THESE BLACK DEVELOPERS ARE BUYING BACK THE BLOCK

The movement to “buy back the block” is a call to action to put Black communities into Black ownership. It’s about keeping the resources generated in Black communities within those communities, benefiting the people who live and work there rather than watching dollars drain to outside owners who have little interest in the community beyond making a return on their investments.

In West Woodlawn, where too many houses sit vacant and abandoned, we’re answering that call to action in a literal way—by purchasing and redeveloping 12 vacant lots on the 6300 block of South Langley Avenue.

We’re five Black community developers who have worked independently for years, cumulatively rehabbing hundreds of vacant housing units into modern homes across Chicago’s South and West sides in communities like Chatham, Roseland, East Garfield Park and Englewood.

We acquired many of these properties through the Cook County Land Bank Authority, which exists to address the blight created by the economic housing crisis of 2008. By being intentional about empowering developers who know their communities, the Land Bank is a true partner to “little guys” like us and a true partner to Black neighborhoods where tax-delinquent properties and vacant land are often left to decay for years.

Developers can be competitive, but together, the five of us always felt like a community because we supported each other and shared a vision: uplifting and investing in the communities where we live and grew up.

One day we put together our numbers and realized that our work had created more than $100 million in Black wealth and is generating $1.5 million in annual tax revenue.

That’s when we realized: We could either stay in our own lanes, doing pretty well independently, or we could pool our skills and resources and pour them into a community that needed them, maximizing our impact on individual lives and an entire community. So we bought a block.

Through the Land Bank, we purchased 12 abandoned lots where we’ll soon build new, state-of-the-art homes in a community that desperately needs quality and affordable housing.

These transactions would not have been possible without the Land Bank, which removes enormous barriers from the process of acquiring vacant homes and clearing title without using any taxpayer money. Without the Land Bank, these homes would have either remained abandoned or been purchased by a large developer who had the resources to sit on them for years until gentrification guaranteed a hefty return.

Not us. Our architect is already working on design concepts. We will, as always, hire from within the community, helping to ensure that the reach of our project ripples to as many Chicagoans as we can reach.

Architects, accountants, attorneys, carpenters, landscapers, HVAC professionals, plumbers, electricians, security staff—an all-Black team reflective of this community will transform this block from top to bottom, creating over 150 jobs before we’re done next year.

This is where we will have some of the greatest impact: employing formerly incarcerated citizens, who often struggle to move forward without much help once they’re outside; older citizens, who may have a hard time finding work; and those who haven’t had many opportunities but who, once given a chance, find tremendous pride and do an outstanding job in building up the neighborhood.

For us, our work isn’t just about this block. We know that a large-scale project like this has the power to attract more investment to West Woodlawn, which has boarded up and vacant homes on nearly every block. A nearby commercial corridor on 67th Street is also ripe for redevelopment for Black-owned businesses.

And we know it will happen; development breeds development, and development breeds stability. Each new owner is an anchor that holds our neighborhood in a safe harbor ahead of the next economic crisis.

Until then, we’ll build up our neighborhoods one block at a time. And when the nearby homeowners need a little help, perhaps with cutting the grass or shoveling the snow, we’ll have our crews do that, too. Because that’s what neighbors do. That’s what it means to be part of a community.