of attention. But even those who’ve been working on community gardens, and larger-scale operations such as West Englewood’s Wood Street Farm, conceded that for-profit urban farming is a tough row to hoe. None disputed, however, that urban gardens and farms have a unique power to engage the formerly unemployed in productive, soul-satisfying activity. And that even limited, local distribution of fruits and vegetables has a healthful impact on neighborhoods some call “food deserts” for lack of full-service groceries.

Bernita Johnson-Gabriel (top), executive director of Quad Communities Development Corp., talked about attracting commercial development during tough economic times during the business break-out session.

Photo: John McCarron

Kathy Dickhut, the city’s deputy commissioner for open space and sustainability, noted that shortly after Mooney took over last fall the city amended its zoning ordinance to promote urban agriculture.

And she ticked off other potential forms of “green infrastructure” made possible by the availability of land, ranging from neighborhood mini-parks to rainwater-absorption areas that can cut the load on Chicago’s oft-overloaded storm sewer system.

Some major “green” public works already are in the planning stages, such as the New ERA rail-to-trail that would convert for biking and hiking an east/west railroad spur that runs alongside 59^th Street from Halsted Street to Damen Avenue.

Benet Haller, deputy for planning and urban development, suggested new residential and retail development ought to be consolidated around CTA and Metra transportation nodes. And while 63^rd Street has never been a heavily industrialized strip, he said the proximity of several major intermodal freight yards suggests that could change.

Whatever is planned over the next 18 months, said Haller to applause: “My vision for your community is whatever you tell me it is.”

Break-out thinking
After the pro planners outlined the project, the neighborhood leaders broke into smaller groups and got down to specifics. Discussions centered around food, housing, jobs, business, environment, culture and transportation. The break-outs were led jointly by CMAP planners and NCP leaders from Teamwork Englewood, Washington Park Consortium and NCP Woodlawn.

Vickie Eaton Johnson gave the out-of-town perspective, explaining how her Cleveland neighborhood worked to control land and invite powerful institutions.

Photo: John McCarron

Terrance Miller, Woodlawn’s NCP organizer, complained that, for all the city’s positive spin, prying vacant land away from city ownership is “such a bureaucratic process, I mean, c’mon. We’ve got to put that vacant land to use. Now every empty lot is a liability – drugs, crime, dumping. We need ownership, responsibility.”

Bernita Johnson-Gabriel, whose Quad Communities NCP area lies north of the Green Healthy Neighborhood planning zone, advised the “business” table on what it takes to attract commercial developers in a down market. And Brandon Johnson, executive director of the Washington Park Consortium, talked of the need to get community input before re-purposing vacant land because some uses could prove a bigger nuisance than no use at all.

Land control
Some of the morning’s best advice, however, came from an out-of-towner. Vickie Eaton Johnson, executive director of Fairfax Renaissance, explained how her Cleveland neighborhood reversed disinvestment by: 1) controlling vacant land; and 2) inviting, rather than blocking, nearby powerful institutions into the neighborhood.

Eaton Johnson explained how Fairfax was stabilized when the Cleveland Clinic and the Cuyahoga County courts were both wooed into building new facilities there … but on terms negotiated by Renaissance. They insisted, for instance, on owning the medical building’s underlying land and on collecting rent.

Terrance Miller of Woodlawn NCP expressed frustration at the difficulty of gaining use of city-owned lots, which he pointed out are a safety hazard.

Photo: John McCarron

“Whoever controls the land controls everything,” Johnson said. “We own the land. Both Fairfax and the Cleveland Clinic own the building. And in 40 years it will be owned by the neighborhood. We didn’t sell out. We controlled the kind of development that was happening.”

Community leaders from Woodlawn – who over the years have had similar discussions with the University of Chicago and its hospitals – were all ears.

Going forward
“This is planning from a local perspective,” said CMAP executive director Randy Blankenhorn in an introductory video about the Technical Assistance Project. “It’s about building local capacity.”

City Hall obviously plans to take full advantage – both of CMAP’s federal grant and NCP’s grassroots connectivity. When completed in 18 months, the South Side plan will be sent to the Chicago Plan Commission for official endorsement, making it as much a part of the city’s future as its elaborate Central Area Plan for downtown.

With that in mind, Commissioner Mooney urged NCP citizen-planners to leave no stone unturned in their search for creative ideas.

“What are our assets?” Mooney challenged. “What are our opportunities? What are the re-uses that we can have for this land in a responsible way? Whether it’s urban ag, or parkland, or residential or industrial redevelopment. Let’s not focus on the deficits. We all know the deficits. Let’s focus on the opportunities – that we’re so close to a powerful downtown engine, that there’s an excellent transportation system, that we have land available and a cooperative city government.”

All of which, said LISC’s Susana Vasquez, gives new life to the neighborhood plans crafted early on by NCP neighborhoods.

“This is a way to change official policy and move some of the great ideas from our quality-of-life plans to reality … and to scale.”

For more information: LISC/Chicago’s Sandra Womack, 312-422-9561 swomack@lisc.org

"Que Viva!"

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:14:39 CST

[Articles]

The great Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata battled for 10 years (1909-1919) to win liberty and land reform for his country’s poor … but he never did live to see his dream fully achieved.

One got the impression, however, that the spirit of Zapata was alive and in good

"My heart is pounding," said Alfredo Rodriguez in both English and Spanish, thinking back on the organizing work of himself and many others in support of Bickerdike's and LSNA's efforts.

Photo: Gordon Walek

voice on Sept. 13, as hundreds of latter-day Zapatistas gathered on Armitage Avenue to celebrate a major victory in their battle for affordable housing.

At the groundbreaking there was a mariachi band, a troupe of young Mexican-style dancers and more than 300 area residents and dignitaries who, at one point, held up oranges in their hands while chanting “Que viva!”

“Zapata Apartments is a hard-won victory for our community and for all of us,” declared Joy Aruguete, executive director of Bickerdike Redevelopment Corp., NCP lead agency in the Humboldt Park neighborhood.

For the better part of five years Bickerdike and its sister NCP group to the north—the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) – struggled against a bad economy and a small group of “not-in-my-backyard” opponents of affordable housing. The economy still is bad, to be sure, and the NIMBY group still has a lawsuit on appeal, but Bickerdike and LSNA would not be denied. At one point, the two NCP groups collected 3,123 signatures on a petition for a needed zoning change.

Many partners
Then again, Bickerdike and LSNA had a lot of help pulling together a $25 million deal that will see 61 affordable rental units constructed on what have been, for years, four vacant lots at or near the corner of Armitage and North St. Louis avenues.

"Que Viva!" shouted the crowd of 300 area residents and dignitaries while holding oranges in their hands, in response to Rodriguez's exhortations.

Photo: Gordon Walek

Mayors Richard M. Daley and successor Rahm Emanuel both backed the project, as have Ald. Rey Colon (35^th) and Roberto Maldonado (26^th). Besides the zoning change, the city recently came through with $4.6 million in tax increment funds, which helped lock in the rest of the financing.

Aruguete described it as a many-layered “lasagna” financing: Harris Bank provided construction and take-out loans; the Illinois departments of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and Capital Fund provided grants; the state’s housing development authority allocated low-income housing tax credits that were purchased through the National Equity Fund.

LISC/Chicago was there from the beginning, with an initial $1 million loan to help finance purchase of the four lots … then later with a $3.6 million loan for construction purposes.

Power of a plan
What made the groundbreaking especially satisfying for LISC, though, is that Zapata was first proposed in quality-of-life plans drafted during 2004-05 by LSNA and Bickerdike as part of their participation in NCP.

