“Will That New Development Benefit Your Community?: The People’s Guide to Community Benefits Agreements and Alternatives” will inform, engage and equip Chicago residents to be active participants in the development process.
By Sarah Conway
Gina Jamison displays her homemade canned goods at a community meeting about the Eco Orchard, where the author first met her. (Photo: Danielle Scruggs/City Bureau)
One late fall afternoon in 2019, Garfield Park resident Gina Jamison and I met to talk about the arrival of a $34 million food and beverage incubator in her neighborhood—but a pair of fruit trees was on her mind.
Bundled in winter coats, our boots crunching over russet-hued leaves, we snaked around rectangle garden boxes at her Kumba Tre-Ahm Community Garden on Warren Boulevard to a chain-link fence. There we stood beneath two cherry trees, their large roots anchored in the soil that once held her great grandfather’s mansion, purchased in 1941. It is sacred ground; an embodiment of a Black Chicago family's history and connection to Garfield Park.
We talked about The Hatchery Chicago incubator project, which would receive upwards of $37 million in government subsidies. Jamison and some other Garfield Park neighbors supported the development, but other residents City Bureau fellows talked to at the time were not. Many worried that the enormous concrete structure on Lake Street and Kedzie Avenue would bring more gentrification—but most of all, they were angry and disappointed that the developers did not adequately reach out to community members before its approval.
The same was true at a community meeting on Eco Orchard at Marshall High School earlier that year, where I first met Jamison and where a protest erupted over the lack of community voices and ideas in the plan to build a sprawling fruit orchard along 5th Avenue. While planners promised a lush orchard and nut trees, others in the room questioned if that’s what residents really needed at all. People didn’t feel heard in what Eco Orchard organizers stressed was a community decision-making process, I jotted down in my notebook.
Gazing up at the cherry trees, their branches entangled in the slate November sky, Jamison shared that they always reminded her of her grandfather, who found his way to Chicago like thousands of other Black Chicagoans during the Great Migration, the largest mass movement of people in American history.
His stately house was a manifestation of his family’s dreams and hopes in a new city, one that transformed into a safe haven for relatives and friends as they made their way north: six brothers and their families under one roof. “When family would come from North Carolina it was the startup place—20 children all in a room, a revolving door all day long for family, people all over, everywhere,” she said.
Years ago, Jamison made the difficult decision to demolish the home and build a community garden where neighbors often stop to say hello. Her deep connection to the neighborhood and its people remain. That’s why, time and again, she shows up to community meetings to talk about developments moving in, even in spaces and rooms where others feel left out.
Jamison knows that Garfield Park doesn’t lack people who are interested in these incoming developments and are ready to collaborate on projects that the neighborhood needs. But local residents—the people who should be at the table discussing a development long before City Council approval—rarely are, she said, and “that’s a problem.”
A recorder between us, the interview felt like so many I’ve done over the past five years reporting at City Bureau: a dance and exchange of memories, rooted in the immense love that Chicagoans have for their communities and their frustrations with the city’s structures.
Our fellowship team did scores of interviews to better understand why community members felt left out of The Hatchery Chicago development process and—more broadly—who gets to have input when a big developer moves into the neighborhood. City Bureau fellows Alma Campos, Ayinde Jean-Baptiste and myself wondered often why so many residents felt dissatisfied with the development process in our city. Who actually speaks for a community, and what does that mean?
From left, the author (Sarah Conway) with City Bureau fellows Ayinde Jean-Baptiste and Alma Campos touring The Hatchery Chicago facility during construction in late 2018. (Photo: Davon Clark/City Bureau)
While we went into the reporting topic with the goal to produce a story, we realized over time that what people need is information on the often complicated and inaccessible development process in the city of Chicago. How do people learn about new developments happening in their neighborhood? How do these projects apply for zoning changes, receive public subsidies and get approved? And how can neighbors get involved and have their voices heard in each step of the process?
Out of years of reporting, research and relationships with community members like Jamison, we’ve built “Will That New Development Benefit Your Community? The People’s Guide to Community Benefits Agreements and Alternatives” to inform, engage and equip Chicago residents to be active participants in the development process.
In this guide, City Bureau explores pathways to equitable development and the tools that enable that work. We dig deep into Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) and how they are created. We also provide case studies and speak to community residents, local organizations, legal experts and other people creating CBAs across the country. On February 22, City Bureau will publish the full guide online in English and Spanish, and we plan on distributing 3,000 print copies across the city this spring.
If you want to learn more, register for our upcoming February 22 Public Newsroom to learn more about CBAs and how they are created. Want to share our newest zine with your neighbors? You can preorder here.
Have ideas on where we should distribute the zine in your neighborhood? You can always drop me a note at sarah@citybureau.org.
See you on February 22!
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