Hi Im Hermene Hartman and welcome to N'DIGO Studio.

In 1968, after the riots from the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was a lot of anger, a lot of frustration.

In the west side of Chicago, well, it burned down.

The community for years was forgotten, it was neglected, and today we see new buildings of revitalization, a transformation of the community.

And we're going to talk to two organizations who are making a difference in housing development on the west side of Chicago.

Our guests, we're going to talk to Attorney Michael McMurray and to Whitney Smith of the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation.

And then we're going to talk to Reverend Marvin Hunter.

His development is Grace Manor Apartments.

They are literally rebuilding the west side of Chicago.

N'digo Studio, N'digo Studio For more information about this show, follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Funding for this program was provided by Illinois Student Assistance Commission.

The Chicago Community Trust, Sin City Studios, Lamborghini Chicago, Gold Coast, and Downers Grove.

Blue Cross, Blue, Shield of Illinois, Commonwealth Edison, and the Illinois Health Plan.

Welcome all of you to Indigo Studio.

Thanks for being in our living room today.

So, attorney, McMurry, tell me about the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation.

Give me some historical perspective.

First of all, thank you so much for having us here today.

Herman, we really appreciate it.

And giving your audience a chance to learn a little bit about the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation or LDS, DC we are a, community based, community driven organization or, not for profit developer, expressing the desires of the North Lawndale community.

We're looking to revitalize and rebuild, North Lawndale through affordable housing, through economic development and wealth creation.

And so our goal is to, again, express the desires of the people who are currently living in Lawndale and who've been there for decades.

Whitney, you want to tell me about your, beginning of Lawndale?

Absolutely.

Christian inner church, right?

Yeah.

Tell me, 19.

87 Lawndale Christian development started as a ministry of Lawndale Christian community Church, that started with 15 young men in North Lawndale.

15 young.

Men, 15 young men.

And coach Wayne Gordon, who was the, Farragut basketball and wrestling coach, who was mentoring these young men and working out with them.

And in the process of really developing them, they said to him, you know, church is not a building.

Church is not a place.

Church is us being gathered so we could start a church.

And that was the moment that was the impetus behind, Lawndale Christian Community Church beginning.

And from that came the ministry for Orlando Christian Development Corporation, the health center and the legal center that we just grew.

We just grew from the vision and resources in mind of young North Lawndale.

- So tell me about the future of Lawndale.

We've heard about the history.

Now tell me about the future and what's going on now.

- Absolutely.

It's really remarkable because we have, in this moment, the ability and the capacity to do development without displacement, right?

Which is something that is not largely done in this country.

- Aha, okay.

- Our strategy is how we make sure we anchor residents in North Lawndale through homeownership, through business development, through community and leadership development to make sure that as, you know, traditional forms of development happen within North Lawndale and around us, we are not pushed out.

We wanna make sure that we have a community that remains, preserves Black culture.

- So you've reclaimed Lawndale.

That's literally what you've done.

- We've reclaimed North Lawndale, and now it's about preserving North Lawndale.

- Okay, so tell me about the housing development that's underway.

- Yeah.

It's called Reclaiming North Lawndale, and the goal is to build 1000 new single family homes in North Lawndale in the next five to seven years, hopefully less with the right resources.

And right now, we've built and sold.

Very important to note, we've built and sold 22 homes in the last year alone.

- What are the price points?

How much of these homes?

- It's a blessing because we're able to sell these homes, the total development cost is typical with what you would see in the market, right?

It costs about $400,000 to realize these homes in the neighborhood.

- How big are these homes?

- There are three... 1,750 square feet, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two full bathrooms.

We have some new facades on our website at LCDC.net that you can go on and take a tour of the home to see the inside, but also see what the exteriors will look like.

And they're just beautiful homes.

Many people would called Them starter homes, but that's not the case.

This is our second go around, building at scale in North Lawndale initially, in the early 2000s, we built a 100 single family homes.