Alejandro Molina, social media manager at ASPIRA of Illinois, shakes hands with Barbara Beck, director of financial services and underwriting at LISC/Chicago, while talking with Susana Vasquez, the new executive director of LISC/Chicago, who previously led NCP.

Photo: Gordon Walek

LSNA’s plan, titled “A place to stay, a place to grow,” specifically called for a “school-to-school housing and retail redevelopment along Armitage Avenue” to be undertaken in partnership with Bickerdike. It was to be a “3-fer”: revitalize the decaying Armitage commercial strip; provide badly-needed affordable housing; and in so doing, help stabilize enrollment at nearby Ames, Funston, Mozart and Yates public schools, where gentrification has caused severe student turnover.

“This proves once again that grassroots planning makes a difference,” said Susana Vasquez, who this summer replaced Andrew Mooney as LISC/Chicago’s executive director. Mooney is now commissioner of the city’s Department of Housing and Economic Development.

Aruguete also credited NCP for bringing Bickerdike and LSNA together on the project, which technically lies two blocks north of Humboldt Park in LSNA’s service area. So although Bickerdike took on financing and construction, it was LSNA that fielded many of the community organizers who gathered petition signatures and made sure pro-Zapata families turned out for public hearings.

Jobs, jobs, jobs
Housing affordability is one thing, but without good-paying jobs Zapata tenants will be hard-pressed to pay even “affordable” rents. Exact rent schedules have yet to be posted, but families there will need to earn from $22,800 to $44,000 annually to qualify.

This mariachi band added to the Zapatista spirit of the day.

Photo: John McCarron

Jobs being key, Bickerdike’s own Humboldt Construction Company has been chosen as general contractor for all four Zapata sites.

Antonio Santiago, general foreman for Humboldt, said the company will use its core staff of 45 skilled tradesmen and laborers, most of them men and women who live in the area and who gained their skills on previous Bickerdike projects such as the Rosa Parks Apartments. When all the sub-contractors, drivers and vendor reps are included, Santiago predicted, as many as 500 workers will be involved. The plan is also to “buy local” whenever possible.

“We always try to use both people and material from the neighborhood,” said Santiago. “It’s part of what we bring to every project.”

Besides the 30 apartments-over-storefronts at the southeast corner of Armitage and St. Louis, where the groundbreaking was held, Zapata will produce 12 apartments at 3230 W. Armitage, three at 3503 W. Armitage and 16 at 3734 W. Cortland St. All four buildings have been designed by the Chicago architectural firm of Lisec & Biederman, Ltd.

Fruitful effort
There was no shortage of enthusiasm at the groundbreaking, and not all the foot-stomping was during the performance by the western-dressed dance troupe from McAuliffe School.

This troupe from McAuliffe School entertains the crowd with western wear and Mexican dancing.

Photo: John McCarron

State Rep. Iris Martinez (D-Chicago) drew cheers chiding NIMBY opponents (who were nowhere in sight) by saying: “I don’t know how people can think that empty lots are better than what we’re going to build here. … These are not ‘the projects’ [like some people think about public housing]. This is going to provide decent housing for hard-working families.”

Lissette Castaneda, a housing leader at LSNA, recalled Zapata’s origins in the NCP planning process and singled out staff and volunteers who went the extra mile to get it done.

“We have worked hard,” Castaneda said, and must continue to work hard “for the next 61 families” who need affordable housing. In that struggle, she said “we can look back to this shining light, so we will never have to doubt our power—the power of justice—ever again.”

And the raised oranges? They were summoned by Alfredo Rodriguez, a Bickerdike supporter who for 36 years has lived down the block from one of the Zapata sites, and who stood up for the zoning change at public hearings.

“My heart is pounding,” Rodriguez said in both English and Spanish. And then, knowing many in the audience had oranges in their complimentary snack bags, he asked everyone to stand up and hold out “the fruit of our labors.”

“Que viva!” he called out. To which the orange-fisted crowd responded: “Que viva! Que viva!”

More information: Andrea Traudt, Bickerdike, 773-278-5669 or www.bickerdike.org

The project came together with many-layered "lasagna" financing, according to Joy Aruguete of Bickerdike Redevelopment Corp.; LISC/Chicago provided $4.6 million in loans.

Photo: Gordon Walek

Foregoing foreclosures

Fri, 9 Sep 2011 00:01:43 CST

[Articles]

Maximo “Max” Pagan and his wife, Gladys, were OK with their $1,600-a-month mortgage from lender HSBC … until their low introductory rate adjusted up, and Gladys missed work due to spinal surgery.

“All of a sudden we’re looking at $2,500,” said Gladys of the adjusted monthly on their tidy brick ranch near Midway Airport. “That’s more than my husband’s retirement check. With food and utilities, and kids in school, we’re already living check-to-check.”

Max and Gladys Pagan hope to benefit from the proposed Mortgage Resolution Fund, due to ramp up this fall.

Photo: John McCarron

No wonder the Pagans are on an informal list of families, started by Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, who might benefit from a new program due this fall aimed at avoiding foreclosure and keeping working families in their homes.

It’s a simple concept—the proposed Mortgage Resolution Fund—though its implementation may prove anything but. The draft operating manual for this first-of-its-kind program is already 700 pages. But surely the need is there.

Balky lenders
Traditional lenders have been slow to modify mortgage terms and especially unwilling to reduce the principal owed, even in the face of broadly declining home values. Instead they tend to foreclose and take back the house. But with times this hard and qualified buyers getting scarce, properties sit empty for months, even years, often degrading into blighted hulks that endanger neighborhoods.

The federally funded Neighborhood Stabilization Program, or NSP, managed here for the City of Chicago by Mercy Portfolio Services, has had considerable success buying some of these REOs (a banking term for “real estate owned”), rehabbing them using local contractors, and re-selling them at a discount to credit-worthy buyers.

But it’s slow going. With so many single-family dwellings so long vacant, vandalized and stripped of valuable piping and wire, the per-unit cost to acquire and rehab can get out of line with the local market. That’s one reason Mercy Portfolio has focused increasingly on apartment buildings, which can be refit at a lower per-unit cost and sold into the stronger rental market.

Drops in a bucket
By late summer, nearly three years into the program, Mercy reports it has rehabbed and either sold or put up for sale or rent more than 700 housing units in 100 buildings.

Domingo and Ana Medina are being threatened with foreclosure by Bank of America, which bought their mortgage from the infamous Countrywide Financial.

Photo: John McCarron

But these successes are drops in the foreclosure bucket. During the past two years Chicago borrowers have been hit with more than 20,000 foreclosure filings—more than triple the level before the crisis hit in 2007-08. And there’s no let-up in sight. During the first six months of 2011, there were 26,681 initial foreclosure filings in Cook County, the great majority against Chicago borrowers.

So big is the backlog of homes on both the court docket and the real estate market that some lenders are simply “taking the keys” and not bothering to foreclose, thereby saving court costs, masking a degraded asset on their books … and sticking the neighborhood with yet another untended hulk.

So it’s little wonder cities like Chicago, and housing-savvy non-profits like Mercy Housing, NHS and LISC/Chicago, are looking for ways to break the spiral of decline by avoiding the foreclosure process altogether.

The new Fund
What may prove a national prototype is emerging here in Chicago: the Mortgage Resolution Fund. The concept’s initiators include Mercy Portfolio’s parent, Mercy Housing, plus three national non-profits: the Enterprise Foundation, the Housing Partnership Network and the National Community Stabilization Trust.

