The CHA Owns More Than 130 Acres Of Vacant Land And Buildings — Enough To Fill 25 City Blocks

BRONZEVILLE — Two decades after the Chicago Housing Authority demolished dozens of buildings on South State Street, empty fields take up block after block. At the south end of the vacant lots, unhoused people have set up tent encampments. Nearby businesses, apartment buildings and churches have closed as the neighborhood lost population. 

Altogether, the CHA owns 48 acres of vacant land along State Street from 35th to 54th streets — the equivalent of nearly 10 city blocks, according to a new report from a longtime public-interest organization.

That’s just a fraction of the CHA’s unused property. After razing thousands of housing units across the city under its Plan for Transformation, the agency now owns nearly 110 acres of empty land and 22 acres filled with vacant buildings at six of its largest sites around the city, Impact for Equity found. 

All that vacant property could fill 25 city blocks — and the total amount at all CHA sites is likely far higher.

The land was supposed to be used for new homes.

Instead, it highlights decades of development delays under four mayors and eight CHA CEOs, with crippling consequences for some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. 

But the report from Impact for Equity, “Building on Opportunity,” also stresses that the city and CHA can use the property to address disinvestment and empower Chicago residents. It calls on city and CHA leaders to make redevelopment of the land a top priority. 

“This is land that should be put for use to serve the communities,” said Cara Hendrickson, executive director of Impact for Equity. “Our call to action is: ‘Get it together and focus.’”

Since taking office in May, Mayor Brandon Johnson has rarely mentioned the CHA, and his office didn’t comment on the Impact for Equity report. 

Instead, press secretary Ronnie Reese pointed to other steps the mayor and his team have taken to expand affordable housing, such as applying for a boost in federal funding and issuing an executive order to simplify the development approval process.

“The Johnson Administration is focused on increasing access to housing for all Chicagoans,” Reese wrote in an email.

Meanwhile, CHA officials are still reviewing the Impact for Equity report, agency spokesman Matthew Aguilar said in a written statement. He said the CHA intends to create a new plan for some of its vacant land, including the stretch along State Street. 

Housing advocates say the city and CHA need to move with far more urgency. Chicago is struggling with an acute shortage of affordable housing, and more than 200,000 people are on the CHA’s waiting lists for assistance.

Given that “housing deficit,” Impact for Equity decided it was time for an in-depth assessment of the CHA’s unused property. 

The vacant land is one of the legacies of the CHA’s Plan for Transformation, launched in 2000 with the stated goals of eliminating “some of the worst housing in America” and creating new opportunities for low-income residents. 

Under the plan, the agency promised to raze thousands of units, including most of its high rises, and rebuild the sites with a mix of public, affordable and market-rate housing as well as other amenities. The work was supposed to be finished within a decade.

But the CHA was much more efficient at demolishing the old housing than constructing the new. Twenty-four years later, the agency has about 16,000 fewer public housing units for families than it did, and site redevelopment has been halting.

CHA officials say they’re back on track now. The agency finished building more than 1,000 housing units last year, Aguilar said, and another 1,100 are currently under construction, including hundreds at “legacy sites” that were fully or partly cleared out under the Plan for Transformation.

“By the end of 2023, CHA and our partners achieved the most active new development pipeline in more than a decade,” Aguilar said in the statement. 

Still, the CHA has a long way to go. Without changes, “the pace of development is such that it could be a few decades before we can expect this land to be redeveloped, leaving multiple generations of people waiting between when the buildings came down and when the sites were redeveloped,” Hendrickson said.

The report zooms in on six of the CHA’s redevelopment sites. Despite some progress, each remains unfinished. For example, the Near West Side site of the Rockwell Gardens complex, now called West End, still has 7 acres of vacant property — and that’s the least of any of the six sites examined by Impact for Equity. 

At each site, redevelopment plans are out of date if they exist at all, according to the report. Without new plans created through community engagement, the vacant land can lead to more disinvestment in surrounding neighborhoods.

At the same time, “while the persistent vacancy is a challenge, it is also an opportunity” to create much-needed housing and new community investment.

In terms of size, at least, the State Street corridor offers the biggest challenge and the largest opportunity.

The Stateway Gardens complex, which ran along State from 35th to 39th streets, once included more than 1,600 apartments. The Robert Taylor Homes, from 39th to 54th, had 4,400 more. The developments were home to more than 27,000 people.

By the 1990s, the CHA determined Stateway and Taylor had deteriorated too much to repair. Under the Plan for Transformation, the CHA began razing all eight high rises at Stateway and all 28 at Taylor. Thousands of families had to move.

The demolition work was done by 2007. But the new homes and development never fully materialized. So far the CHA has built fewer than half the 3,700 new homes it promised at Stateway and Taylor. 

Yet “there is currently no publicly available overall plan for the vacant Robert Taylor Homes land and no community planning process has taken place,” the report states. And the CHA’s plan for the remaining Stateway land “is many years old and was developed without significant community input.”

The CHA says it will start “a community development and urban planning process” for some of its vacant land, including the stretch along State Street, later this year. 

In the absence of transparent plans, the CHA has already sold off chunks of its land to private interests after back-room negotiations. 

In 2015, the agency sold 13.5 acres of Taylor land — at half its estimated value — to XS Tennis. The nonprofit athletic and education organization used the property for a sports complex. 

In 2021, then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot offered another 25 acres of Taylor land to the Chicago Fire soccer team so it could build a new training facility; the team instead chose a similar-sized parcel at the CHA’s ABLA Homes development. 

Last year the CHA approved the sale of an additional parcel to allow XS Tennis to build housing — but those 39 units will be used for the organization’s employees and visiting athletes, not people waiting for CHA assistance.

The Impact for Equity report does not mention these deals or the CHA’s other land selloffs. But it urges the CHA and the city to create a better process by putting the land to use with the input of the community.

Specifically, it suggests that the city — and Mayor Johnson by implication — declare that redeveloping the CHA land is a top goal. This would include naming a coordinator to lead the effort with the CHA, dedicating a funding stream for it and creating community-driven plans for each site.

“This ought to be a priority,” Hendrickson said.

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