Chicago betting Bronzeville revival is here to stay

Felicia Kelly, a restaurant owner in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville district, is sure the South Side community’s revival is here to stay after development was stalled for more than a decade by the financial crisis and rising crime.

That kind of hope was once rare in a neighborhood that inspired poet Gwendolyn Brooks to write We Real Cool about the young players she saw at Bronzeville’s Golden Shovel pool hall. The poem ends: “We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.’’

Bronzeville, dubbed the city’s “Black Metropolis,” is home to African-American businesses and artists, but has long been underdeveloped, with thousands of vacant lots after years of disinvestment. Now, business owners like Kelly are encouraged as the city promotes new developments in the South Side community that once was home to Brooks and musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Nat “King” Cole, Sam Cook, Dinah Washington, Quincy Jones, and Herbie Hancock.

Kelly opened her Cajun seafood restaurant ‘Surf’s Up Bronzeville’ at 43rd Street and South Cottage Grove Avenue on Dec. 30, after seeing a bustling scene of new Black-owned mom-and-pop stores. Compared with Surf’s Up South Shore, the store’s first location in the city, Kelly said they have been getting a lot more customers due to foot traffic in the area.

“It took a couple of years for our sister restaurant on 71st and South Shore to really pick up,” Kelly said. “They had to host a lot of events to get recognized. I can say we’ve been getting recognition pretty quickly. On Fridays and Saturdays, we see well over 100 or more people.”

Multifamily Investors
Meanwhile, adding to the revitalization, the neighborhood is drawing multifamily property investors chasing higher returns and Chicagoans in search of affordable homes at a time when soaring prices have put much of the city and suburbs out of reach for many buyers.

Some 28 new construction houses or townhouses sold in Bronzeville last year, the largest number of newly-built homes sold in any Chicago neighborhood in 2021, according to Crain’s. The Humboldt Park neighborhood trailed, with sales of 25 homes, and Logan Square and Bridgeport followed with 21 each.

Sandwiched between the Loop and Hyde Park on the shore of Lake Michigan, the proximity to downtown Chicago and affordability are what drove buyers to Bronzeville during the pandemic when home prices surged. The neighborhood features late 19th and early 20th century attached row houses in the Italianate, Queen Anne, Romanesque, and Classical Revival styles as well as more modern single-family homes.

Those houses “were flying off the market because these were luxury homes that you would find in Lincoln Park or Logan Square for half the price in some cases,” said Sheila Dantzler, a Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty agent.

Pre-pandemic, a new 3,000-square-foot single-family home in Bronzeville would be listed anywhere between $600,000 and $700,000, according to Dantzler. “Last year, that [price] ticked up to anywhere between $700,000 and $900,000,” she said.

The city’s biggest challenges as it works to spur development in Bronzeville are to bring down the crime rate and avoid pricing out long-time residents.

“It’s a systemic risk” for developers looking to develop in the city, said Kier Group’s partner Aaron Sklar, who specializes in brokering multifamily properties on the city’s South and West Sides.

Persistent Crime
The number of crime incidents including robbery, homicide, and sexual assault last year totaled 1,548 in Bronzeville, about 49 percent higher than the affluent Lincoln Park’s tally of 1,040, according to the Chicago Police Department.

The median price of homes sold in Bronzeville was more than $550,000 in the first 11 months of 2021, according to the Chicago Association of Realtors. That compares with $318,000, the median price of homes sold across the city in the same period.

While development on the South Side has been on a pause for the past decade, Kiser Group’s partner Noah Birk said it’s only in Bronzeville where developers, particularly from out-of-state, are coming to build small-unit multifamily properties that yield higher capitalization rates, a measure of return on assets, compared with the rest of the nation.

“Landlords that we talk to every day are having zero problem putting tenants in,” said Birk. “There’s definitely people that want to be in the area, particularly in nicely rehab places.”

Cap rates for multifamily properties were in the mid-8 percent range, higher than the average of 5 percent across the country last year, according to Marcus and Millichap.

Money trickling into the area means more retail and large developments, such as the $3.8 billion Bronzeville Lakefront project, a 100-acre mixed-use development with apartments, townhomes, hotels, and a life science campus, planned for completion by 2041.

Multibillion-dollar Project
It’s one of three multibillion-dollar projects approved by the Chicago City Council, with the construction of infrastructure scheduled to begin this fall on the first phase, developed by GRIT Chicago composed of Farpoint Development, Loop Capital, Draper & Kramer, Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, McLaurin Development, and Bronzeville Community Development Partnership.

Built on the former Michael Reese Hospital site, the project, built from the ground up, can create synergies between commercial, residential buildings, and landscaping – becoming the next “Fulton Market,’’ the development in the former meatpacking district that has been the bright spot downtown, said Eric Helfand, principal at Farpoint.

“When we think of building large office towers in Fulton Market over a decade ago, people would’ve said, ‘What are you talking about?’,” Helfand said. “I think of it in the same construct as Bronzeville Lakefront. You have to be a little bit of a visionary to understand what the opportunities are.”

From planning how to build road grids that are efficient for cars and pedestrians to developing district-wide infrastructure, the Bronzeville projects are significantly different from building at Fulton Market, a densely populated area in the city filled with bars, restaurants, tech and life science companies.

The $600 million first phase, expected to be completed in 2024, will develop the site with a 40,000-square-foot community center, as a life science campus focused on health and biomedical technology, and an innovation center of more than 500,000 square feet of office and lab space.

The project’s $3 billion second phase, encompassing 6.8 million square feet, is expected to include more medical research facilities, offices, retail, and residential units.

Other major developments in Bronzeville include 43 Green, a $100 million project with 99 residential units and more than 5,000 square feet of retail space, which broke ground last month.

Further south at 11444 South Halsted Street, a long-vacant former strip mall is being transformed into a mixed-use complex. Dubbed The Morgan Park Commons, the development will include 250 rental units, 140 single-family homes, and up to 20,000 square feet of retail space.

“Bronzeville is an up-and-coming neighborhood, but it’s dead at night when businesses close,” said Kelly, adding residential developments, mom-and-pop stores, and big-box stores are sure to transform the area.

“There’s so many new things coming up. It’s going to be a completely different look by this time next year.”