The effort got off to a fast start this summer when Gov. Pat Quinn and the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) chose to back the idea with $100 million obtained from a U.S. Treasury allotment to those states “hardest-hit” by the foreclosure epidemic.

“We began conversations about ways to avoid the foreclosure process shortly after NSP began operations,” said William Goldsmith, who directs Mercy Portfolio and will serve as president of the Mortgage Resolution Fund.

He predicts lenders and loan servicers will be eager to sell delinquent mortgages to the Fund, rather than foreclose, once they pencil out the numbers. Same goes for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Goldsmith said, as those government-sponsored mortgage wholesalers look for ways to pare their swelling inventory of non-performing loans to reduce the ultimate cost to taxpayers.

The Medinas love their 51-year-old Cape Cod duplex, home to their two adult daughters--one a disabled military veteran--and their 9-year-old grandson.

Photo: John McCarron

Under one comparative model, a typical lender would recover $75,000 on an unpaid loan balance of $200,000. This compares to recovering zero from the loan and losing an additional $5,000 by pursuing foreclosure, paying lawyers and court costs, and ultimately watching an empty house descend to near-worthlessness … all the while exposed to the legal liability of owning an eyesore.

The Fund would buy that mortgage for $80,000 and issue a new mortgage to be administered by a consumer-friendly servicing agent. The loan’s principal would be lowered to reflect the home’s true market value; the repayment schedule extended; and the interest rate lowered to reflect today’s record-low rates.

The new mortgage could then be sold to an investment house, such as Fannie Mae, restocking the Fund with capital to buy more troubled loans held by working families.

A “fresh start”
“Working” is the operative word, Goldsmith explains, because for the Fund to succeed its borrowers must have incomes sufficient to make those reduced monthly payments.

That likely describes Max and Gladys Pagan, according to Sonia Delgado, who has counseled the family at the Chicago Lawn/Gage Park office of NHS. “I truly believe,” said Delgado, “that with a fresh start they can afford their mortgage.”

Same goes for Domingo and Ana Medina, another of Delgado’s clients at NHS. They are being threatened with foreclosure by Bank of America, which took over the loan when it bought the now-notorious Countrywide Financial.

The Medinas desperately want to keep their Cape Cod-style duplex on the 5100-block of South Lotus Avenue because their two adult daughters—one a disabled military veteran—and their 9-year-old-grandson all call it home.

Like a lot of stressed borrowers, they tried to modify their mortgage under the federal government’s Home Affordable Mortgage Program, or HAMP. But BofA would not let them advance beyond the “trial” phase and at one point, Ana claims, refused to accept their monthly payments.

Now the interest-only period of their mortgage has expired and the lender wants $2,562.82 per month toward their 7.64 percent, $313,441.44 mortgage.

“They don’t listen to you,” said Ana, who lost her job as a videotape duplicator four years ago. She lives now on a Social Security disability benefit plus Domingo’s meager pay working for a temp agency as a school janitor.

Getting a new, affordable mortgage through the Resolution Fund would be, she said, “the answer to our prayers.”

The new program will be welcomed, too, by those who’ve been in the trenches for years fighting the foreclosure menace.

“This is what we wished the banks to do all along,” said Jeff Bartow, executive director of the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), about the desperate need for principal write-downs and an escape from tricky, pop-up interest rates.

With the Greater Southwest Development Corp., SWOP has been a mainstay of NCP on the city’s Southwest Side. Their “Keep Our Homes” project and REACH counseling center have become national models for neighborhood-based foreclosure-fighting.

Bartow is heartened, also, that Goldsmith and the Resolution Fund intend to accept nominations from neighborhood-based mortgage counselors such as Sonia Delgado and NHS … rather buy batches of failing mortgages that lenders are most eager to get off their books.

“We’re hoping they do it in a concentrated way,” Bartow said, explaining that the best part of the Mercy-run NSP program is that it targets neighborhoods that have clusters of foreclosures … yet still have potential to rebound if key buildings are saved.

“We’re excited about it,” he said of the new Fund, especially if it employs the same, targeted approach … and lets community-based groups like SWOP and NHS screen and nominate applicants.

Those having difficulty with mortgage payments and in danger of foreclosure are encouraged to contact Neighborhood Housing Services at (773) 329-4185, English, (773) 329-4181, Español, or e-mail foreclosureprevention@nhschicago.org

Seeding the food deserts

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:46:10 CST

[Articles]

Food access and nutritional health were frequently recurring themes when it came to improving quality of life in the 16 neighborhoods participating in LISC/Chicago’s New Communities Program (NCP).

Participants in the NCP planning process weren’t just whistling in the wind. Through NCP, Elev8 and other efforts, LISC has supported infrastructure development such as supermarkets and restaurants, urban agriculture and gardening, food for the needy, and nutrition and fitness education.

“For too long, people living in NCP communities have not had the access to good food that many other communities take for granted,” said Chris Brown, director of education programs at LISC/Chicago.

Supermarkets and restaurants
Several communities have been attempting to follow the lead of West Haven, on the Near West Side, in attracting a full-service grocery store like the Pete’s Fresh Market, scheduled to break ground at Madison and Western this summer. Others have bolstered their physical infrastructure around food by holding restaurant crawls that publicize local eateries.

The owners of Merla's Kitchen, a favorite stop on last year's Albany Park restaurant crawl, serve up some of their signature dishes to hungry customers.

Photo: Gordon Walek

LISC/MetroEdge has been leading the supermarkets effort with the Grocery Store and Food Opportunity Interest Group, which includes participants from Auburn Gresham, Humboldt Park, Washington Park, North Lawndale and elsewhere who review MetroEdge’s extensive research on grocery store development and discuss the ins and outs of how to go about it.

The Group pores over issues such as land consolidation and ownership, the right product mix for various ethnicities, how to frame one’s marketing package, why certain stores work and others don’t, and how to decide whether your community needs a discount store, upscale, or something in between.

“Part of what we’re trying to work toward is identifying where feasible opportunities might lie and push toward a possible pitch to developers or operators,” says Jake Cowan, business manager for LISC/MetroEdge. “Our goal is to support individual food-systems planning for each neighborhood.”

NCP leaders from some neighborhoods have been canvassing possible sites. In Humboldt Park, Ald. Roberto Maldonado (26^th) has been eyeing a parcel at Central Park Avenue and Division Street. NCP staff have received feedback from the community that an independent, midscale grocer would best fit the bill.

“It very much matters what kind of store goes in there,” says Christy Prahl, NCP director at Bickerdike Redevelopment Corp.

This bird's eye view from the roof of the nearby Westtown Bank building captures the site at Madison and Western where Pete's Fresh Market plans to break ground this summer.

Photo: Mike Quinlan/Near West Side CDC

In Auburn Gresham, Wal Mart has broken ground with a small-footprint Fresh Format store at 76^th and Ashland and has plans for two other stores in or near the community. But Ernest Sanders, NCP manager and communications director at Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corp., thinks a vacant lot at 79^th Street and the Dan Ryan would be a “prime” location for a produce store, given its proximity to both the Ryan and the 79^th Street CTA bus line.

Similarly, Englewood has gained a Food 4 Less on 71^st Street and a Save-A-Lot on 68^th Street, but Doris Jones, NCP director for Teamwork Englewood, isn’t satisfied given that the Jewel at 62^nd and Western shut down. “They’re going to say you’re not a food desert, but I’m saying we need one more,” she says, and she hopes to work with Ald. JoAnn Thompson (16^th) to woo one.

