North Lawndale housing development facing delays over city rules

You can’t trust City Hall. You can fight it and maybe win, but you can’t trust it.

It’s a lesson that people working grassroots causes internalized long ago, and it’s certainly not new to Richard Townsell, a community activist for more than 30 years and executive director of the Lawndale Christian Development Corp.

The group has taken a broad-based approach to improving its neighborhood. It argues for better city services, yes, but also works as a developer. It has produced more than 490 apartments or commercial spaces and it’s pushing an effort to add single-family homes, seeing them as a way to put vacant land to use, adding customers for local businesses and building generational wealth.

So there was optimism in the air two years ago when then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot brought the media to an outdoor event in North Lawndale to announce full-throated city backing for 250 new single-family homes. Intended to be priced for working-class buyers, they would be put on city-owned vacant lots, numbering about 950 in North Lawndale.

“That is a wow. That is a wow,” Lightfoot said of that statistic. “But through this campaign we will turn this vacant land into opportunity.”

The announcement had high-level folks galore, including U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia and Chicago Housing Commissioner Marisa Novara. The plan was to build the homes in three to five years with Townsell’s group, working with United Power for Action and Justice, taking the lead.

Lightfoot is now out of office, and Novara, highly regarded by housing advocates, is leaving her city job later this month. So how are those homes coming?

Townsell doesn’t mince words. While he said he’d like to have 200 homes started by now, only 18 are in various stages of construction, with two sold and contracts on four others. They are mostly around 16th Street and Avers Avenue and 18th Street and Sawyer Avenue.

He said the hold up is from all types of municipal red tape over the properties, even though the transfer of city-owned land should be easier than private-market dealings for parcels with liens and back taxes.

“This is really about a city that has no urgency when it comes to working families,” Townsell said.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

He doesn’t blame individuals. He said it’s more about rigid government layers with little coordination among departments and with no one taking charge. “No one says, ‘I’m going to call you back in a few hours, and it’s going to be done,’” he said.

Townsell said it can take weeks for the Law Department to process a change of title. He said permits and inspections also can take months, as well as simple certifications from the Water Department that there are no overdue bills. He said one property was tied up over $19 unpaid from years ago.

“This is a failure of the system,” he said. He and colleagues with United Power pressed new Mayor Brandon Johnson on their concerns during a meeting at St. Rita of Cascia on the Southwest Side.

The Housing Department provided a statement Sunday saying the North Lawndale program is a pilot effort, unique in that the city builds foundations and water connections before transferring title.

“Multiple departments and local partners are looking at how to streamline this and other aspects of the program to facilitate construction, which is the purpose of the pilot. Process improvements are expected later this summer,” the statement said.

The program also has been hobbled by inflation in construction costs and by the Federal Reserve’s 10 interest rate increases in the last two years.

Two years ago, Townsell was aiming to sell the homes for around $220,000. He had to raise that to $250,000. He said his costs are about $310,000 per lot, despite getting $1-per-parcel land from the city. Townsell’s group has backing from the state and has $17.5 million in construction loans from banks and foundations. He’d like to get it to $25 million.

While he won’t blame individuals, he clearly has problems with people in top-level city jobs. “The city is spending too much time on fluffy things — issues of design and policy,” he said. “It is not built around production. It is built around policy wonk ideas, and as a result nothing gets done.”

Townsell did not mention specifics, but Lightfoot lumped North Lawndale housing into her Invest South/West program, which has been criticized for its slow progress. Developers complain the city insists on costly designs.

Also, under Novara, the Housing Department has pushed for adding affordable units in wealthier neighborhoods while shoehorning coach houses — back-of-the-lot homes once banned as tacky — into available backyards. The administration squandered political capital by pushing through an affordable housing deal on the Northwest Side over an alderperson and many residents who opposed it. That developer has been unable to start the project.

Why not spend more time on affordable homes where the community wants and needs them?

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times