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By Trey Arline, Block Club Chicago | April 12th, 2023 (Click Here For Original Article)

WEST GARFIELD PARK — Elaine Bell-Quinn’s mother and father came to Chicago separately during the tail end of the Great Migration, looking for more opportunities.

The two met and married, raising their family — including Bell-Quinn — in West Garfield Park. But as Bell-Quinn grew up, the neighborhood struggled with disinvestment.

Now, Bell-Quinn’s helping to revitalize the neighborhood and reclaim her family’s legacy — starting with her family’s home block.

Earlier this month, the Cook County Land Bank Authority awarded Bell-Quinn the deed to the land at 4738 W. Monroe St., which is next to her family’s longtime home at 4742 W. Monroe St. The deed was free as part of a community wealth initiative to restore struggling neighborhoods and incentivize investment in them.

Bell-Quinn and her partner, Brian Quinn, plan to establish the Kitteh Soup Kitchen & Garden on the vacant plot to grow fresh produce for the neighborhood and beautify the area. It will also serve as a cat sanctuary for stray felines.

Bell-Quinn, who lives in Logan Square with her partner, said she saw a need to return to her childhood home and create a positive legacy.

The home, which has stood since the 1920s, has been set ablaze twice: once during the 1991 Chicago Bulls championship and again during 2020’s unrest, Bell-Quinn said. But Bell-Quinn’s project is reimagining the house and the land next door, turning it into a space that can feed neighbors.

The garden will be up and running by this July.

“There are still good people that live in these communities,” Bell-Quinn said. “We need to remember where we came from in order to know where we’re going. I’m just blessed, humbled and filled with so much gratitude.”

Bell-Quinn’s parents were both from Mississippi, but they didn’t meet until her mother moved to Chicago in 1960. Bell-Quinn, 50, was born, and her parents bought the Monroe Street home West Garfield Park with help from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, she said.

Bell-Quinn’s family was close: She remembers the way her dad taught her to make frozen pizza with the cardboard, and her mother shared her love of gardening.

Bell-Quinn left Chicago in 1990 to go to the University of Tulsa. Afterward, she lived in Louisville, Kentucky, and throughout the East Coast before returning to Chicago in 2000.

Bell-Quinn then worked as a stage actress and director throughout the United States — but she was always based in Chicago.

Bell-Quinn’s family had sold the Monroe Street home, but she and her partner bought it back in 2015 with big dreams of moving in.

Over the years, West Garfield Park had suffered from systemic neglect, Bell-Quinn said. There were vacant lots, a lack of food healthy food options and abandoned properties.

The couple began work to revive the family home. They’re doing a gut rehab: replacing the flooring, piping, stairs, doors, wiring and more.

As they’ve worked on the revival, they also set their sites on the property next door, they said.

The lot at 4738 W. Monroe St. had once held a two-flat that had been vacant for years, officials and Bell-Quinn said. It was set on fire during unrest in 2020 and demolished.

Bell-Quinn and Quinn learned they might be able to secure the deed to the land through an auction in 2021, they said.

The Land Bank hosts auctions for properties that are severely delinquent on taxes; eventually, the person who wins the auction can acquire the property through a complicated process. The idea is to restore the properties to the tax rolls and put blighted or vacant land and buildings into the hands of residents who can restore them.

The West Garfield Park land was given to Bell-Quinn through the group’s Holiday Sale initiative — which is providing her and 10 others with land for free.

“We’ve witnessed firsthand the impact when we empower community members and local developers to reclaim and resurrect abandoned parcels that depress home values and drain community wealth in Cook County’s Black and Brown neighborhoods,” Cook County Land Bank Authority officials said in a statement. “The sale is one step in the right direction toward putting these properties into the hands of residents and community organizations.”

Bell-Quinn had dreamt about owning the two plots when she was a little girl. Now, it’s reality — allowing her to strengthen her community rather than sever ties with it.

“I just want to be an inspiration as much as I can so that we can move in the right direction,” Bell-Quinn said. “It’s people that are the largest resource that’s missing from our community. It’s important that we are proud of who we are and where we come from.”

Though the area is struggling, Bell-Quinn’s happy memories from her youth give her hope, she said.

“We want to give people more than just blight,” she said.