As for food festivals and restaurant crawls, LISC/Chicago and its affiliates have supported at least three. The now-self-sustaining Mole de Mayo, to which LISC provided seed money in 2009, is sponsored by Eighteenth Street Development Corp., a key partner in the NCP planning process in Pilsen. The food-tasting event also features entertainment like mariachis, dancers and lucha libre wrestlers.

In Humboldt Park, the Division Business Development Association—an important participant in the planning process led by Bickerdike—holds food crawls along the Paseo Boricua on Division Street. And the North River Commission in Albany Park, one of LISC/Chicago’s so-called Great Neighborhoods, has held one restaurant crawl and plans another this fall.

For more on LISC/Chicago’s efforts to support supermarkets and restaurants, please click here.

Urban agriculture and gardening
At least seven NCP and Great Neighborhoods Program communities enjoy farmers’ markets during the warmer months: Woodlawn, Logan Square, Bronzeville, Humboldt Park, Englewood, Albany Park and Grand Crossing. Among the most active is the 61^st Street Market in Woodlawn, which caters to low- to moderate-income people by promoting Link cards, which allow food stamp recipients to receive benefits electronically.

Students in the urban agriculture program at Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School in Humboldt Park listen to Carlos DeJesus, assistant principal and urban ag coordinator, explain how best to sink hardy winter flowers into planters along the Paseo Boricua on Division Street.

Photo: Ed Finkel

The five schools participating in Elev8 have brought fresh produce into their communities through gardening. Orozco Elementary has attracted a dozen or more students to tend its Seeds & Sprout program, which has produced squash, eggplant, broccoli, chili peppers and other healthy choices that students are motivated to try once they’ve had the experience of nurturing them to ripeness.

Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School in Humboldt Park has developed a project-based science curriculum that draws from the SUHI study and food deserts report. Students have grown plants hydroponically in the winter and more recently in a newly constructed greenhouse on the roof of the cafeteria. “It’s hands-on and very productive,” said sophomore Guisell Sinaloa. “It’s very earthy.”

The Washington Park Consortium has led an effort to construct three community gardens, one of seven such programs in NCP neighborhoods, including South Chicago, Auburn Gresham, Englewood, East Garfield Park, North Lawndale and Logan Square. The Consortium is investigating the development of a commercial farm that would sell to restaurants and farmers’ markets.

In Englewood, Wood Street Urban Farm has developed a six-month job training program that teaches young adults not only how to garden but also how to plant the seeds of a better life through broader, more transferable skills. One participant, LaToya Wiseman, said she signed up after realizing that “hanging around with your friends isn’t going to get you an education, isn’t going to get you a house.”

For more on these urban agriculture efforts, please click here.

Free meals for working families
LISC/Chicago has supported food distribution networks, social entrepreneurialism around food, and school-based efforts to improve nutrition for those on free or reduced lunch.

In Logan Square, Christopher House provides preschool, after-school and adult education programming, as well as a food pantry where working families line up twice per month. The pantry saves them at least $25 per week, according to surveys by Christopher House, a key partner in the NCP planning process led by Logan Square Neighborhood Association. LISC/Chicago has supported the salary of a family support specialist who works with Christopher House’s clients.

NCP lead agency Teamwork Englewood has partnered with local churches to bring about healthy eating and healthy cooking.

Photo: Juan Francisco Hernandez

Teamwork Englewood, another NCP lead agency, has been supporting 17 of the 35 food distribution pantries, soup kitchens and shelters that comprise the Englewood Food Network. LISC has funded the M.E.N.U. (Meeting Eating Needs Unmet) program, which distributes healthy recipes, and the Englewood Food Network Cookbook. Teamwork and the Food Network have helped ensure that fresh produce is available via food trucks that deliver to the pantries.

In East Garfield Park, Inspiration Kitchens Garfield Park Café, which opened this spring, is providing affordably priced sit-down meals as well as job readiness and vocational training for the homeless and others in poverty. LISC provided $15,000 in project support and early feedback on the business plan, while the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, lead agency for NCP, helped distribute incentive gift certificates.

Through the Elev8 program, students at Perspectives Calumet Charter School in Auburn Gresham and the four other middle schools that participate have been providing healthier food for the children of the same sorts of lower-income working families that frequent the food pantries. A $15,000 grant from Elev8 helped pay for daily salads and offerings like bran rice. “I like that it’s natural food here,” said Ra-Shun Thurmond, a seventh-grader at Perspectives.

For more on these efforts to provide free food, please click here.

Nutrition and fitness education
Food deserts provide little in the way of fresh fruits and vegetables—and plenty of burgers, chips and pop. Adding to the risks of heart disease, diabetes and other preventable conditions is the lack of fitness opportunities in these communities, given that being outdoors in the wrong place at the wrong time can be fatal. LISC/Chicago has been supporting those who provide both.

Betty Jo Nichols, a nutrition proselytizer of sorts, received a $1,000 grant from LISC in 2010 for a nutrition workshop during a senior health fair in South Chicago, and she’s presented programs at the local Germano-Millgate Center and during the 10^th Ward Green Summit environmental fair that NCP lead agency Claretian Associates helps to run. She’s also partnered with the YMCA Street Intervention in conjunction with this summer’s Hoops in the Hood program. “I teach them how to prepare food differently, to prevent illness they were creating for their own bodies,” Nichols says.

South Chicago resident Betty Jo Nichols followed her passion to become a nutrition and cooking coach, providing workshops everywhere from people's kitchens, to community centers, to the Green Summit activities sponsored through NCP lead agency Claretian Associates.

Photo: Ed Finkel

In Woodlawn, the University of Illinois-Extension has been presenting six-week healthy cooking classes to parents of local elementary school-aged students and anyone else who wants to sign up. Launched through a partnership with NCP Woodlawn, the classes also provide them with an extension certificate that opens the door to foodservice industry careers. Another benefit: “We’re hoping to compile the parents’ recipes into a community cookbook,” says Terrance Miller, NCP organizer for Woodlawn.

The Englewood Food Network is also heavily involved in nutrition education, providing information about healthy eating to those who frequent its pantries and working with Kennedy-King College culinary students to pull together salad bars for Sunday dinners, thanks to a CLOCC grant and a partnership with Teamwork Englewood. LISC provided a $5,000 grant that produced a 15-item cookbook.

Growing Home has provided healthy cooking demonstrations, as well, in partnership with Kennedy-King’s Washburn Institute, during movie nights held the first Wednesday of every month. The agency also held a cooking competition last May that incorporated tours, workshops, music and sampling opportunities.

LISC/Chicago’s Elev8 program has provided nutrition and fitness education for students and parents alike. Participants in a 22-week after-school program at Ames Elementary School made fruit smoothies, pickled vegetables, and blueberry-peach jam, said instructor Cassandra Orr of the nonprofit Seven Generations Ahead.

Students at Ames Middle School in Logan Square learn healthy cooking and eating through an Elev8 after-school program provided by the nonprofit Seven Generations Ahead.

Photo: Ed Finkel

“They did not believe they would be able to make jam,” she says. The after-school programming available through Elev8 also has helped to educate students about healthy-food concepts, such as the “Strong Bodies, Healthy Minds” offering for girls at Reavis Elementary in Quad Communities.

“It teaches them how they can make a difference in what they meat,” said Syda Segovia-Taylor, Elev8 director at Reavis.

Parents and families at Orozco Academy have joined the Family Health Club run through Alivio Medical Center as part of the Elev8 program. The club combines physical activities like aerobics and kickboxing, health awareness and screenings, and healthy cooking. “These individuals are really engaged,” says Marco Garduno, youth, schools and family programs coordinator at Alivio. “They come up with their own ideas.”

For more on these nutrition and fitness education opportunities, please click here.

