* 10/31/25 - Chicago’s Unbalanced Growth -- And What It Teaches Us + some info re Gentrification Management Program..............
Buzz Sawyer
Chicago’s Unbalanced Growth -- And What It Teaches UsWhen you have one hand in the oven and the other in the freezer, that's not average. That's just two different ways of getting burned.
A view of the Fulton Market District, a hotspot of new development on Chicago’s Near West Side over the last 25 years. Source: gettyimages.com A report came out from Crains Chicago Business (paywalled) that spoke to the uneven nature of development in Chicago. Ed Finkel, writer of the Crains article, noted that from January 1, 2023 to September 24, 2025, the City of Chicago Plan Commission approved 131 planned development projects representing 27,200 new dwelling units and $22.5 billion in investments. One Chicago neighborhood, the Near West Side, accounted for 36 of the 131 projects over that period – more than a quarter of all projects. Crains also noted that the Englewood neighborhood, on the South Side, saw only six planned development projects, producing a total of 98 new units. Englewood is a community in dire need of new investment of all types – housing, commercial development, infrastructure, even services. But the investment disparities are becoming too large to overlook. In fact, I don’t have records of Chicago Plan Commission PUD approvals since 2023, but my gut tells me that perhaps Crains is overstating the amount of new development in Englewood, one of many South Side neighborhoods. Crains may be inadvertently including projects in adjacent neighborhoods like Auburn-Gresham, Chatham, Back of the Yards, Grand Crossing, and Washington Park. My experience in Chicago over the last 35 years in planning in Chicago is that there’s consistently been about 4-5 times more development taking place in Chicago’s favored north lakefront and its adjacent neighborhoods when compared to the South and West Side combined. The extent of development disparity in Chicago has been that wide, for that long. The Corner Side Yard is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. For their part, former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and current mayor Brandon Johnson have done quite a bit to steer new development to the city’s oft-neglected neighborhoods. As mayor, Lightfoot created the Invest South/West program in 2019, designed to reverse historical disinvestment in ten communities on the South and West sides. A $750 million investment in the program by the City was used to leverage an additional $2.3 billion in additional investment, through corporate and philanthropic support. Mayor Johnson dropped the previous name but continued the programmatic effort; in June the mayor celebrated the opening of the Aspire Center for Workforce Innovation, located in a formerly closed elementary school on the West Side. The $40 million project got almost half of its funding from city and state sources. Crains also notes the recent industrial and commercial development taking place in the Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side. Unfortunately, you could take all the investment in the South and West sides, representing about half of the city’s population and more than half of its physical footprint, and it would pale in comparison to what’s happening now, on the Near West Side, all by itself. How does that change? Neighborhood vitality is hard to maintain without economic opportunity Finkel points out that five characteristics of neighborhood vitality make developers and investors want to develop in certain areas. He suggests that five vitality factors – existing population density, economic opportunity, access to services, quality public spaces and high levels of social cohesion – played a role in making the turnaround happen in other neighborhoods. And it’s clear that many South and West side neighborhoods took significant hits to their neighborhood vitality as the manufacturing jobs they depended on disappeared. Rapidly declining population reduces economic opportunity and social cohesion. Services begin to suffer; quality public spaces don’t get the investment they need. That causes more people to leave and deepen the downward spiral. But I’d argue that’s not completely true. Chicago’s Fulton Market area, the neighborhood that’s been the focal point of the Near West Side’s boom, was emphatically not a neighborhood before the 1990s. It was a meatpacking and warehousing district located just west of the expanding Loop office boom. The 1990s Fulton Market “neighborhood” would rank low on this neighborhood vitality scale. Here’s how Peoria Street in the Fulton Market area looked as recently as 2002:
Source: chicagobusiness.com There was very little residential development, so population density was non-existent. The only social cohesion at the time was between business owners, not residents. There were no quality public spaces of note, even though Fulton Market was the location of one of the most significant labor demonstrations in American history (until a sculpture was placed on the site where protesters spoke in 2004). The Fulton Market area had really only one of the five vitality factors noted by Finkel and Crains – economic opportunity. It was adjacent to a growing Chicago office market, and more people were looking to move closer to it. The photo below isn’t the same area as above, but only about 4 blocks east. This captures how the area looked just 10 years later:
