“If you flip the map of Chicago, Grand Boulevard would be where Lincoln Park is,” Harold Lucas says with a smile. He’s worked for nearly two decades as a community organizer in and around the mid-south side, which includes Grand Boulevard, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Over the years he’s been a sort of community development chameleon, focused on the rehabilitation of the neighborhood but constantly reinventing his approach.
But Lucas has picked an unlikely spot to become a millionaire. Mid-South covers three-and-a-half square miles on the city’s south side–between 22nd and 51st streets, from the Dan Ryan all the way to the lakefront. It includes the area that was once known as Black Metropolis, the lively artistic, political, and economic center of black life in Chicago. Black Metropolis was also the title of the noted 1945 study by sociologist St. Claire Drake and Horace A. Clayton. The book presents an unflinching look at how the urban black ghetto was created, but it does more than illuminate the effects of racism. Black Metropolis draws a portrait of what’s now one of the bleakest neighborhoods in Chicago as it was 50 years ago: a vibrant, self-sustaining city within a city, home to such luminaries as Joe Louis, Scott Joplin, and Richard Wright. When Lucas talks about redeveloping Mid-South he’s looking at Black Metropolis as his model: a diversified economy supporting a mix of income levels.
Yet in the shadow of these public housing projects, there’s the Gap, a tiny scrap of real estate about six square blocks in size. It’s called the Gap because for years it was a sliver of blank space that fell between the boundaries on everybody’s planning maps. Now the Gap has handsome new houses next to vintage rehabbed homes, and its residents are described by other Mid-Southers as the very class of upwardly mobile black professionals that people had long maintained would never stay in, let alone move back to, the inner city.
Some say that community activists don’t, in fact, work in partnership with anybody–that their approach is almost always antagonistic–and that at best an ideology of “empowerment” assumes a relationship between political might and an improvement in economic well-being that has never been demonstrated to exist. At worst, critics say, the process pits community residents against city government, discouraging those who might have considered investing in the neighborhood. Others claim the idea of empowerment through community activism sends the poor off in a false direction, locking them into their present condition. These observers think it doesn’t make sense to attempt to relieve poverty by getting bogged down in the unpromising project of trying to resuscitate a blighted neighborhood.
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These issues have come to a head in Mid-South, North Kenwood-Oakland, and Woodlawn because all three communities are actually starting to see the results of rapidly accelerating redevelopment. In the decade between 1980 and 1990, single-family home values in Grand Boulevard had appreciated by 112 percent, and those in nearby Douglas shot up 336 percent. Woodlawn saw home values double, while in Oakland they rose a more modest 64 percent (in keeping with the city average of 67 percent). By 1994 the Kenwood neighborhood was ranked number six in top home values in Chicago, with the average single-family home there fetching $338,155–up from $197,799 in 1985 and $89,500 in 1980.
It may sound simplistic to say that the city took an interest in these neighborhoods because community action brought them there, but it seems to be true. And nowhere is it easier to trace that connection than in Mid-South.
The city’s now working with Lucas’s tourism group on a $3.5 million project to create a visitor’s center in the Supreme Life Insurance Building, the historic home of a black-owned insurance company at 35th and King Drive. A public library branch will also be installed in the Chicago Bee Building, which was erected in 1931 by black entrepreneur Anthony Overton to house his Chicago Bee, a weekly newspaper that was supposed to compete with the Chicago Defender.