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:31:55 CST

[Articles]

The mural is an intergenerational piece featuring prominent members of the West Side and uses Adinkra symbolism to express the theme. The mural features Pastor Willie W. Upshire (founder of the West Side Baptist Minister’s Conference Center), Nancy Jefferson (known as the Mother Teresa of the West Side), and a local teen who worked on the mural.

Photo: Courtesy Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance

From learn-and-earn to slam-and-jam

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:22:10 CST

[Articles]

“There’s no time to get in trouble.”

If the Near North Unity Project needed a motto this summer, Shelby Tharpe surely nailed it.

It was a sticky-hot Friday afternoon and the 13-year-old was conferring with his buddy, Leon Wilbut, near basketball court No. 1 in Seward Park at the corner of Sedgewick and Orleans streets.

Two of the team captains flank Patrick “Shane” Steward, founder and president of Chicago Men in Action, or M.I.A., which runs the basketball league with support from LISC/Chicago and its Near North Unity Project (NNUP).

Photo: John McCarron

Shelby goes to Franklin Elementary, which is north of Division Street. Leon goes to Salazar Elementary, south of Division.

Ordinarily that might be a problem. Neither belong to a street gang, but in the brave new world emerging on Chicago’s Near North Side following removal of the Cabrini-Green high-rises, old “affiliation” boundaries have been slower to go away. One side of Division is Vice Lord turf; the other Gangster Disciple country. Wise mothers tell their children not to cross.

Yet here they were, captains respectively of the Celtics and Knicks, two teams in the 12-14 age division of the Bridge the Gap basketball program, talking over ground-rules for their upcoming game.

This pleases Patrick “Shane” Steward, founder and president of Chicago Men in Action, or M.I.A., which runs the basketball league with support from LISC/Chicago and its Near North Unity Project (NNUP).

“Sometimes kids come to me with [team] rosters already made up,” Shane said. “We don’t go for that. We mix ’em up. Kids gotta learn how to get along.”

Referee Johnny Payton tosses a jump ball during a game at Seward Park, which brought together young people from both sides of Division Street in "violation" of gang boundaries.

Photo: John McCarron

And get along they do, all summer, every Friday afternoon on the courts behind the Seward Park field house. On the sidelines Shane is in charge, making sure the “shorties” show manners as they line up for free hot dogs and soft drinks; making sure the right teams get the right color tee shirts; making sure the boom box is pulsing and the announcer at the scorer’s table credits players for selfless passes as well as three-point bombs.

“We’re always looking for leaders,” said Shane, nodding toward Shelby and Leon.

Leadership is at a premium in this neighborhood, where hundreds of high-rise families have been uprooted and resettled in townhouses and mid-rises that look like a big improvement … but test a kid’s coping skills every day. Shelby and Leon grew up in the high-rises but now are adjusting to new expectations—and aggravations—of mixed-income housing where old forms of “hangin’ out” are frowned upon.

Monday through Thursday the two are downtown, at Harold Washington College, in the “Learn and Earn” program run by the city and CHA. There they brush up on academic skills, learn about various career paths and best of all, they say, collect a small stipend for six weeks.

But Fridays are best. Fridays they get to slam-and-jam with their homies at Seward Park. There’s no time to get in trouble.

Kids need options
With one weekend to go in the month of July, Chicago police already had recorded 230 murders during 2011, a majority of the victims being minorities in their teens and 20s.

Gangs don't mess around with the aptly named Justice Stamps, director of the Marion Stamps Youth Center.

Photo: John McCarron

It is true that FBI-index crimes—murders, assaults, rapes, etc.—have been trending down in recent years, both in Chicago and nationwide. But as the economic non-recovery grinds on, police and community leaders are seeing a new brazenness among gang bangers who can see no other future for themselves.

As of late July Chicago police had shot more than 40 people this year, most of them young and all of them, police say, brandishing a weapon. A total of 25 were shot by police in all of 2010.

“Respect is missing. They are not scared of anything,” said Charles Price, who monitors gang activity for the Local Advisory Council representing public housing tenants in the Near North neighborhood.

Price was among 30 community leaders who huddled July 26 in the community room of the 18^th District police station for a mid-summer reality check on the first few months of the Near North Unity Project. On one matter there was strong consensus: Positive youth activity and personal safety are not only interlocked … they are key to the neighborhood’s success.

“Kids just need options,” said attendee Duwain Bailey, chief of operations for the Chicago Housing Authority. “Not every kid is going to gravitate toward sports. For some it’s music. For others cooking or baking. Or maybe they’d just as soon get a job and work. As an organization, we’ve got to help create those opportunities.”

The drum line prepares to march forth.

Photo: John McCarron

Especially concerned about youth behavior and personal safety were seniors at the conference table.

“My community is everything but safe,” said Willie B. Jones, representing seniors living in CHA apartments on the 1300-block of North Cleveland Avenue. “We don’t feel comfortable walking a square block, not with young gentlemen standing there on the corners by the eights and tens. We feel intimidated. We feel vulnerable. But we need our exercise.”

Youth served first
Much of what was said at the meeting confirmed NNUP organizers’ early decision to start the effort by immediately providing support for summertime youth activities, such as Bridge the Gap basketball.

Elsewhere in the city, LISC/Chicago has first identified an existing community organization with which to partner as part of NCP; then, a lot of early effort has gone into helping neighbors produce a comprehensive Quality-of-Life plan to guide subsequent activity.

Keri Blackwell, senior program officer for LISC/Chicago, said NNUP does need to identify or create a lead local organization, one that will eventually produce a comprehensive neighborhood plan. But by moving first to support highly visible summer programs, she said, a grassroots constituency is coalescing that can tackle those more detailed chores beginning this fall … after kids go back to school.

A Tae Kwan Do demonstration unfolds during halftime of one of the basketball games.

Photo: John McCarron

“So we’ve got Friday night jazz in Seward Park; we’ve got crews of kids working clean-and-green Saturday mornings; we had about a hundred youths at Community of Peace working on environmental issues; we’ve got the basketball. … It all takes manpower, … and the kind of buy-in that makes people stick around.”

“This is not a science,” seconded Stanley Merriwether, the LISC consultant who coordinated the effort locally. “Different communities have different personalities, different complexities. There’s not a formula that says you do this and then you do that.”

The two handed out forms detailing what LISC looks for in a local partner and asking for names of community groups that might fill the bill. Ald. Walter Burnett (27th) also will have a strong say.

Flag of hope
But it was youth problems and solutions that dominated the meeting, and two youngsters from the city’s After School Matters (ASM) program at Seward Park were asked to speak. Jeremy Dossie and Crystal Herron both raved about their daily drum line and flag corps practices at Seward Park … but complained other kids not in the program come by “to make fun and try to start fights.”

Then again, troublemakers don’t come around when Justice Stamps is at the park making sure her ASM campers are on task and not being harassed. She’s director of the Marion Stamps Youth Center, an activity named in memory of her mother, a legendary organizer in the Cabrini-Green area.

The Division Street boundary is artificial--but very real in the lives of Cabrini-area young people.

Photo: John McCarron

“All of my kids graduate high school and plan to go to college,” Stamps said of her Youth Center regulars. Her summer’s big breakthrough, she said, was getting kids living north of Division to come down to Seward Park for ASM camp.

“It’s been a task-and-a-half ” keeping the gang-bangers away, she said, and there have been incidents. “But we’ve seen progress. We’re pulling the teens in because now they know there’s a whole group of people working to keep them safe.”

Later that day at the park, during a practice break, instructor Sasha Rashidee, once a flag team member at the University of Illinois, explained what it is that the Near North kids really need.