Source: wikipedia.org Meanwhile, efforts to revitalize disinvested neighborhoods are often done to stimulate economic opportunity, not feed off it. Improving access to workforce training, for example, gives people the skills to improve their quality of life, but it doesn’t directly correlate to an improvement of the quality of their community. People with better skills move to places where they can get better jobs. If no better jobs are placed in the neighborhood where the training takes place, maybe the workforce training center is counterintuitively contributing to decline. Unless that workforce training center is adjacent to the economic catalyst. Most urban revitalization efforts try to spark growth in one location and hope it spreads outward. This is flawed. I believe revitalization starts in the heart of cities and extends outward, utilizing the assets that historically made the city desirable. As revitalization takes hold and spreads, cities can take advantage of adjacency, meaning that revitalization continues to spread outward. An alternative Ten years ago I wrote an article that addressed this issue and considered a policy to fix it. I outlined a program I called the Gentrification Management Program. This article in its entirety (and a whole lot more, like nearly 800 articles more!) is available to paid subscribers, but I’ll summarize a bit. Building on the efforts of progressive suburban communities in the late 1960s and early 1970s facing possible destabilizing integration from adjacent cities, like Oak Park, IL and Shaker Heights, OH, I thought of ways that neighborhoods could welcome desperately needed economic growth without leading to widespread low-income resident displacement – gentrification. I also linked it to work I’d done on the New Communities Program in the early 2000s, led by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). I worked on a number of quality-of-life plans throughout Chicago, I led the planning efforts on the Near West Side, the East Garfield Park neighborhood, and in Englewood. I contributed to planning efforts in many more (but not all) of the 27 quality-of-life plans completed under the program. During that time, I found that we were working on two types of plans. One type was communities seeking to stimulate growth, and for its residents to maintain a place within it as it grew economically. The other type was communities that were adjacent to already expanding areas (the Near West Side/Fulton Market area, for example, being adjacent to the Loop; or Logan Square, squeezed between an affluent Lincoln Park to its east and a growing Wicker Park/Bucktown area to its south), and also trying to maintain a place within it as inevitable economic expansion occurred. Overall, I’d say the quality-of-life plans for neighborhoods in the immediate path of revitalization were deemed to be successful. We worked with longtime residents to allay fears about an impending loss of community, and craft a future that would be inclusive. We worked with newcomers who wanted improved amenities and services and added their input as well. I wouldn’t say we completely eliminated the displacement fears that come with gentrification, but I think we created a way to imagine inclusive and complete communities – and greatly slowed displacement, without stalling economic growth, as a result. The quality-of-life plans in communities that weren’t in the path of revitalization had great ideas, but not the force of economic opportunity to make them happen. The lesson I learned was to guide revitalization. Don’t force growth into areas that aren’t ready for it, and just as importantly, don’t overburden areas by altering their character. Prepare the people who could potentially be displaced to remain there and live in the community they always imagined. Let newcomers know that their new neighborhood had a history that was worth remembering and honoring. And to focus efforts on places adjacent to where successes were already happening. By building on it where it has the fuel to move further. When I presented the Gentrification Management Program idea ten years ago, I took some heat. Most of it came from proto-YIMBYs and abundance movement types who thought I was stifling urban revitalization. It also came from progressive anti-gentrification activists who noted the power imbalance between well-funded developers and neighborhood groups, suggesting that existing residents would try to stifle growth and lose. I remember thinking that at some point these groups would recognize the difficulty in getting the communities they wanted built, and that they’d one day look well beyond city limits to get what they desired. There’s still plenty more city to make better if we prepare for it right. You're currently a free subscriber to The Corner Side Yard. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
© 2025 Pete Saunders
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