Jeffery Tompkins
Urban Planner + Strategist | How can we make your places go?
Woodlawn Phoenix District
In collaboration with the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, Jeffery helped to envision a 15-acre master planned mixed-use community honoring the history and context of a disinvested neighborhood on Chicago's Southside.
01 - THE PHOENIX DISTRICT
RISING FROM THE ASHES
Woodlawn, Chicago, IL | Spring 2021
Although Woodlawn first boomed during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, it was not until the 1920s that the neighborhood around 63rd and Cottage Grove reached residential and commercial maturity. Woodlawn proved an appealing retail and amusement district in large part due to its convenient transportation connections and close proximity to dense concentrations of affordable housing in lakeside apartment buildings. During the 1920s, as African Americans looked to move out of the overcrowded slums to the north, Woodlawn residents, in an attempt to keep their neighborhood all-white, established restrictive covenants and engaged in rogue violence against those seeking to move in. Some Woodlawn amusements followed suit by excluding African American patrons. During the 1950s and 1960s, as racial tensions mounted, Woodlawn declined as one of Chicago’s largest outlying business districts.
Years of disinvestment have left the neighborhood with only a fraction of its peak population and in danger of the rapid gentrification seen just north in Hyde Park. Bring on 2021 and the construction of the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park near the neighborhood and you have the makings of a community in danger of displacement.
Jeffery helped to reimagine what community development could look like with the aid of a creative financing model utilizing a Mutual Benefit Corporation allowing the development to not only provide affordable family housing but allow neighborhood residents to actually gain equity from the project, allowing yearly payouts for each resident.
More coming soon.