“They crave personal instruction, personal attention,” she said while untangling the hair of 16-year-old Ikayla Gregory. “So we break it down, make it easy. One, two, three, four on the gok block,” a small red plastic box struck with a drumstick.

Ikayla said she was scared to try out for her high school’s flag team last year. But this fall, after a summer a Seward Park, she may give it a try. “I think I’m good enough now,” she said.

More information: Stanley Merriwether (312) 504-4706 or smerriwether@gmail.com

Points of light amid foreclosure funk

Tue, 2 Aug 2011 10:22:26 CST

[Articles]

Home prices keep falling and mortgage foreclosures keep rising.

A new study on renters, meanwhile, counts 12,334 apartment buildings going into foreclosure during 2009-2010 and with them a whopping 37,726 rental units. LISC/NCP neighborhoods were among the hardest hit, with five losing more than 200 rental buildings just during 2010: Humboldt Park (284), Logan Square (253), Little Village (231), Englewood (218) and North Lawndale (203.)

Mike Tomas, NCP director for the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, believes NSP could become a win-win if the program scales up to not only rehab houses but also train young people in the building trades.

Photo: Gordon Walek

So if you’re looking for good news on the housing front this summer in Chicago, good luck. There isn’t much … but there is some.

The federal government is moving to improve its under-performing Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) by prodding mortgage lenders and servicers to move faster and even reduce balances owed to reflect the declining market. Meanwhile, the city’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), managed by Mercy Portfolio Services, is restoring dozens of foreclosed and vacant homes and is having success selling them to new owners at affordable prices.

Sure, the HAMP and NSP efforts are but a trickle against foreclosure’s grim flood. But they’re a start. And every small victory has important lessons on how foreclosure-fractured neighborhoods can get back on their feet.

East Garfield Park glimmer
Consider the three sturdy houses in East Garfield Park newly rehabbed by the Community Male Empowerment Project (CMEP) with help from the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, the LISC/NCP lead agency there.

Developer Melvin Bailey and his crew stand in front of a two-flat they're rehabbing in East Garfield Park.

Photo: Gordon Walek

CMEP leader Melvin Bailey says he recruited young men from the neighborhood to work alongside skilled tradesman on the rehab of 3352 and 3412 W. Walnut St. and 327 N. Central Park Blvd.

“The idea is to teach young men skills so they can move forward with their lives,” Bailey said. “Other young men in the neighborhood see our guys working a trade and they get the idea they could too.”

The Walnut Street houses already have been sold to mortgage-capable families on discounted terms set by Chicago’s NSP Program and the Central Park building will go on the market shortly. A more complete description of the program—and a more detailed story on the East Garfield Park rehabs—can be found at http://www.chicagonsp.org/news/962

“We’re 3 for 3,” said Bailey of the rehabs. “And we’re talking to some banks about scaling up … taking on more houses and turning this into a real training program.”

That would be a welcome win-win for Mike Tomas, the NCP director at GPCA.

“This way the neighborhood gets more than just a fixed-up house,” Tomas said “You help youngsters learn along the way. Like everything we do in NCP, it’s a more comprehensive strategy.”

Federal help
Since inception in 2008 Chicago’s NSP program has been awarded a total of $169 million by HUD to buy and rehab from 2,000 to 2,500 lender-repossessed properties in 29 target neighborhoods. In the latest funding round East Garfield Park was designated an “area of greatest need,” meaning more funds and more rehabs for a neighborhood that was hit hard by a pre-crash speculative bubble.

Large numbers of foreclosures continue to reflect a generally fragile economy.

Photo: John McCarron

Meanwhile, the Mortgage Relief Fund (MRF), directed by Mercy’s William Goldsmith, is negotiating with the U.S. Treasury Department for permission to buy delinquent mortgages from banks so as to avoid the lengthy foreclosure process. Better for MRF to keep viable owners in place, the reasoning goes, than allow vacant houses to slip into Illinois’ year-plus judicial foreclosure process, after which time many are stripped and vandalized beyond repair.

"We know there's a very large swath of families that are working that are underwater and can no longer afford this mortgage," Goldsmith recently explained to the Chicago Tribune.

Mortgage mods via MRF would be a welcome addition to those being negotiated—or not negotiated—under the federal government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP.) More than 4.5 million mods have been applied for nationally since program launch in 2009, but as of this April only 1.5 million had been finalized.

Many blame lenders—who are paid to modify mortgages with easier terms—for not following up with some applicants and giving others the runaround. Doubtless the slow economy also plays a role, with folks losing their jobs even as home values slip below the balance owed.

The government recently ordered lenders to provide a single “point of contact” for customers seeking to modify, and the Treasury has begun publishing a monthly report card on how lenders are performing.

Market stalled
But no amount of blame-naming is going to stem the foreclosure tide unless the economy, and especially the housing market, turns around. The Illinois Association of Realtors recently noted that, although home prices tend to reach their annual peak in the May-June buying season, home prices in the Chicago area are from 9 to 15 percent lower than one year ago.

An apartment building at 6015 S. Indiana Ave. that's being renovated through NSP.

Photo:

With sales volume off by 26 percent year-over-year, and with so much foreclosed and otherwise “overhang” inventory, the Realtors predict, at best, a flat housing market for 2012.

RealtyTrac, the Web-based information service, counted 33,508 city residential properties in some stage of foreclosure as of the end of May 2011. The Southwest Side’s 60629 zip code that includes Chicago Lawn led all neighborhoods with 144 foreclosures filed just in the month of May.

Renters routed
As bad as the situation is for struggling homeowners, the new study by Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing LCBH) reminds that things are even worse for limited-income renters. During 2010, according to the report, Chicago was losing 123 apartment buildings per week to the foreclosure menace.

And new laws designed give renters an early warning, along with a grace period to find another apartment, were widely ignored by both landlords and by lenders doing the foreclosing. LCBH found many landlords fail to notify tenants of an impending foreclosure, as required by law, and even kept on collecting rent after losing control of the building.

Many foreclosing lenders, meanwhile, fail to honor still-valid leases and frequently use “constructive eviction” tactics—such as no maintenance, utility shutoffs and take-it-or-leave-it “cash-for-keys” offers—to clear buildings so as to limit their liability.

Seven NCP neighborhoods are among the 20 LCBH says lost more than 10 percent of their apartments to foreclosure over the past two years. They are East Garfield Park (17.3 percent), Englewood (14.6 percent), Humboldt Park (14.3 percent), Washington Park (13.5 percent), North Lawndale (12.9 percent), South Chicago (12 percent) and Chicago Lawn (10.6 percent).

LCBH, a recent grantee of LISC/Chicago’s Foreclosure Response Fund, has made the full report available online at http://lcbh.org

For more information:

Renter’s rights—LCBH’s Mark Swartz 312.784.3520
NSP—William Towns 312.447.4609
Foreclosure counseling—Neighborhood Housing Services 773.329.4185.

Residents groove to Seward Park Jazz

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:42:17 CST

[Articles]

“Get your coat. Grab your hat. Leave your worries at the doorstep,” crooned Brent Kimbrough to the crowd gathered at Seward Park on a recent Friday night. Not that any coats were needed on this 80 degree evening, but the sentiment was understood. This was a time to enjoy the sounds of jazz and relax in the peaceful company of one’s neighbors.

More than 400 residents gathered at the Near North Side park on Elm Street for the second of five outdoor concerts in a free, summer-long Jazz Fest (remaining concerts are on August 12 and August 26).

