North Lawndale will soon see a six-story, affordable-housing apartment complex with lots of windows and a green exterior in the community.
In the complex, called Grace Manor Apartments, the second through the sixth floors of the building will include 65 units with a mix of 31 one-bedroom and 34 two-bedrooms, complete with a rooftop deck.
There will be additional space for community commercial tenants and service providers that will benefit residents and the surrounding community on the ground floor, such as health and wellness service providers as well as job training and wealth-building classes.
This affordable housing, which broke ground last week, comes amid effort by Rev. Marvin G. Hunter, who worked for decades to bring affordable housing to North Lawndale. “Only God could have allowed me to hear the amount of ‘nos’ that I’ve heard, the amount of ‘that can’t be done’ and ‘that’s not the way it’s done,’” Hunter said.
Hunter, the pastor of Grace Memorial Baptist Church, was born and raised in North Lawndale, where he continues to live and work.
The church, along with East Lake and Burling Builders Inc., are partners of the upcoming $40 million, affordable housing complex.
Hunter said that this project is a continuation of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream for mixed-income affordable housing on the West Side and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
But the dream did not come easily to Hunter. Through this 25-year journey, Hunter said he met many obstacles to building affordable housing on the West Side. He said that the major ones were ordinances that created barriers for this project.
One was the ordinance that if the union is funding the building, only union workers can work on the project.
Hunter said that this obstacle would have prevented them to hire local contractors because unions were historically not friendly to marginalized communities.
“They looked on the surface that they promoted development in the city, but what they really did was create barriers for marginalized groups of people such as 14th Amendment citizens, Black and Brown people, like the people in North Lawndale, Roseland, Austin and so on,” Hunter said.
Hunter said he believed in God’s timing and that timing fell on the last year of former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s term.
He said Lightfoot met with Hunter and said she saw his vision and since then she helped to bring down those barriers.
“It made me want to do cartwheels, backflips, the moonwalk, all that,” Hunter said. “I was happy as a man could probably be and not for myself, but for the people that I represent, the people that believe, the people that stood and the people that will work and will ultimately live in this property.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order last week to streamline housing development and remove barriers.
The executive order requires 14 city departments to assess their current methods and suggest ways to make development easier by eliminating obstacles and speeding up review and approval times.
Hunter said that he made sure to hire contractors local to the North Lawndale and West Side area. Out of 45 contractors who bid on the project, they chose seven, which he described as “the best of the best.”
By hiring minority contract workers, Hunter said he is fighting a harmful stereotype that Black people don’t want to work.
“We didn’t just give them low-hanging fruit,” Hunter said. “These people are working on the MEP, which is electrical, plumbing, so on and so forth. Those are places in building that people in this community don’t generally get an opportunity to work on. Generally, they give them the labor or what they call the low-hanging fruit.”