Wow.

And those residents, I'll tell you who moved in, are still there.

That's that's.

Great.

And that is the reason we are so thoughtful and so committed to this work.

We are anchoring our residents in and making sure that they have beautiful homes that will carry them into an uncertain future.

With climate change and different political atmosphere than we expected.

We are making sure that our residents will have, security and safety, and a backdrop to create lives that are, that thrive.

Where you can raise a family, where you.

Can raise a family.

That's great.

Reverend Hunter, you're doing something interesting, too.

Grace Manor Apartments, tell me about your development.

- Grace Manor.

I'm so excited about Grace Manor.

- I know.

- It is a long time mission and dream of the Grace Memorial Baptist Church.

Our church mission is food, housing, and education.

And we approach that by, nobody goes hungry, nobody goes uneducated, nobody goes unhoused within four square blocks around that church.

And so what we've done is try to encourage other pastors to take on that same ideology.

- Interesting.

that we could all meet in the middle by having a revitalized community.

One of our community partners is sitting here with us now, which is kind of a champion.

In fact, Coach Gordon, let me just throw this out.

I met him in 1980 at Farragut High School.

He was the coach.

I was on the football team.

So he was your coach?

Well, he was kind of assistant, right?

But he would come there.

This was a little storefront that he had, and we would come in and lift weights.

And it was just he and his wife, and he may have had the daughter of one of those kids.

And then we would just lift weights.

And we I was part of those young men that they talking about.

You were one of those 15.

I was one of those guys.

I just, you know, I didn't stay around because I after that, I then went over to Collins High School.

Okay.

Because I got.

Recruited to play football for Collins High.

School.

Are you football, man?

You burn.

Well, I'm not that great, but they just talked me into doing it, and I did it.

All right.

Now, interesting.

In our conversation, it is the church doing the building of the house.

That's an interesting role for church.

Or is it normal for church?

It is absolutely normal.

Everything that has happened for our people in this country has always been led through the black church.

It has always been led through the black church, but then pretty much everything that has happened for the common man in America at large has been led through the church.

Because you can understand America is a Christian Judeo society.

The Constitution of our Constitution, the government since the first draft of it was the Magna Carta, which is the Holy Bible.

So it was designed for the church and the government to work in conjunction together to make the country that we now live in.

And that's why this study evolving.

And it'll it'll get better as as we go on.

Grace manner.

What we had to do to bring it into fruition was we created was we created a 501(c)(3) corporation called Grace at Jerusalem CDC.

So what we've done through Grace at Jerusalem CDC is we've gone after the social determinants of that community.

- What's a social determinants?

- Social determinants are the social ills that determine whether or not a person rise or fall.

And so what our job is- - So that would be homelessness.

- That would be homelessness, that would be medicine, that would be mental health, that would be food deserts and so on and so forth.

So we believe that the first leg to eradicating the social determinants of the negative is housing.

- Tell me about Grace Manor particularly.

Like, how many... Yours is not townhouses.

Yours is apartment type housing.

- Correct.

It is the first 100% affordable housing project in the history of the west side of Chicago.

- Oh my gosh.

- So Grace Manor is literally the... And I think the word is culmination of Dr. Martin Luther King's vision.

When he came to Lawndale, he came to Lawndale to do exactly what Grace Manor is doing.

We've met every point of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from jobs, contracts and opportunity to 100% affordable housing.

And and we did that so well.

And to Biden, he of he chose seven seven communities, seven organizations around the country.

And Grace manor is one of the seven.

So when you look on, the hood website, that language that you see about affordable housing in Lawndale and so on and so forth, that's Grace manor.

That is division vision.

That's what we do.

So tell me about the apartments.

How many apartments and what's the what's the rental scale.

Is 65 units of of housing actually there.

And it's a rad hat mix.

So that means that it's, you know, some and the rest is affordable housing.