The jazz festival is attracting the new mix of people living in the area formerly known for the towering Cabrini Green high-rise buildings.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

It was a new experience for a neighborhood formerly associated with the Cabrini Green housing projects. As the high rises came down during the past decade, many of their tenants left the community. Others took their place in modern housing developments, creating a new mix of ages and ethnicities. The neighborhood is still looking for ways to celebrate its increased diversity.

They may have found one. Just north of the Seward Park field house, the usually empty lawn was full of toddlers, 20-somethings, and “old-timers.” Some laid out blankets and enjoyed picnics, while others sat back in portable chairs and sank into the jazz vibe as the sun sank in the sky. People tapped their feet, bobbed their heads, and swung their hips to the music.

Larry and Pat Burns live two blocks from the park, where Pat used to play 16-inch softball as a boy. They came to the festival after spotting a flyer . “I don’t think I have ever seen people on this lawn,” said Pat Burns. Agreed Larry, “It’s been a long time comin’."

The idea for the jazz festival sprung from the Near North Unity Program (NNUP) developed by LISC/Chicago in cooperation with Ald. Walter Burnett, Jr. (27^th). Additionally, concert promoter Alvin Carter-Bey has helped line up the musical acts. “I was born and raised here,” said Carter-Bey. “We thought jazz would appeal to lots of people, young and old.”

People sat, swayed and danced to the music as the sun sank low in the sky.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

They were right. Some people came out an hour early to fire up their grills before the concert started. Others heard the music as they strolled by and were drawn into the park. It wasn’t long into the evening before some couples left their seats to dance on the walkway next to the stage.

Deborah Hope has lived in the area for more than 25 years, but this was only her second time in the park. “I never came here before because it was like a war zone,” said Hope. “But now I’m sitting here, and it feels good. I look to my left, and I see white, black, Asian. To my right—well, I don’t know all the nationalities, but it’s like a rainbow. And we’re socializing, not arguing.”

It was exactly the scene the NNUP hoped for when planning the concert series. “We want to strengthen the community from within,” said Project Manager Stanley Merriwether. The NNUP looked for activities that could have a positive impact while facilitating interaction between residents. “It’s not just about the activity per se,” she said, “but the community that can be established through the activity.”

“Music is the great equalizer,” offered Burnett, explaining that the festival is meant not only to bring people together, but also to attract people to the main recreational resource in the community—Seward Park. “We want people to know this park is not only for the kids, but for everyone,” he said. “By having more adults around, kids learn they are not invisible, and they learn to be respectful.”

The jazz festival concept arose from the Near North Unity Project, developed by LISC/Chicago in cooperation with Ald. Walter Burnett, Jr. (27th).

Photo: Eric Young Smith

The Near North Side has seen its share of changes over the past few years. Perspectives differ on whether the changes have been positive or negative, but few would argue the merits of a peaceful evening in the park.

“I’m OK with the changes,” said resident Keantre Malone. “I want to be able to walk to my neighborhood park. And I’m definitely coming back to the Jazz Fest every time.”

“Before, we had these tall high-rises that served as boundaries—limits. Those limits are no longer present,” said Tim Ballard, who grew up in Cabrini and volunteered to help with security for the jazz festival. As he set up chairs for a group of elderly residents arriving together by van, he gave his perspective on the new near North Side. “Instead of just feeling the change, you have to embrace the change.”

The Seward Park Jazz Fest is the NNUP’s kickoff event, and the hope is for the festival to become an annual occurrence. Carter-Bey hopes next year to attract some international acts. It’s already attracting quite a bit of local attention.

With the harmonious feelings flowing in the park on this night, the only blue notes sounded were from the stage.

Seward Park Jazz Fest 2011 Dates June 24: Ari Brown Jazz Quartet
July 8: Brent Kimbrough & Company
July 22: Joan Collaso & Band
August 12: Greg Penn & Crosswind
August 26: Chris Greene Quartet
Hosted by: Alderman Walter Burnett, Jr. Sponsored by: Alvin Carter-Bey, US Bank, McLaurin Development Partners, Near North Unity Project Supported by: Chicago Park District, McLaurin Development Partners, US Bank, LISC/Chicago, and the Near North Unity Project

Bridge-building on Division Street

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:21:19 CST

[Articles]

It’s been a neighborhood long divided between have-not public housing residents and have-it-all residents of Chicago’s pricey Gold Coast. Only now, with the grim Cabrini-Green high-rises gone, many think it’s high time to bridge the old divides and create a diverse-but-unified community on the Near North Side.

The old divides between the Cabrini-Green public housing project and Chicago's pricey Gold Coast are fading thanks to a variety of efforts, including the Near North Unity Program.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

Enter the Near North Unity Program (NNUP) – a coalition led by Ald. Walter Burnett (27^th), LISC/Chicago, and a deep roster of local religious leaders, park directors, school principals, affordable housing tenants and condo developers.

“We have a diverse community, new buildings, a lot of beautiful things,” said Ald. Burnett about the physical transformation taking place. “But we have a lot of social challenges and a lot of cultural differences. The goal of the Unity Program is to bring folks together, break down those differences and bring out how much more we have in common.”

The plan is to marshal some of the same resources and expertise that the MacArthur Foundation (the program funder) and LISC/Chicago have brought to the New Communities Program (NCP), which for nearly a decade has been working with community groups in 28 neighborhoods across the city.

Ald. Burnett said he’s been especially taken with the way NCP brought together the black and Puerto-Rican communities in Humboldt Park at the western reaches of his ward. So last year he guided a tour of the Near North area for MacArthur President Robert Gallucci and then-president of LISC/Chicago Andrew Mooney, who now heads the city’s Department of Housing and Economic Development. They agreed NCP methods could make a difference in the neighborhood bounded by North Avenue on the north, Wells Street on the east, Chicago Avenue on the south and the North Branch of the Chicago River on the west.

As with NCP, several “early action projects” will be undertaken while local residents begin crafting a long-term quality-of-life plan for the neighborhood.

Some history
Nobody is claiming all this will be easy. The late Studs Terkel was making a point, after all, when he titled his oral history of everyday urban struggle after this neighborhood’s main drag: Division Street: America.

New townhouses have replaced Cabrini highrises that were razed through the CHA's Plan for Transformation.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

The divide between East-by-the-lake and West-by-the-river has perplexed city planners and thinkers since before the Great Fire of 1871, when dirt-poor Irish pitched a shantytown west of LaSalle Street called Kilgubbin. Later came the Italians with enclaves dubbed Little Sicily and Little Hell. After World War One, as white ethnics moved up and out, the ramshackle zone became a port-of-entry for southern blacks.

A leading sociologist of his day, Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, researched the area and in 1929 produced his classic The Gold Coast and the Slum contrasting the simultaneous development of the upscale lakefront and the grim decline of what he called the city’s “oldest slum.” The latter was, he wrote, “a jungle of human wreckage” full of rickety wooden tenements heated with dangerous wood stoves and most without indoor plumbing.

What the neighborhood did have, then and now, was a prime location – literally within the morning shadow of the skyscrapers rising along North Michigan Avenue.

Cabrini rowhouses in the shadow of the former Montgomery Ward offices.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

This likely explains why, during the Great Depression, the city targeted Near North for its first experiments in urban renewal, or “slum clearance” as it was then called, using both private philanthropy and New Deal dollars. Montgomery Ward was encouraged to build its sprawling headquarters and warehouse along the river at Chicago Avenue.

Then came the Marshall Field Garden Apartments (1930) along Sedgwick Street, a pioneering effort financed by the estate of another famous retail baron. Later renamed Town and Garden Apartments, its 628 moderate-income units remain handsome … but were never profitable.