Bell-Quinn has long prided herself on her love of nature; now, as an adult, she’s delved into sustainability work, making her own soap and other cleaning products while gardening, she said.

Bell-Quinn credits her green thumb to her family’s roots as sharecroppers who were experts at working the land in Mississippi. Her mother, who lives in North Lawndale, still gardens today at 81.

But converting the long-neglected land at the house in West Garfield Park into a thriving garden has been a large project, costing about $5,000 in seeds, fertilizer, tools and other needs, Bell-Quinn said.

But Bell-Quinn and Quinn plan to distribute the food they grow to neighbors throughout the area.

“It’s very lovely to go grocery shopping in your backyard,” Bell-Quinn said.

Sustainability for the garden is also important to Bell-Quinn, given the systemic pollution on the West Side. She hopes to have a net-zero environmental impact and wants to install solar panels.

“We’re not treating the Earth right, so I’m doing my duty as a human citizen to have a positive impact on my environment,” Bell-Quinn said. “What we do with our lives and how we treat things is not sustainable.”

Bell-Quinn and Quinn said the community is grateful for the garden, as West Garfield Park has become a food desert in recent years. They’ll grow raspberries, strawberries, onions, peppers, asparagus, thyme, elderberries, gooseberries, turnips, beets, collards, kale, tomatoes and corn, helping to nourish their neighbors with fresh produce.

The garden has also become home to 17 stray cats. It is designated as a cat colony by Cook County, and the couple is certified to train and assist others with animal spay and neuter work.

Bell-Quinn hopes their level of investment in the garden inspires others to invest in the communities’ health, she said.

“I can see the negligence and what the lack of care does to us,” Bell-Quinn said. “It’s in my roots to care for Mother Earth. I am just doing my due diligence as a human being to take care of whatever I’m doing to not have a negative impact on this Earth.”

By Michael Romain, Village Press | July 14th, 2022 (Click Here For Original Article)

The village of Bellwood is looking to build even more homes just as two of the most recent homes the village constructed are close to selling for $425,000 each. 

In an interview on July 14, Bellwood Mayor Andre Harvey said purchases are currently pending on the two homes at 130 49th Ave. and 132 49th Ave. The homes were built on a lot just off St. Charles Road that used to be a gas station. 

According to Harvey’s count, Bellwood now has 25 of what Crain’s Chicago Business dubbed “village hall-built houses,” or homes that the village has been building on its own since 2016, as a way to improve its housing stock. 

In Bellwood, most homes are between 900 and 1,200 square feet. The two homes on 49th Avenue are each 2,150 square feet. 

Last month, the village board approved the purchase of another eight vacant residential lots in Bellwood through the Cook County Land Bank Authority, an agency that helps restore vacant land and abandoned properties. 

The lots are at 241 Bohland Ave., 411 48th Ave., 119 50th Ave., 610 S. 23rd Ave., 2402 St. Charles Rd., 2408 St. Charles Rd., 3403 Monroe St. and 3407 Monroe St.

Harvey said that because the lots are small, the homes that get built will be roughly 1,900 square feet — smaller than the two new homes built on 49th Avenue, but still larger than the typical Bellwood home. 

“The amenities on the inside of the future homes will be the same [as the ones on 49th Avenue],” Harvey said. 

According to Redfin, the two new homes in the process of being purchased feature granite countertops, a master bedroom with a soaking tub and stainless steel appliances, among other amenities. 

The mayor said the village hopes to start construction on the lots “as soon as possible,” adding that he recently learned that the price of lumber “is going down a little bit. We’re eying the price every day. We hope it decreases a bit more. We don’t want to pass on too much additional cost to the consumer.” 

The housing construction is part of Bellwood’s plan to attract more homeowners to the village, Harvey said. 

“We have to build,” the mayor said. “I’m trying to make Bellwood a true destination community where everybody and anybody wants to come and live. We want to keep people interested in coming to the community.” 

By Josh Niland, Archinect | February 11th, 2022 (Click Here For Original Article)

As part of the firm’s desire to fill the “middle market” of residential housing options with inspiring contemporary architecture, Chicago-based practice Future Firm has designed a new 1,300-square-foot residential project, called Hem House, that has provided the city with a sustainable model for building the bedrock of successful mixed-income communities. 

