Publications

Project Portfolios

The Wood Street Urban Farmin Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood consists of three hoop houses that allow fresh, organic produce to be grown year-round. Two of the hoop houses are 26 by 72 feet, and the third is 30 by 82 feet, for a total of 8,400 square feet of year-round growing space. The facility is operated by Growing Home, a non-profit organic agriculture business with a mission to create job opportunities for low-income and difficult-to-employ people. In addition to producing a wide variety of organic vegetables and herbs, the farm provides job training to about 30 people a year, most with histories of homelessness, substance abuse, or incarceration.

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) that will begin occupancy in January 2006.

The Churchview Supportive Living Facility is an 86-unit supportive living apartment complex for seniors located 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, will provide 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 (HWUC), 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 feet two story 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 will provide 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.

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