So it's mixed at market rate.

- So, what's market rate?

- Well, market rate in that area, and don't quote me on this 'cause that's not the part of the job I do, is probably somewhere around 1,600, 1,700.

- A month?

- On the highest end.

And yeah and it may be lower I'm not sure with the government's interaction hood, people pay 30% of their income, which allows them to live in the property affordable so they don't actually pay the $1,600.

So they'll pay whatever 30% of their income is, and the government will pay the rest up to the market rate price, which is the $1,600.

Okay.

Doctor King came to this community when he decided that he would move the movement north, and Chicago was chosen and West Side was chosen.

But you all did something that I thought was so admirable.

And it's when I became first acquainted with your organization, and that was at the address where Doctor King lived.

You all tore down and rebuilt it.

Tell me about that project.

Unfortunately, the city didn't have the foresight to preserve Doctor King's actual home.

The actual homes had.

Been torn down.

This was like a compromise in the area of.

Yeah, many people thought of of various ways to honor Doctor King.

We develop housing and we knew that if, you know, King had been in North Lawndale on the Poor People's Campaign to End Slum housing, and the best way to honor him was to build our 48 units of beautiful affordable housing, you know?

Lcdc.

In its 37 years in North Lawndale, has built up almost 400 units of affordable housing.

Almost 400, in addition to the housing.

Yeah.

Comes business.

Absolutely.

So you are providing business opportunities within the structures of what you're building.

Tell me now, one of your projects caught my eye.

Yeah.

That I thought was so innovative and global.

Yeah.

And that is it.

Come to about the job?

Absolutely.

I'm so glad you brought that up.

We need a little bright spot.

In our lives right now, we are developing, out our strategy.

It's not just about homeownership.

It's not just about affordable housing.

It's a holistic strategy that includes anchoring people in community through business development and economic development.

So we train and educate people in the in the ways of entrepreneurism, but collective entrepreneurism.

So it's a worker owned cooperatives.

And we're proud to to be the reason that the very first Limited Worker Cooperative Association has launched in North Lawndale.

Lifting Lawndale is the name of the group, and through that group, they're bringing construction jobs in a company, chocolate tier company, a printmaking company, and others.

And that chocolate company is a, it's a Chicago hub that's connected to this global black woman owned diaspora of chocolate producing cooperatives.

So Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Trinidad Tobago, among others, Uganda, Nigeria.

We are all coming together to reclaim the narrative around where chocolate comes from.

- And so chocolate comes from Africa?

- Chocolate comes from Africa.

You know, you can't grow chocolate in Switzerland despite what they would have, you think.

- So they get their chocolate from Africa.

- They get their chocolate from the global south, but the labor that it takes is not rewarded in our traditional systems, right?

It's based on taking advantage of those communities to extract their labor cheaply to make their products.

And were trying to do Something different.

- So there'll be a chocolate?

- There'll be a chocolate store in 1600 South Lawndale, which is the business hub that is in pre-development for us right now.

We have five projects.

- So, Reverend Hunter, in your development, you're going to have businesses too on your ground level.

- true, but it's more of... What we're doing at Grace Manor, that'll be more of a convenience for the residents because we don't have enough commercial space.

It's only about... We probably have maybe 15 thousand square feet.

So we're going to be creative in having, you know, something where we can service the tenants of the department, but the community will have access to it.

We will also have one of our offices for the CDC there as well.

Because again, food, housing, and education is our mission.

What we've done in order to connect the job to it with the social determinants is we created the North Lawndale Chamber of Commerce, Black chamber of commerce.

- Nice.

- And so through that, we've actually gotten 92 deputy registers.

So we got people involved in registrations and understanding the political process.

- So let me ask this.

You're building housing, and this is opportunity, and you will be bringing probably families into the housing.

What kind of businesses are you looking for?

What kind of businesses come from the development of housing?

Is it a restaurant?

Is it a grocery store?

