LeClaire Courts’ long-delayed reconstruction may get started

The Chicago Housing Authority Board of Commissioners voted Tuesday morning to move forward on the reconstruction of its LeClaire Courts development on the Southwest Side. It’s one of the final communities to undergo redevelopment in the agency’s Plan for Transformation, first launched in 1999 but plagued by delays ever since.

The CHA tore down LeClaire Courts more than 10 years ago, scattering its last residents across the city, many with Section 8 housing vouchers, and opening a gaping hole along Cicero Avenue in the Garfield Ridge neighborhood near Midway Airport.

“It is time to take the necessary steps to get this development moving,” CHA Chief Development Officer Ann McKenzie said. “This area has not seen development in years.”

Commissioners approved a $27 million infrastructure agreement with the city to help reconstruct LeClaire Courts’ water mains and streets, and a ground lease for co-developers The Habitat Co. and Cabrera Capital, who will construct two six-story buildings with 183 total apartments, including 86 for the CHA, another 79 at affordable rents, and the rest market-rate.

The developers envision a total of 650 mixed-income apartments eventually rising on the site, first opened in 1950 as an integrated, suburban-style community of two-story row homes.

But new housing is just one aspect of the redevelopment. The first phase will also include a new grocery store, medical center and child care facilities, amenities sorely needed by many on the Southwest Side, 22nd Ward Ald. Michael Rodriguez said.

“For far too long, for generations, public housing and affordable housing have been put on the other side of the tracks and bled to death,” he said. “Right now, this area is a food desert, and a health care desert, so we’re bringing in what the whole community wants.”

Commissioners heaped praise on the developers for including such assets.

“We’ve seen enough neighborhoods in the city of Chicago without grocery stores, and that’s something we’ve been working on in North Lawndale as well,” said Commissioner Luis Gutierrez. “So, bringing a grocery store to this project is extremely important.”

A grocery store wasn’t part of the development team’s initial plans, Cabrera President Robert Aguilar said, but after several meetings with neighborhood residents, they considered it essential. Other amenities will include community plazas and plenty of green space.

The CHA board also voted Tuesday to kick-start more construction at the former Cabrini Green site on the North Side, and at the Ogden Commons development in North Lawndale. The agency will provide a $11.5 million construction loan for the 99-unit Parkside Phase 5 housing development, the final phase of Parkside of Old Town, a mixed-income community begun in 2005 on Cabrini-Green land.

It will also provide a $9.95 million construction loan for Ogden Commons’ 75-unit second phase, near Douglass Park on the site of the former Lawndale Courts housing complex, where developers already have 92 units underway.

Commissioner Debra Parker asked CHA officials when the LeClaire developers could finally break ground, adding that she was frustrated by the slow pace.

“We should be at Phase 3 or 4 by now,” she said.

McKenzie said the site is almost ready, but the developers need the new infrastructure, as well as final approval from HUD, and the CHA will come back to the board by November with the project’s financial details.

“You can’t build without water and sewers,” she said.

Habitat Vice President of Development Jeff Head said the team could break ground in the second quarter of 2024.

Rodriguez said he’s been working on filling the Cicero Avenue vacancy ever since joining the City Council in 2019, and last week met with dozens of former residents eager to return.

“The question wasn’t whether people supported this new development, it was, ‘When is this going to happen?’” he said. “These are complicated deals, so to get everything right takes time, but I’m excited about what’s to come.”