Executive Summary
Beginning in the 1990s, thousands of units of public housing on hundreds of acres across Chicago were demolished with the promise that new, thriving communities would be built. While progress has been made toward this vision, it has been uneven and unnecessarily slow, leaving vast areas of land at several mixed income sites owned by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) vacant or underutilized during an increasingly acute shortage of affordable housing.
In just six mixed income developments profiled in this report, nearly 110 acres of land is vacant, with an additional 22 acres of land home to only vacant buildings. This represents over 25 Chicago city blocks of land that could provide housing and complete communities to Chicago residents. Unless the current pace of development is accelerated, many CHA mixed income communities may not be completed for decades longer, leaving still unfulfilled the opportunity they present.
Chicago now has a chance to make a course correction by focusing on mixed income communities, prioritizing them, and streamlining the governmental processes needed to move development forward. Because they contain large areas of CHA-owned land, these communities present a two-fold opportunity both to address Chicago’s need for affordable housing and, in most cases, to invest in under-resourced neighborhoods.
After more than 25 years, it is time to complete these communities and develop the housing and other resources that have long been talked about, but not yet fully provided. Now is the time to finish the job, bring closure to this decades-long endeavor, and strengthen these neighborhoods. Chicagoans and their communities have waited long enough.