The design team worked with real estate developer Jacob Root to create the project with the hopes of diversifying the housing stock available to those interested in the area where new residential construction costs usually begin at $600,000. 

“While there’s a very vibrant art and culture scene in Chicago, there isn’t a lot of bespoke contemporary architecture, and what exists in residential is almost exclusively very high end — so we’re hoping to help change that narrative,” co-principal Ann Lui explained. “Because Chicago residential lots are all the same size, it’s easy for people to repeat plans and end up with a lot of underwhelming architecture. We’d like to be a trend in a different direction.” 

Located in the East Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago, the array of brick townhouses and two-flats typify the neighborhood’s residential structures. Using a narrower footprint than that of its neighbors, the designers say they were able to create an “easily replicable model” apt for use in one of the city’s myriad vacant lots. 

“This unique use of the typical Chicago 25’ x 125’ residential lot allows Hem House to be experienced as though it is on a much larger site,” Future Firm’s co-principal Craig Reschke shared. “It also allows for large windows that let in natural light but also remain private from the street.”

The home is defined by dual-stacked volumes clad in black metal siding that is typically used as a roofing material to give it the “sharp” and “clean-looking” aesthetic associated with contemporary residential design. A central entrance is tucked into the side yard, opening into a combination mudroom and laundry station followed on the right side by an L-shape kitchen and the distribution of the living areas which have been positioned to maximize light and seclusion in unison with its vibrant white gypsum board interior.

The house was completed last summer and hit the market for $399,000. It later sold and, as Darlene Dugo of the Cook County Land Bank Authority tells it, now stands as a shining example of the ways in which flexible single-family units can reshape communities by recharging disused areas. 

“For too long, blight caused by decades of redlining and the 2008 housing crisis has depressed property values and economic investment in Black and Brown neighborhoods,” she said. “By reclaiming vacant lots and building affordable, beautiful community assets, Hem Development is demonstrating what is possible when we enable local architects and developers to resurrect abandoned space.”

By Stacey Sheridan, Forest Park Review | January 16th, 2022 (Click Here For Original Article)

Construction is underway on Garfield Street, where crews are building a new welcome center and front-facing adoption center for the Animal Care League (ACL) at 1003 and 1009 Garfield St. Crews broke ground last month, but the transformation of the two buildings is starting to materialize.

“The outline for the walls is up and you can really see what the two buildings are going to look like and the space that we’re going to have for animals,” said ACL Executive Director Kira Robson.

The work is the first phase of a wider four-part plan to expand the nonprofit animal shelter’s premises, which will ultimately allow ACL to take in more animals and increase its in-house care services.

“It is well overdue, and we are so excited,” Robson said of the planned expansion.

ACL spent over a decade trying to buy the run-down, abandoned building at 1009 Garfield St., which sits between three other shelter-owned structures. The shelter was finally able to acquire the property in the summer of 2019, with the help of the Cook County Land Bank Authority.

The first phase of the expansion plan focuses entirely on 1003 and 1009 Garfield St. Eventually each of ACL’s four buildings will be joined to create one large structure, but in the meantime, Robson is thrilled that ACL will finally have a lobby.

“We’re very excited about it because if you’ve ever been here, we don’t have that kind of a space right now,” she said.

The lobby will house the welcome center, as well as offices and a community room, where ACL plans to host birthday parties and seminars. The center is meant to be, as Robson described, “an engaging space for the community.”

Currently, ACL takes in about 1,200 animals each year. With the new adoption center, it will have the ability to house two to three times as many rabbits, cats and dogs and do so in a lower-stress environment. It will also allow for discrete adoption, as well as medical and intake spaces. The full adoption center includes dog suites as opposed to kennels, plus communal cat adoption rooms and suites for cats with feline immunodeficiency virus and feline leukemia. Rabbits haven’t been left out either. The center will feature an expanded rabbit adoption area.

“It’s going to have a really serious impact, not only on the animals we serve, but our volunteers will have a better space to come and volunteer,” said Robson, who expects the first phase of the project to be finished in March or April of this year.

Upon completion, the plan is to move directly into the following phases, which focus on the expansion of ACL’s in-house medical capabilities and construction of training spaces for animals, as well as “real life rooms,” which Robson explained are designed to feel like a home environment to get the animal adjusted to that lifestyle.