What is it?

As long as we can get the housing and get the people to come back to the housing, then we could then encourage the businesses to come back.

So what I did under that process was I called at the time, there was a company called Golden Corral, and we were trying to get Golden Corral to build a store on 16.

Restaurants, a.

Restaurant.

So they came in, we brought them in from Chapel Hill and they talked with in.

The mayor gave me the best advice in the world, which answers your question, and that is he said, Reverend Hunter, we would love to put the restaurant here.

We know that your people support our restaurant.

I said they do, but they supported by going into Cicero, Illinois, which is a different economy, and it takes the money away from our community.

We have to create businesses where the money recycles in our community more than 30 to 40 minutes.

We have to at least have it turn over three times before it leaves in a 24 hour period, he says.

You're right, he said.

But how our business model works is we usually build these these kinds of businesses in high traffic areas like malls, he said.

But here's the key for you if you build the rooftops, then you will have to then go and convince the businesses to come and it won't be such a hard sale.

Okay, so what I do because you've got the property correct.

So we've then developed a business model where we are building commercial and residential at the same time.

So while we're talking about Grace manor and to just keep on subject, I talk about it, but we have actual plans in place for the revitalization of 16th Street from the for business strictly business, because if you are serious about revitalizing North Lawndale, you have to revitalize 16th Street.

The old thought of revitalizing Lawndale was to revitalize route 66, which is Ogden Avenue, and then Roosevelt Road, which are the outer fringes of it.

If you really from Lawndale as I am, then you know that the order of the West Side, North Lawndale specific is 16th Street.^ - I see.

So that's the main artery.

- You have to revitalize it in order to maintain the population of people and do exactly what they're saying they're going to do.

And so that's a very important question you asked.

because we need to have our developers think like Glendale Christian and like Grace and Jerusalem are thinking.

And that is we want to maintain the population we have.

Gentrification is is not bad if it's gentrification for the purpose of inclusion and not exclusion.

Wendy, I want to ask you this because when I came and visited with you, you all told me about something that really, yes, piqued my interest.

So not only is the revitalization for something new, but it's also to take something old and fix it up.

Yeah, rather than tear down.

Yeah.

And what I'm speaking of particularly is the library.

Yeah.

So you all did something with the library you didn't want to tear down.

You didn't want it to go away, but you did want to fix it up.

Tell me about that.

Absolutely.

I'd I'd like to echo his point around the fact that, you know, so $124 million leads North Lawndale annually.

124.

Million dollars.

There's a data book that we produced with UIC that you can look up, that gives you the most recent, like, complete profile of North Lawndale.

And in it, it clearly specifies that $124 million leaves this community every year because the dollar does not go over even once.

It doesn't circle.

It doesn't circulate in other communities.

But I want you to talk about this library and let me let me tell you why this is important.

Know people have to learn how to assume their communities and take them back and take them over.

Yeah.

And what you all did with the library is a prototype.

Yes.

Of how you did that.

Please tell me that how you did.

It was the outgrowth in the organizing effort.

Lcdc is an organizing institution, and it has always been a lot of our power.

All of our power, I would say, becomes from the coalitions, the partnerships and the deep leadership development, we do both in the community and externally.

And the library win, win is a result of that.

And I say that so emphatically because often, we organize in Black communities, we don't always win.

The library is an example of what it takes when just 24 members of the community came together, we inspected the local library on 13th and Homan.

And we found it in deplorable conditions.

I mean, there were rat boxes in the children's play areas.

There was exposed wiring in the elevator, there was mold.

And it was bad not just for the residents who had to visit it, it was bad the workers who had to be in that space eight hours a day.

And we went through with our leaders from North Lawndale, and we did a citizen's inspection.

We created badges, we took our cameras and we said, "This is our library.

These are our tax dollars at work.

We deserve better."

And took those pictures and the report we created to the Chicago Public Library board meeting, which is in the basement of the Harold Washington Library.

