The history of Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side splits into two chapters. Before April 5-6, 1968, and afterward.
Before the riots that ensued on two harrowing days following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., North Lawndale thrived with an array of factories including an International Harvester plant that employed 14,000 people, the world headquarters for Sears, Roebuck and Co., and bustling shopping corridors for a mostly Black community of more than 110,000 Chicagoans.
The riots gutted it all — literally. Whole streetscapes went up in flames. In today’s dollars, damage to the West Side from the 1968 riots reached $77 million. Vacant lots blighted block after block. Jobs never returned, and families moved out — in droves. The neighborhood’s population today stands at 34,794, according to the 2020 census.
Mayors have come and gone, pledging revitalization that never materialized.
A new report from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago starkly outlines the plight North Lawndale faces today. Violent crime in the neighborhood far outpaces the rate for all of Chicago. Nearly 8% of North Lawndale’s lots are vacant or mostly vacant. Fewer than 500 people who live in North Lawndale also work in the neighborhood — more than 11,600 residents leave the community to go to work.
Here’s what is especially revealing: Every year, the people of North Lawndale spend $124 million outside of their neighborhood, rather than at restaurants, stores and businesses in their own neighborhood. The reason is elementary. North Lawndale lacks shopping corridors and commerce that would otherwise keep that money spent within the community. And any job growth that has happened in the neighborhood has largely benefitted people who live outside North Lawndale — many of them white workers taking the growing number of jobs that require college degrees. Roughly just 2% of those white workers live in North Lawndale.
“Diminished opportunities, both economic and educational,” the report states, “are having an adverse impact on the quality of life in North Lawndale and point to the need for substantial investments in the community.”
That sums up the problem. What’s the solution?
We have said several times that Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Invest South/West initiative offers some hope for neighborhoods on the South and West sides that have been abandoned by City Hall for far too long. The effort combines public and private sector money and resources to stoke investment — and in turn job growth — in neglected South and West side communities.
So far, $1.4 billion in public and private money has been earmarked for revitalization projects in Englewood, Austin, Auburn Gresham, Humboldt Park, Bronzeville and other neighborhoods. In North Lawndale, the program will enable developers to transform an acre of vacant land into a $31.4 million combination of mixed-income apartments, shops, restaurants and a community center, as well as a separate $38.4 million effort to build an innovation center at the site of a former illegal dumping ground.
Lightfoot’s Invest South/West program shows what City Hall can do to help remedy disinvestment in long-neglected neighborhoods. We’re watching closely to see what impact the program’s projects will have. But the task of revitalization can’t — and shouldn’t — be left solely up to City Hall.
Chicago’s corporate community must step up.
The city’s banks should be first in line to help. Lending enables dreams of homeownership and a neighborhood’s entrepreneurial spirit to flourish. But for far too long, banks have focused lending much more on the North Side rather than communities on the South and West sides.
An investigation in 2020 by WBEZ and the nonprofit newsroom City Bureau found that America’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, lent 41 times more money in white Chicago neighborhoods than in Black neighborhoods. Overall, between 2012 and 2018, mostly white neighborhoods in the city got more than 68% of money lent for housing purchases, compared with just 8% in majority-Black neighborhoods, and 8.7% in Latino communities. Vacant lots and empty storefronts will continue to doom North Lawndale’s economic outlook as long as that lending gap persists.
North Lawndale also suffers from what urban affairs specialists call a “food desert,” a community in which access to grocery stores and healthy foods is scarce or nonexistent. According to the Great Cities Institute report, almost half of North Lawndale’s residents had much lower access to fruits and vegetables compared with more affluent neighborhoods such as Lakeview on the North Side, where nearly 83% of residents had access to healthy foods. Big grocery chains are free todecide where they want to open new stores, but they should realize that Chicago will remain a strong market for their investment only if all of Chicago thrives — not just the North Side and downtown.
The same applies to the city’s big employers. It isn’t just North Lawndale that continues to bleed population. Historically, Chicago’s overall population has been on a worrisome slide for quite some time. Investing in neighborhoods like North Lawndale — seeding job growth there and turning vacant land into economic engines for the community — is how neighborhoods left behind will forge a comeback. That’s sound urban policy, and its sound corporate policy. What’s not good corporate policy? Putting it all on the shoulders of City Hall.
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