This story is part of Reframing Crime Narratives, a 10-part series about public safety by The TRiiBE to create space for community conversation about crime in Chicago.
The series is supported in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Envisioning Justice grant by Illinois Humanities.
On the city’s Southwest Side, in the Chicago Lawn community, neighbors and local organizations say they are addressing crime and improving the area’s quality of life by rehabbing long-abandoned buildings and acquiring vacant lots to build new, affordable homes that are then sold to interested buyers.
Called Reclaiming Southwest Chicago, the project is a years-long effort — now in its second phase — that organizers say has led to a 73% reduction in overall crime and 50% reduction in violent crime in Chicago Lawn, according to CPD crime data. Chicago Lawn has been a majority Hispanic, Latinx and Black neighborhood since the project began in 2012. Now with multiple offshoots, including Reclaiming North Lawndale, Reclaiming Back of the Yards, and Reclaiming Roseland, the project could serve as a blueprint for curing crime in other Black and marginalized communities, some neighbors, business owners and others in the area say.
The first phase of Reclaiming Southwest Chicago, which ran from 2012 to 2019, focused on one portion of Chicago Lawn, a 20-block contiguous area between 59th, 63rd, Rockwell streets, and California Ave., near the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), the organization behind Reclaiming Southwest Chicago. SWOP said the project also led to a 91% decrease in the number of vacant properties in the 60629 zip code, which includes Chicago Lawn and other neighborhoods.
It’s the belief of SWOP Executive Director Jeff Bartow and others involved with Reclaiming Southwest Chicago such as organizations like United Power for Action and Justice, Brinshore Development, and the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), also based in Chicago Lawn, that restoring dilapidated buildings attracting crime can help curb the issue before it begins while also inspiring neighborhood pride.
“SWOP institutions really grappled with, ‘What should our response to this be?’” Bartow said. “We started talking with colleagues within United Power around that time, and we began crafting a response where we, with the support of United Power, would take the lead in strategically seeking to build back the neighborhood.”
SWOP’s initial target area alone included about 93 vacant addresses when the project began. Through its work, SWOP decreased the area’s number of vacant homes to eight, Bartow said.
One person with firsthand experience of the transformation Chicago Lawn has undergone is Rafi Peterson, the site director of Communities Partnering for Peace (CP4P). Peterson began working with SWOP in 2003 as part of its Ceasefire program and, along with several neighbors, helped assist in the building of several Chicago Lawn homes as part of the project’s first phase.
“People within the community wanted better, and then we started figuring out a way to have that,” he said.
The Foreclosure Crisis and Chicago Lawn
Many of the vacant homes and lots restored in Chicago Lawn were victims of the United States foreclosure crisis which began in 2010, when many Black communities lost their homes after struggling with high-interest mortgage loans.
Peterson can still recall the extreme effect the foreclosure crisis had on Chicago Lawn. Even a home Peterson helped acquire to serve as transitional housing when he worked for IMAN had once been a victim of foreclosure and attracted crime, he said.
“At that time, it was 40 houses on [one] block and over 20 of those houses were vacant,” Peterson said. “Nobody was in it. They got foreclosed on … and so the house that we had was definitely one of the houses that gang members were actually living in.”
Drugs and sex work were also commonly exchanged at these homes, Peterson said.
Alia Bilal, the chief executive director of IMAN, said after a violent sex crime occurred near one of these homes, IMAN also stepped up its housing work, forming a coalition with SWOP, the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, and the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.
In 2010, IMAN began to acquire buildings across the street from St. Rita’s of Cascia Parish and Fairfield Elementary School. Neighbors were becoming frustrated with the vacant buildings and increasing crime, so the groups collaborated to acquire one of the buildings through a rarely-used city ordinance that offloaded abandoned buildings to neighborhood nonprofits, and restored the building together. It became the second home to be restored through IMAN’s Green Reentry Program and was later rented out.
“That building had become such a representation of the degradation of the neighborhood,” Bilal said. “It had become a hideaway home — some of the local kids would perch in that building and they would wait until school was out, and they would go and snatch purses from parents who were picking up their kids at the school, and … it became a drug home.”