If anyone's ever interested, it is difficult to find.

- I bet they didn't know you all were coming, did they?

They did not (indistinct).

- We were the meeting.

We got there, the board meet was sitting in the (indistinct), and there were two other people there.

And it could not have been better telegraphed if we had asked, you know, if we had written the script ourselves.

God really was writing the script.

- Thank you, God - Because we got in there and they were talking about a river that was under construction in a north side library.

They were running a moat through a north side library.

And we were like, huh.

Oh, there's money.

- We want a river too.

Yes.

And so we showed them our report and we said, this is what our library looks like.

This is the.

Complete contrast to your library, to the new library.

They say that that was the point I wanted to make.

You don't always have to tear it down.

No, sometimes you have to fix it up.

I dare say that the the most of our effort right now is about preserving.

There you go.

Black culture, black access, black homeownership, opportunity.

It's not the reserving the old into the future.

In these uncertain times when you.

Own your culture, you own your future because you've preserved your pay that.

Again.

When you own your culture.

Your culture, you own your future because you preserve your past so that your future can have a stable foundation.

That is the whole purpose of it.

You don't want old things just because they are old.

You need them because they are the foundation by which you stand on.

That being said, my entire life and ministry in their community has been about trying to preserve what was there.

And but but what happens is we have had so many opportunists.

People come to Lawndale under the guise of being developers.

A lot of people don't understand the history of Lawndale.

- Let me ask you a question.

- Cool.

- Let me ask you a question that is, I wanna take you out of Lawndale.

- Okay.

- And I just wanna put you in an American city that has gone through the problems, the trials and tribulations of the exploitation of a community.

How do you deal with that?

How do you deal with maybe, like, owning your culture means owning your community, which means projecting your future.

So how do you bring that change about?

- We have to overcome first the, the things that separate us the most.

And that is the implicit bias that exists.

Remember, it's the tale of two communities.

This community struggles with the Jewish history and the African-American history there.

You gotta understand the pathology of the Jewish people that come there stems back all the way to the Bible.

They believe that any land that they were born in, that they have an equitable right to the land.

We are pretty much like a nomadic people.

Wherever we go, we make it our home.

And we then begin to build right there.

Now, for instance, I'm not here on this set with you wishing I was anywhere else.

I'm as happy as I'm going to be now.

- Well, I'm glad of that.

- You know?

And so that's how we are as a people.

That is our makeup as a people.

So you can drop us in the middle of Pluto and we will turn it into a haven to live.

- I think also, the work we're doing represents a model for how you- - That's what I'm trying to get to.

This is a model.

It's not just what you're doing in Lawndale.

It is an American model.

And what I wanted to in using the library is I wanted to point out that you can protest and you can change when you come together as a unit.

- I think the question our work is trying to answer is, if there is even a sliver of the American dream available for people in this country.

How we get there?

And the work we do is ensuring that, to the greatest extent, possible.

If there's a bit of that available to people, it's gonna happen for people in North Lawndale.

We are collaborating across our community with other communities in the city of Chicago.

To your point, we need it to be a circular, a continuum of a ecosystem level shift.

So it's not just like how we do this in North Lawndale.

It's not to say that North Lawndale is an island.

It's not.

It's not to say that others can't come there to live and raise their families or participate.

By all means they can.

But our comprehensive strategy really centers around, you know, that community control.

So thank you for telling us about the wonderful projects that you're doing.

Right on.

And if you got Starbucks, you're on your way.

Oh, I'm Robin Hartman with Indigo Studio.

Thanks for watching.

For more information about this show, follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Funding for this program was provided by Illinois Student Assistance Commission, the Chicago Community Trust.

Sin City Studios, Lamborghini Chicago, Gold Coast, and Downers Grove.

Blue cross, blue.

Shield of Illinois.

Commonwealth Edison and the Illinois Health Plan.

N'digo Studio.