Grants and Loans
LISC Chicago invests strategically throughout the metro area to foster healthier communities.
Grants
LISC provides a wide variety of grants:
- for program support, where the grant funds help fund operations;
- for technical support, training and consultants, to increase the capacity of a local organization to undertake projects and programs;
- for predevelopment assistance, typically for real estate projects that require upfront capital for such expenses as title searches, design, engineering, and so on.
Loans
LISC makes loans to support a variety of real estate developments, including:
LISC loans are often used for:
- Acquisition costs
- Pre-development expenses (architect, feasibility, environmental tests, legal)
- Construction
- Bridge loans to advance public or private funding contracts.
- Mini-permanent loans for facilities, commercial, and industrial development projects.
LISC terms are generally:
- Short term, less than 3 years, but mini-perm loans may be up to 7 years.
- Interest is due monthly
- Collateral is required for all loans.
- Loans are at recourse/guaranteed by the borrower.
- Borrower must reflect a good financial condition
- Borrower must demonstrate experience to complete the proposed project.
Loans can range from $50,000 to over $2 million and are made to both not-for-profit and for profit organizations. They're intended to be short-term (usually less than three years, paid back at the time of permanent financing) and market-competitive. They do not take the place of traditional financial facilities, such as those offered by private banks. Instead, they cover the high risk portion of a project – the predevelopment stage of a project in a low-income community – that most lenders are unable to finance due to their underwriting thresholds. Sometimes LISC funds are used to complement a bank commitment by taking a second or tertiary position in the payback scheme of the project.
Equity
LISC has developed several facilities over the years that raise and invest equity in real estate development. These include the National Equity Fund, a syndicator of federally-awarded low income housing tax credits, and the New Markets Tax Credit LLC, also a tax credit syndicator, but for commercial/business development. Currently, LISC Chicago is also involved in select housing projects in which it is using its capital resources as a direct equity investor.
Results
Since its founding in 1980, LISC Chicago has invested nearly $150 million in grants and loans in neighborhoods in and around Chicago. The grants and loans have led to the development of nearly 27,000 units of housing and 4.5 million square feet of commercial/retail space and community facilities. In addition, LISC’s equity sources have invested another $317 million in projects in Chicago, leveraging an estimated total of $3.7 billion in total development throughout the metropolitan area.
Project Portfolios
The Austin Wellness Center is the first new human services building constructed in Chicago's Austin neighborhood in forty years. It addresses the needs of the area's 114,000 residents in two critical areas - healthcare and jobs. The Center's clinic and dialysis units offer area residents consistent quality healthcare close to home, and a proposed technology center is expected to offer residents and local business owners training in health-related, computer-based job skills and access to an employment database. A non-profit organization,Westside Health Authority, conceived of the Center and managed all aspects of its development, with assistance from LISC Chicago, and funders like the City of Chicago.
The Bethel Center, built with a bridge connecting it to the Lake Street El platform, incorporates the components of green technology and transit-oriented evelopment. These aspects complicated the financing and development process, but promise to reduce energy costs, provide transit accessibility, and be good for the environment. The Center houses Bethel’s Employment Services, where area residents can receive employment counseling and access to a computer lab (community technology center), with desktops, fax machines, and copiers, to aide in job searches and technology training supported by LISC/Chicago. A new Child Development Center provides daycare services for 106 children. Two West Side residents are the owners of a new Subway store on the Center’s first floor, one of 6 retail spaces. A dry cleaners occupies another retail space and two more will be used for a financial services center (a joint effort between Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, First Bank of Oak Park and Bethel).
The Churchview Supportive Living Facility is an 86-unit supportive living apartment complex for seniors in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the city's Southwest Side. The facility provides housing and assistance such as light housekeeping and meal service to local seniors who are unable to live alone, but who are not yet ready to enter a nursing home. It acts as a next step development for residents of the adjacent Churchview Manor Apartments, a low income senior housing development completed in 1992. The Greater Southwest Development Corporation (GSDC), a local CDC, developed both complexes, with support from LISC Chicago and the City of Chicago, among others.
The Concordia Lutheran Church has been serving families in the North Center community with preschool, summer camp and after school programs since 1981. Seizing the opportunity to expand their services to infants, teens and seniors, and to reach a new neighborhood, Avondale, the Concordia Avondale Campus, a non-profit organization created by Corcordia Lutheran Church, has developed a community center on the city’s northside. The new facility, a renovated three-story, 25,000-square-foot abandoned school building with a new 4,000-square-foot addition, provides infant care through full-day preschool for up to 150 children, after-school programs for 40 children, summer camp for 60 children, and senior services for 250 senior citizens.
The Harold Washington Unity Cooperative, developed by Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation, with support from LISC Chicago and the City of Chicago, consists of 87 affordable units in 18 newly-constructed buildings on vacant lots in West Humboldt Park. The project aims to create new homeowners through a delayed coop conversion, and thus helps to bring stability to a community that has seen high rates of displacement and upheaval in recent decades.
The Hyde Park Art Center is a 32,000-square-foot modern center that includes five gallery spaces, classrooms, artists’ studios, an art resource community center, and a café. The renovation project is the Center’s first facilities project in its more than 65-year history, and provides the Center with its first free-standing home.
Oakwood Shores, the new mixed-income community that combines market rate, affordable and public housing rental units in attractive three and six flats with both affordable and market rate, for-sale single-family homes, forms a new gateway to the historic Bronzeville neighborhood. Parkways unite the redevelopment site with the surrounding boulevards while a community center, to be built on parkland immediately to the north of the development, provides a new unifying focal point for the entire neighborhood.
For more information, contact Barb Beck, 312-422-9553 or bbeck@lisc.org