“Finally, we came across a young woman who had been sexually accosted in the gangway of that building and we said, that was [enough],” she added.
Bilal said the block is now “one of the safest blocks in this neighborhood, and the neighbors on either side [of the street] will tell you that this is a block where the quality of life has been significantly increased.”
By the end 2012, the year Reclaiming Southwest Chicago began, there had been just over 1,000 violent crimes in Chicago Lawn. By the end 2019 when the project’s first phase ended, the number of violent crimes reported decreased to 738, according to City of Chicago Violence and Victimization Trend data. Additionally, fatal and non-fatal shootings dropped to 91 in 2019 from 140 in 2012.
Though many acknowledge that Chicago Lawn has become a safer community over the years, some believe housing alone can’t decrease crime in Black communities, and instead, should be coupled with neighborhood services that can address the other needs of marginalized people.
“I think programming and access to things like jobs and resources [is important],” said Jeremy Wright the owner and CEO of Thrift, a Black-owned business marketplace and secondhand clothes shop in Chicago Lawn who’s lived and worked in the area since 2017. He also serves as a commissioner for Special Service Area #59. “Housing is a thing, of course, but all of this stuff is not being committed by homeless people and stuff like that. So I think it’s about giving people access to a living wage through work,” Wright said.
From what Wright has observed, crime hasn’t been a major issue in Chicago Lawn’s business district, aside from some graffiti and gun violence, he said. One of Wright’s own customers, who he recalls as being “always in and out” was shot and killed one year after Thrift began operating in 2021.
“I think those things are important, for people to be able to do activities, and I think across the board, in Chicago in general, I think some of those things are not happening all time.”
Replicating Reclaiming Southwest Chicago
Staff from SWOP like Chris Brown, the director of operations at SWOP, recognize the decrease in crime in Chicago Lawn shouldn’t be attributed to just the group’s housing project, but instead the collaborative efforts of the entire community.
“We’d love to claim credit for all of that and say absolutely, it was all about the housing work, [but] I’m sure it was about many things; our housing campaign, in terms of turning vacant, dangerous buildings into occupied homes, was just a piece of it,” Brown said.
SWOP has several programs that encompass its slate of work alongside its Reclaiming Southwest Chicago housing project, including community safety programs, a parent mentorship program, digital learning classes, immigration and citizenship services, and more. SWOP is also the lead agency of the southwest side for the Healthy Chicago Equity Zone campaign, leads the Southwest System of Care (SWSOC) collaborative, and regularly organizes around local issues.
Similarly, IMAN has arts programming, organizing and advocacy work and more throughout the Chicago Lawn community.
“The work in schools, creating after-school and out-of-school time programming, was a piece of it. The work with immigrants was a piece of it. The stuff we did on police accountability was a piece of it, and other things that were, people who were coming in and buying buildings and rehabbing those properties were also a big piece of it,” Brown said.
Currently, Rev. James Meeks’, formerly of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, Hope Center Foundation is spearheading Reclaiming Roseland, and, as of January, SWOP had seven Chicago Lawn properties, five being single family homes or two-flats and two being multi-unit buildings, with the goal of completing 25 more buildings by the end of 2024, according to SWOP’s 2024 housing campaign plans.
Brown believes replicating the work done in Chicago Lawn will require developing a community organizing strategy with strong actors who will be committed to ensuring the success of the project even over many years, even when local police chiefs, school principals, or aldermen leave the community. It should also allow people to “come together, build relationships, work through their local institutions and build power to act.”
People like Wright also think it’s important to acknowledge that many Black communities in Chicago have been shrinking as people leave for other cities or states to escape what many see as a pervasive issue with violence and crime. Black people should be investing in their communities, he believes
“For a lot of us, we are leaving the community, and we’re not seeing the value in our land, in our space,” Wright said. “We see that in Woodlawn and in spaces that’ve been gentrified. So we can create value in our spaces, and I think that it’s important that we continue to promote that message, that it is about what we can create in community, not what somebody else values our spaces to be.”
