20 Apr 23 | Chicago Tribune

"Roseland can be great again," say local residents and community leaders pushing for new medical complex

By Brian J. Rogal

New development may soon get underway in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood on the Far South Side, filling several blocks near 111th Street and South Michigan Avenue with a medical center that residents hope will both save lives and spark an economic revival in a region that for decades lost residents and saw the shutdown of local institutions and businesses.

“There are too many abandoned buildings here,” said Judy Ware, an owner of Ware Ranch Steakhouse at 11147 S. Michigan Ave. "It really looks deserted, so it's not a happy place to shop and eat.”

The Chicago Plan Commission in 2022 approved a 10-year master plan, put forward by the Roseland Community Medical District Commission, which envisions a 480,000-square-foot health care campus rising in phases just west of Ware's restaurant, bringing hundreds of jobs while also enticing new homebuyers and investment.

It may take several years to attract enough private financing to finish the job, but now armed with $25 million in state funds, district commissioners can start buying land for the campus, making infrastructure improvements, and pitching the site to health care providers.

"A new health center will be a great asset to the community, and with all the personnel that are going to be coming here, it should help all of our businesses,” Ware said.

A coalition of community groups, developers, legislators, as well as city and state officials, back the effort, which they said will also bring medical services to what they call a “health care desert” Far South Side communities such as Roseland, West Roseland, Riverdale, Pullman and the Chicago Housing Authority's Altgeld Gardens are home to about 300,000 people largely dependent for health care on Roseland Community Hospital, a 134-bed institution at 111th Street beset for years by financial woes. During the COVID crisis, CEO Tim Egan called it "outgunned, outmanned and underfunded.”

"We have one of the highest infant mortality rates in the city, and we have one of the highest rates of premature births,” said Abraham Lacy, president of the Far South Community Development Corp., which helped lead the campaign for a new health center. “We also don't have a Level One trauma center for the Far South Side; if there is a gunshot victim, they may have to go all the way to the University of Chicago or Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn. They may die on the way.”

Greater Roseland Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Andrea Reed said the pandemic exposed just how wide the gap was between the community's health care needs and what was available, but a new center with a range of specialists and providing many types of care should relieve pressure on the hospital.

“We had quite a few people that passed away due to COVI D,” she said. “But having a new center will mean they can have their own physicians when they have problems instead of having to go to the emergency room.”
Lacy added that the proposed medical campus will likely provide maternal health care, mental health other preventive services, community centers, supportive housing, as well as retail and restaurants. He sees it as a one-two punch, both closing the region's life expectancy gap with wealthier neighborhoods and starting up a new economic engine.

"This is a must to turn around a community that has been deprived for so long,” he said.

Developer Leon Walker, managing partner of DL3 Realty, grew up in Roseland, learned to swim at the now shuttered local YMCA and witnessed the local economy's decades long erosion. Real estate agents swept into the neighborhood in the 1960s, buying houses cheap from white owners and selling the homes to African Americans at high prices. Many companies also began eliminating or moving well-paying industrial jobs out of nearby neighborhoods such as Pullman, cratering family incomes, lowering property values and sending local small businesses into decline.

"I was there in the '70s when white flight had already taken hold, but all that accelerated in the '80s and '90s by continued disinvestment and the flight of black middle-class families,” Walker said. “I’m not speaking as a disinterested outsider. This is home.”

Unemployment stood at more than 30% in some Roseland census tracts by 2020, nearly four times the Chicago average, according to data from New York University School of Medicine's Department of Population Health. Life expectancy stood at just 65.8 years in one Roseland tract, more than 11 years below Chicago's average, while Streeterville residents on the Gold Coast average 90. In addition, less than 16% of seniors in Riverdale and Altgeld Gardens reported receiving preventive health care in 2018, compared with 38% in Lincoln Park on the North Side.

In 2007, DL3 Realty developed a 27,000-square-foot medical office complex across the street from the main hospital, and Gov. Pat Quinn later appointed Walker to the Roseland Community Medical District Commission, the governing body of the 95-acre special planning district established by the state in 2011 to address the health disparities on the city's Far South Side.

The new medical complex helped address some local health care needs, Walker said, but the 2019 closure of MetroSouth. Medical. Center in suburban Blue Island meant still heavier burdens at Roseland Community Hospital, where most patients pay through Medicare, Medicaid, or are charity cases.

"That's not sustainable,” he said. "We have to bring back a more diverse demographic.”

Ware said it's not easy running a local business. She and her husband moved to Roseland in the 1990s, and bought the steakhouse, first opened in 1969, in 2018. They shut down for two years after the place was damaged by fire during the civil unrest of 2020, and even though business has been relatively good recently, she partly attributes that to many residents receiving income tax refunds.

“Once that money dries up, people don't come out as much, so it's a struggle to keep the doors open,” she said. “If we had to pay rent, we’d have shut the doors a long time ago.”

City and state officials are backing the plans to revive Roseland and other Far South Side communities. The administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot gave the medical district a $300,000 grant, allowing commissioners and other community partners to create the master plan with Adrian Smith +  Gordon Gill Architecture, which also did the Pullman National Monument several blocks to the east.

The plan convinced the state to award the project $25 million from its Build Illinois bond fund.

That's not enough to launch and finish the project's construction, according to Walker, which could eventually need several hundred million dollars of private investment. But with the state's seed money the district can start acquiring the land between 111th Street and 112th Place, launch environmental cleanup efforts and bring in utilities, among other infrastructure improvements, all necessary to attract private investors such as health care providers.

"You have to flesh out the vision and put it on paper, so people can see the possibilities,” Walker said.

"This has been a priority for the community for a very long time, but we didn't have the resources," said 9th Ward Aid. Anthony Beale. "This has truly been a grassroots movement and I'm glad the city finally saw the vision and jumped on board.”

And if the city launches its proposed $3.6 billion extension of the CT A's Red Line from 95th Street through Roseland to 130th Street in Altgeld Gardens, with several stops close to the hospital and medical district, Lacy said that will help the new medical center form a nucleus for Roseland and the surrounding neighborhoods, with thousands of patients commuting in and patronizing local businesses, alongside hundreds of nurses, doctors, technicians and support personnel. Chicago aldermen in December approved Mayor Lightfoot's plan to create a special transit tax district to partially pay for the project, and the city is now seeking federal funding.

“With the Red Line extension, it's going to be a quick train ride for many people, maybe 10 or 11 minutes, so they will say, ‘This is a convenient location to fulfill my health care needs,’” Lacy said. Roseland is also one of the 10 communities targeted by Mayor Lightfoot's three-year Invest South/West development initiative. In December, the city asked for proposals to redevelop three neighborhood sites, all along the once-bustling retail corridor on Michigan Avenue south of 111th Street, including the former Gately's People Store and the now-vacant historic Roseland Theatre building.

“There is a lot happening in Roseland right now,” Lacy said. “And there's going to be even more over the next two to three years.”

Walker said he hopes getting a new mayor won't derail any of these efforts.

"I think it would be wise for any administration to see this as an opportunity to positively impact more than 300,000 people,” he said. "Roseland can be great again.”