How quickly ACL can move forward with phases 2-4 depends entirely on the community, according to Robson. Funding will be key in determining how quickly construction crews will be able to move from phase to phase. ACL plans to announce a capital fundraising campaign in the coming weeks.

“I truly hope that Oak Park is going to realize how important it is for us to have this kind of a facility, both for the animals and the community,” she said.

By Darcel Rockett, Chicago Tribune | January 3rd, 2022 (Click Here for Original Article)

North Kenwood resident Bonita Harrison’s goal has always been to own 200 units of property. As a residential developer, her mission was to create noticeable change to a South Side neighborhood when it comes to affordable housing for and by people of color.

She was well on her way with her firm Sunshine Management, which had 68 units before the pandemic. Now, she only has 15 left, a mix of two-flats and four-flats and single-family homes.

“When you’re a smaller business it’s hard for someone to have that capital to go through the tough times,” Harrison said. “I had to sell because I was constantly being crunched taking money from myself, my family, my daughter, trying to make decisions: ‘I’m not paying my own mortgage, but I’m paying the mortgage for all these other buildings.’”

In the real estate field since 2006, Harrison, 40, is just one of a number of property owners trying to hold on to what they worked for. After much conversation about tenant and landlord relations during the pandemic and hundreds of millions of dollars of rental assistance going to thousands of the former for the latter, Michael Glasser, president of the Neighborhood Building Owners Alliance, wants people to know losses like Harrison’s can influence the housing market in an area, and lead to disinvestment. A recent study by the Alliance, which represents Chicago’s small to medium-sized landlords, showed continued hardship for housing providers in the south and west sides and suburbs.

“It’s the small housing provider who’s really been up to an enormous challenge because they might only have four units in a building or two units or 10 units,” he said. “With a couple people not paying … it absolutely can destabilize housing.”

“Our gas prices will be the big issue this year. Our insurance prices are going up because of all the calamities around the world. And we all know what’s going on with property taxes. Those bills are going to cost a lot of money. And that’s going to be destabilizing for a lot of owners in low-income neighborhoods.”

Tanya Woods, executive director of the legal aid organization Westside Justice Center, worries that owners selling because of COVID-19 challenges could open the door to nonlocal investors, with local wealth leaving communities, leading the way to gentrification.

“When we talk about affordable rental, the vast majority is located in these lower-cost neighborhoods, and owned by folks like Bonita and other small owners who are for profit,” said Stacie Young, president/CEO of Community Investment Corporation, which lends money for the acquisition and rehab of affordable multifamily housing in low- and moderate-income communities throughout Chicagoland. “Our borrowers, half are led by people of color. The typical story of a borrower that we finance would be a janitor who saves his pennies to buy the six-flat down the block. They probably are employing local folks to maintain their building; going to local vendors to get their stuff. This is a disruption.”

Young said that’s why more attention and support is being paid to small housing providers nationwide. She, too, is concerned about big firms and/or outside investors coming in and buying property away from local developers who are familiar with the area. According to Young, CIC has worked with partners for years on creating and advocating for a proposal that would provide property tax relief to owners that invest in their buildings and hold a certain proportion of units as affordable. That proposal became state legislation this summer.

“This kind of property tax incentive is one of the rare types of government-related policies/resources that the small, for-profit rental owners can access without invoking an overabundance of costly government regulations,” Young said. “These guys (small rental owners) are anchoring our neighborhoods and our blocks. We have heard a lot about out-of-town money. They don’t know that there’s a difference between Auburn Gresham and a property on Lake Shore Drive. They’re like, ‘I can buy this building for such a low price. And they don’t know their neighborhood, the way small owners do.”

Harrison said the majority of the buyers of her properties were out of the community. She said six months after the sale of a former Greater Grand Crossing property, tenants were still contacting her trying to figure out where to send their rent checks because the new owners never contacted them.

Harrison, a former financial analyst, moved into real estate full-time after buying and selling her first home before the Great Recession. The sale was a “blessing,” according to Harrison, who made more money from her first home than her work salary, owning it for less than a year. Harrison flipped homes in Greater Grand Crossing, Chatham, Pullman, Roseland, Morgan Park, Bronzeville, Englewood, and Auburn Gresham. She acquired a lot of the properties through the Cook County Land Bank Authority.