So the newly-created Chicago Housing Authority took up the burden of affordability and one of its first efforts was the Frances Cabrini Homes. The 16-acre complex of row houses and low-rises opened during World War II and counted many defense workers among its 586 tenant families. Ironically it would be these more human-scale row houses that stood the test of time – not Cabrini-Green’s thicket of post-war, 16-story high-rises, the last of which were demolished last year as part of CHA’s ambitious Plan for Transformation.

The ’hood transformed
As part of the Transformation Plan, much of the sprawling Cabrini-Green area has been redeveloped with mixed-income townhouses and low-rises wherein a third of the new units are rented to CHA tenants, a third rented to moderately-subsidized families, and a third sold as condominiums to “market rate” buyers. The developments have names like Parkside of Old Town and North Town Village. The CHA also rents units in nearby private complexes such as Mohawk North and Old Town Square.

Jazz concerts at Seward Park are among the early action projects of the Near North Unity Program.

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This unprecedented racial and economic intermingling – a nationally significant experiment, really, in the techniques of integration and community redevelopment – has not been without frictions and sore points. Some market rate owners complain of loud music and kids “hangin’ out” in lobbies and on front stoops. CHA tenants complain of dog waste left by, and “snooty looks” flashed by, haughty condo owners. Both complain about a lack of street parking and, more worrisome, unruly behavior among teenagers, especially those affiliated with street gangs.

“Safety is the main issue,” said Patrick Steward, whose Chicago Men in Action (MIA) group has organized a summertime youth basketball tournament that NNUP will build upon. “Safety affects so many things in so many different ways.”

Stanley Merriwether, an accomplished community development professional brought in by LISC/Chicago to coordinate the project locally, summed up the challenge at a start-up meeting of neighborhood stakeholders:

Building trust among residents of vastly different backgrounds and circumstances will be a key to establishing a strong, cohesive community.

Photo: Eric Young Smith

“The goal is to create cohesion, to build relationships where there are none currently, to try and create a more vibrant and revitalized Near North community,” she said. “By working on different projects that people across the community have said are priorities – community wellness, safety, youth, employment – we will get to know each other better.”

Early action
Several “early action” projects are being planned for this summer, Merriwether said, including some that already had local sponsorship but can be expanded using NNUP resources:

Back-to-School Fair – Tentatively set for Sept. 3, this neighborhood tradition would be expanded to include a rummage exchange of household goods, music concerts, youth basketball playoffs, health screening and information and distribution of donated backpacks filled with school supplies.

Clean & Green – Senior leader Charles Smith is organizing crews of youthful volunteers to gather rubbish from vacant lots and plant trees, flowers and vegetable gardens where permissible.

Jazz in the Park – This series of Friday evening performances at Seward Park – the first was on June 24 – at Division and Orleans is not unlike those presented by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and will be hosted by Al Carter-Bey, a jazz historian and longtime Cabrini-Green mentor.

Cake Decorating Classes – Justice Stamps, daughter of the late and legendary Cabrini-Green activist, Marion Stamps, plans to teach the baker’s art to teenagers in the kitchen of St. Matthews church.

Bridging the Gap Basketball – This offshoot of LISC/Chicago’s citywide Hoops in the Hood program is organizing teams of players aged 8 to 18 for its free, Friday afternoon competitions at Seward Park. Ancillary activities will include food, music, jump rope competition and even free haircuts.

Digital Portal – LISC/Chicago will provide technical assistance for creation of a NNUP website through which residents can stay on top of local activities, social services, employment opportunities and info on local stores and businesses.

Building trust
Surely the most important project, though, will be building trust among residents of very different backgrounds.

“We’ve got to make things attractive to everybody,” said Carol Steele, president of the Cabrini-Green Local Advisory Council. Tough-minded and always protective of her public housing constituents, Steele was among those who in 2004 sued the CHA in federal court, forcing it to delay demolition of the high-rises until acceptable replacement housing and relocation services were in place.

There’s a strong feeling among the public housing tenants who remain, Steele explains, that the neighborhood is being redeveloped for someone else, not them. This suspicion would be allayed, she argues, if the CHA would get on with its “Phase II” remodeling of the many row houses that are still empty and boarded up.

“It’s always been a melting pot around here,” Steele said. “So don’t tell us about diversity. Now the concept has to be one community. That’s not so easy.”

Steele wouldn’t get an argument on the latter point from Keri Blackwell, the LISC/Chicago senior program officer who, with colleague Sandra Womack, is coordinating the NNUP effort from downtown.

“Without question,” Blackwell said, “this is the most complex of the neighborhoods LISC has partnered with.”

And, she might have added, a worthy test of the networking methods used so effectively elsewhere in the city by the New Communities Program.

More information: Kblackwell@LISC.org or smerriwether@gmail.com.

Susana Vasquez named LISC/Chicago executive director

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 23:47:11 CST

[Articles]

Susana Vasquez, who for nearly two decades has worked to redevelop Chicago neighborhoods, is the new executive director of LISC’s Chicago office. LISC, the nation’s leading community development support organization, has been redeveloping Chicago neighborhoods since 1980.

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The move is a natural evolution for Vasquez, who joined LISC/Chicago in 2003 as a program officer and soon became director of the office’s most ambitious effort – the New Communities Program, a 10-year project to comprehensively redevelop 16 Chicago neighborhoods. Former director of education programs Chris Brown has become director of NCP.

“Susana’s definitely suited for the demands of this job,” said Lori Healey, the chair of LISC/Chicago’s board of advisors. “She knows the city, she knows the neighborhoods, and she knows the community organizations. The leadership she displayed as NCP director will be of enormous value as she takes the helm of LISC’s most productive and creative office.”

Over the years, Vasquez, 40, has developed a reputation as a savvy organizer, a polished diplomat, a decisive executive and a skilled personnel manager – all essential qualities in navigating the complicated world of Chicago neighborhoods, local politics, multiple funding sources and numerous partnerships required to make underserved neighborhoods better and stronger.

After graduating from the University of Illinois with a degree in U.S./Latin American History, Vasquez cut her community development teeth as an organizer on the Affordable Housing Campaign (led by the Chicago Rehab Network), as a tenant organizer at the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, and as a community organizer at the Resurrection Project, where she became the deputy director.

She left to earn a master’s degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and returned to Chicago to work for LISC, where became involved with NCP after it had expanded from a three-neighborhood pilot program to the 16 neighborhoods it encompasses today.

“We think Susana’s unique qualities will ensure a seamless transition at the LISC/Chicago office, which has been a leader in our national focus on comprehensive community development,” said Michael Rubinger, LISC’s president and CEO. “We’re lucky to have her.”

Vasquez succeeds Andrew Mooney, who ran the office for 15 years before leaving to become Chicago’s commissioner of housing and economic development.

“We’re confident that under Susana’s leadership, LISC/Chicago will continue to be the nation’s leader in bringing new ideas and techniques to the business of neighborhood redevelopment,” said Julia Stasch, vice president of U.S. programs for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, primary funder of the New Communities Program. “She has a sophisticated grasp of the field. She can get things done and will hit the ground running in this critical position.”

About LISC/Chicago
LISC combines corporate, government and philanthropic resources to help community-based organizations revitalize underserved neighborhoods. Since 1980, LISC/Chicago has infused $160 million into comprehensive development programs throughout the city, which has leveraged an additional $4.7 billion in community investment and resulted in the development of 28,000 units of affordable housing, over 5 million square feet of commercial space, and a wide variety of social and economic development programs. For more information, visit www.lisc-chicago.org .