We love seeing the immense fiscal power of nongovernmental resources wielded for good in Chicago.
We’ve seen this many times recently, including $100 million in collective donations from the business community to bolster public safety through community violence intervention. Now there’s another moment to celebrate: a $10 million investment, and that’s the word, from a family foundation. It’s aimed at expanding affordable homeownership in Chicago neighborhoods that need it most.
Chicago’s problem with housing is that there simply isn’t enough, especially when it comes to options ordinary people can actually manage to buy. We need to build affordable homes, plain and simple. And we need to encourage homeownership, allowing people to build equity.
So Tuesday brought good news on all those fronts. The Pritzker Traubert Foundation announced that it has awarded its huge ($10 million!) 2025 Chicago Prize to Reclaiming Chicago, a community-led coalition working to expand affordable homeownership on the South and West sides. The substantial investment will help finance new single-family and two-flat homes, beginning with a large-lot development in Chicago Lawn that is expected to deliver about 125 new affordable homes. Beyond that initial project, the funds then will seed a revolving loan program designed to lower construction costs and speed development across four South and West side neighborhoods.
We met in March with representatives from Reclaiming Chicago working on solving this problem. They outlined their mission: To build modest single-family homes in neighborhoods such as Roseland, North Lawndale, Back of the Yards and Chicago Lawn and sell them at an affordable price to people with modest incomes who are prepared to become homeowners and invest in their neighborhoods. Back then, they’d already gotten off to a strong start, having raised money for construction from an assortment of big banks, foundations and other deep-pocketed contributors since 2018. They showed us photos of the very solid homes they’re building and told us stories about the people living in them who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to realize the dream of homeownership.
Their enthusiasm and clear vision made us feel hopeful then, and still does today.
This is a problem the private sector is better positioned to solve, in coordination with housing officials, of course.
We much prefer Reclaiming Chicago’s approach to some of the recent city-led affordable housing efforts. Consider the Fifth City Commons project, a brand new 43-unit development in East Garfield Park on the West Side that opened earlier this year. The $38 million project cost amounted to an eye-popping $884,000 per taxpayer-subsidized rental unit. As longtime affordable housing developer and advocate David Doig claimed in a LinkedIn post, “That’s more than it costs to build a luxury unit in Fulton Market or the Gold Coast.”
Doig is also part of the Reclaiming Chicago effort which operates far more efficiently.
Chicago needs more housing, and it needs that housing to be affordable. The Chicago Prize investment in Reclaiming Chicago shows what’s possible when private capital, local knowledge and public goals align.
$10 million is enough money to have a substantial impact on an effort such as this, modest as it now may be. Yet more importantly, it will encourage investment by others and help write a blueprint for an idea worth expanding.
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