The redevelopment of a 21-acre North Lawndale site into a 302,000-square-foot industrial complex and a pair of community centers has the potential to bring jobs, and space to gather and innovate, to the West Side.
The plans are the latest proposal in the city of Chicago’s ongoing Invest South/West initiative. Maurice Cox, commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development, said the initiative is laser-focused on sites that were neglected, overlooked and abandoned. The $38.4 million project will sit at 4300 W. Roosevelt Road.
“We intended to raise the bar across the board and prove several things,” Cox said about the Roosevelt and Kostner redevelopment. “Could we create a next-generation light manufacturing facility that serves as an industry model for what green and clean energy practices look like? Could it be designed in a way that actually gives something back to the community? Could we lay the foundation for a park along the Altenheim rail line and provide connections beyond the site to the rest of the neighborhood? Could we utilize the exterior building walls as a canvas for artistic expression and could we create hundreds of jobs? And could we extend the dignity of design excellence to industrial sites?”
Cox said the project is a manifestation of all of those goals. 548 Development is partnering with Related Midwest to bring the site to fruition. The complex will have a 153,460-square-foot building with 31 dock spaces on the northern portion of the property and a 148,680-square-foot-building with 31 dock spaces on the southern portion of the property. The site will also include a North Lawndale Innovation Center, which will provide two buildings for community-based retail, workforce training, and office uses in partnership with local community organizations. An adjoining community park will offer outdoor gathering space for the community.
Cox said the wants and needs of the site came together over months with the help of hundreds of residents and community members via opinions shared in virtual meetings and surveys.
“It represents a collective effort of all of us to give this site an entirely new meaning in Chicago,” Cox said. “Rather than acres and acres of unimproved land, rather than mountains of debris, we are going to see this site return to its original purpose and that is to be a job-producing center for North Lanwdale and beyond. This is going to be a center of innovation. It brings to a close one of the most nefarious chapters in community disinvestment that Chicago has ever seen.”
548 Development founder and partner AJ Patton said the idea of a freight/logistics complex with communal space just made sense. Several hundreds of permanent and temporary jobs are expected to come from the development.
“Retail is dead. You can’t do office and there are four other new housing developments within 2 miles of that site,” Patton said. “People need jobs.”
This is the 11th project announced in the Invest South/West initiative, a three-year program to invest $750 million in developments across 10 disadvantaged neighborhoods on the South and West sides.
In March 2021, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced $67 million in investment proposals for the first three developments to be built in the Austin, Auburn Gresham and Englewood neighborhoods. In August, the city announced four mixed-use projects and three peripheral developments valued at $200 million for South Chicago, North Lawndale, Bronzeville and New City.
The city announced three mixed-use projects in November totaling $126 million for Humboldt Park and South Shore.
“This project checks all the boxes of our values about how we go into community, work with community and making sure that we’re making investments that benefit community,” Lightfoot said. “The city’s investment into this development was a no-brainer.”
Bounded by Roosevelt Road and Kostner, Kildare and Fifth avenues, the site is located in the Roosevelt/Cicero Industrial Corridor and was occupied by a Copenhagen snuff plant and other industrial users before being cleared in the 1980s and 1990s prior to its acquisition by the city. Patton said there’s going to be significant environmental cleanup at the site before work begins.
Both Patton and Ald. Michael Scott Jr., 24th, envision groundbreaking before the end of 2022 with something promising to show by 2023. Scott says seeing something partly created by an African American in the city of Chicago, in a community that is overwhelmingly African American is really important when it comes to changing the narrative of what currently exists in North Lawndale and what can be in North Lawndale.
“I know there have been several attempts to redevelop this site — I remember one being a movie studio, the Obama Presidential Library,” Scott said. “Everybody got to the rim and did a pump fake and didn’t shoot the ball. I’m cautiously optimistic that we have a developer now that will feasibly have the wherewithal to get this in the ground with the city commitment of dollars. And hopefully that will create something that is catalytic as it relates to development in and around this ward and hopefully be the snowball that rolls downhill to get other things.”
In its early years, the North Lawndale area was a neighborhood where immigrants lived and worked until they could afford to move to someplace better. Factory plants and the world headquarters of Sears, Roebuck and Co. existed in its boundaries employing those who lived there. Shopping was prevalent on Roosevelt and Kedzie. By the time WWII ended and families made the transition to the suburbs, the Black population moved in. Fires set during the 1968 riots took out robust shopping corridors that never fully returned. Disinvestment has endured for decades.
Patton said he doesn’t think the Roosevelt and Kostner redevelopment would have come to pass had the Invest South/West initiative not been created. He says Invest South/West is transformational because it dares to empower the people in the neighborhood, the same folks who have been in these neighborhoods doing work for years. With the redevelopment, Patton is bringing inclusivity to the table — meaning more Black and brown people at every level of development and not just on a subcontractor or laborer level. As he says, “equity is in every line item.”
“This has been barren land for some time,” he said. “It’s important that we have something nice, a job creator, that is going to be pointed toward us and inclusive of us. We’re creating two innovation centers on-site to be a hub for new business, incubation space, community space. We need more of that. We need these spaces. We want beautiful things. We want development. We want a vibrant economy, and we want to participate in it just as much.”
Scott agreed.
“There’s a lot of momentum and hopefully this will be that snowball that gets everything rolling so that North Lawndale can come back the way that it should, or was prior to 1968,” he said. “Hopefully this will unlock all the other development that is needed to make our community vibrant and rich and sought after by folks to come and live and play and work and the like.”
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