The Land Bank is an independent agency of Cook County, founded by the Cook County Board of Commissioners. The agency acquires properties that sit vacant, abandoned and tax-delinquent for years and sells them at below-market rates to qualified community-based developers who then rehab the homes and sell them. Properties are awarded to developers through evaluation, in which a developer’s plan, prior work, and references are considered. You don’t have to be a licensed or certified professional to rehab a property. The agency is currently holding a holiday buying program through mid-January to help local developers acquire vacant properties in their neighborhoods; and giving away 10 parcels to the first 10 applicants approved. The majority of the properties available in Chicago are in Englewood, North Lawndale, Roseland and West Pullman, according to the organization.

Harrison taught the business to her daughter, Kenya, 25, a realtor, who is buying her first six-unit on the South Side.

“People when they look at our community, they’re like, there’s no value there. But there is,” Harrison said. “There’s a lot of people who want to be here. Like myself, I was born here. I was raised here. I raised my family here. I want to be in my community; I want to work here. It matters to me. I want to see the change here.”

Harrison said that one of the challenges she and other developers face are scarce and costly materials, which cause project budgets to rise. Many developers of color are using hard money loans to fund their entrepreneurship. This form of asset-based financing is a quick way to secure financing, but typically are higher interest and entails shorter repayment periods.

“How do you move through a project, if you have hard money to pay and also make a profit? It’s been very difficult. A lot of us that have these short term loans, we don’t have a choice but to move the project along. If we don’t, then it’s very detrimental.”

Harrison said she received a PPP loan and three of of her 68 renters have received federal rental assistance funds. She’s hoping more incentives are provided to current community residents to thwart gentrification. She knows the city has a number of programs for developers like herself, but admits that paperwork can be a barrier. According to Land Bank chairwoman and Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, the organization is continuing to lower the barrier to entry for developers. Per CCLBA’s executive director Eleanor Gorski, the organization saw some of their highest numbers of applications this summer.

“We have over 600 small, vast majority Black and Latino developers from the neighborhood who know how and what to develop there,” Gainer said. “I don’t know if you saw the recent story about Zillow where they tried to buy all these houses and flip them at scale … They didn’t have any sense of the local market, like what kind of house did people want to buy, what were they willing to pay?”

Is there a case where an outside investor makes sense? Per Young, the national nonprofit Preservation of Affordable Housing is a great example.

“About 12 years ago, they were the out-of-town investors,” she said. “They hadn’t done work in Chicago before, but what they brought with them was this expertise to do large-scale developments in a neighborhood. POAH came here from Boston with this capacity, and because they work so hard on the ground … it really added value to that neighborhood and also the rest of the city.”

Bill Eager, senior vice president of Midwest real estate development for Preservation of Affordable Housing, said what made the difference for POAH was spending a fair amount of time making connections within the community, with individuals and local organizations. He said a lot of the early work was in Woodlawn — working with block clubs and tenant associations. Eager said POAH hired a director of community engagement full-time to help the organization build the network they needed to become part of the community that they wanted to be in.

“When we buy a property, we are not at all looking for short-term ownership. We’ll want to do a deal and be in it for 20 to 30 or more years,” Eager said. “I don’t think it’s outside versus inside with investors. I think the bigger question is are the people who are looking at the properties interested in being long-term stewards, putting the resources in financial and otherwise, to keep the properties healthy, or are they just looking to flip them in a few years. The question is: what are their plans once they’re here?”

When the pandemic is over, Bonita Harrison is going to try to attain the goals that she originally set, which is 200 units. And she’s all about cooperating with other developers to concentrate efforts to redo homes a block at a time.

“We can do better together; I can find other developers,” she said. “Let’s focus and that way we can bring equity to the community and it could be us within the community doing it. It helps versus me doing one here, someone else doing one in Pullman, someone else in Roseland, the effect is not as great.”

By Sean Jones, Bonita Harrison, DaJuan Robinson, Keith Lindsey, & Derrick Walker, Crain’s Chicago Business | June 18th, 2021 (Click Here for Original Article)