The grand opening of a Whole Foods market in the Englewood section of Chicago is only the most recent—and visible—sign of a neighborhood working hard to bring back jobs and opportunity to its residents. Recent years of community, planning, organizing and investment, with steady help from LISC, helped attract the high-end grocery store, which is hiring locally, lowering its prices and stocking products made by homegrown entrepreneurs.
The excerpt below is from:
This IS Englewood
By Gordon Walek, LISC Chicago
There are lots of ways to identify positive neighborhood change – increased population, income levels, school test scores, housing prices, new businesses, lower crime rates, etc. But sometimes the early signals are more subtle and less empirical – such as how long it takes to cross a street.
Consider Ivan Ramos’ walk the other day from his Financial Opportunity Center office on the southeast corner of 63rd and Halsted to the northwest corner of the intersection, where Whole Foods was preparing to open a grocery store. En route he stopped and talked to people he knew – former and current clients, co-workers, maintenance people and others. While on the south side of 63rd Street he visited the Teamwork Englewood office to greet his friends Perry Gunn and Rashanah Baldwin.
A few years ago, that walk wouldn’t have taken nearly so long. Or happened at all. For one, there was nothing on the northwest corner. It was a vacant space – a ghostly reminder that the once-thriving 63rd Street commercial corridor faded long ago. For another, despite the presence of the Kennedy-King College campus, the intersection wasn’t pedestrian-heavy, lessening the chance for random encounters with neighbors and associates. Finally, the relationships among Englewood community organizations weren’t at the level where people were routinely dropping in on one another.
Whole Foods rules
It’s a stretch to attribute Englewood’s newfound cosmopolitanism to the arrival of a Whole Foods grocery store, but people attending the grand opening at the new Englewood Square shopping center on September 28 didn’t count it out.
“It’s a tale of two cities,” said Ramos, who for the last five years has been helping residents find jobs, learn employment skills and improve their credit scores at the Kennedy-King Financial Opportunity Center (one of 12 FOCs throughout Chicago supported by LISC). “The conventional notion of Englewood is a place of crime and violence. But what you see here is a community – in every sense of the word.”
And the arrival of new businesses at 63rd and Halsted, he says, is a big part of that. In addition to Whole Foods, the center includes a Starbucks, a Chipotle restaurant, a clothing store, a nail salon and a health center.
More than just a shopping center
“This is more than a shopping center,” said Perry Gunn, executive director of Teamwork Englewood, a LISC lead agency that for years has been working to make the neighborhood stronger. “It’s a place that will make people think differently about this community. They’ll feel the vibe. It’ll make businesses want to invest here.” Continued[+]...