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| Barcelona Housing Systems has these dreams for the one-time South Works site. Many other developers have prepared similar sketches for what could be done with the former steel mill. |
HECK,
IF WE had Donald Trump interested in building more things in Chicago, he
probably would have turned the site into Trump, the Park – a lakefront facility
devoted to promoting his glorious public image.
But
we don’t, which is why the site has been one of continuous speculation –
including the most recent plans detailed this week by which Emerald Living of
Dublin and Barcelona Housing Systems want to acquire the 440 acres of land
where steel was once manufactured – and turn it into some 20,000 units of
housing.
The
latter company has a process of modular, environmentally-friendly technology
that is supposed to make it financially practical to build large numbers of
housing structures in a short period of time.
As
for whether this plan will ever become reality, who’s to say? What I know is
that the one-time U.S. Steel South Works site has had so much speculation about
what can be done there during the decades since the steel mill there was
shuttered.
YET
NOTHING MUCH has become of it.
I
remember when a deal was reached for Solo Cup Co. was going to build a plant on
part of the land (there’s even one of those Jeffery Baer programs on WTTW-TV
about Chicago neighborhoods that declares this the future intent of the site).
Most
recently, a portion of the land was going to be acquired by the Mariano’s chain
of upscale supermarkets so that they could build a grocery store that could
service the nearby South Shore and South Chicago neighborhoods – along with my
personal favorite Chicago sub-neighborhood; the Bush!
Then,
there was the 12-year period in which McCaffery Interests developed a plan to
turn the site into practically a new Chicago neighborhood – with its own
housing, schools, retail shopping and a marina for the boats that naturally
would be owned by the people who lived there.
WHICH
MEANT IT was intended to be an upscale community that took full advantage of
the proximity of Lake Michigan just to the east. A concept that bothered many
of the local residents of the aforementioned existing neighborhoods.
Because
those are blue collar areas that, in fact, include one of the oldest
Spanish-speaking enclaves in Chicago. They were the kind of neighborhoods meant
to house the people who actually worked in the steel mills.
Which,
in fact, is why my own grandparents lived in that area. People could walk to
work every day.
My
grandparents are long gone from South Chicago. But the people who remain were
the types to spew out the word “gentrification” as an obscenity – seeing any
development as an effort to chase them out of the neighborhood where, in many
cases, their families had lived for decades.
SO
WHETHER THIS latest project can advance forward is going to depend on how it is
presented to the public.
There
actually would be one benefit to new housing being built in the area – much of
the existing housing stock in South Chicago is old. The house where my maternal
grandparents lived is now a vacant lot, but the structures up and down the
block date back to that era.
My
point being they are old, and some of them haven’t been maintained to an ideal
standard. There could be a use for new structures – and something has to become
of the site. Having it just sit there idly by is not realistic.
Even
if there are people like one anonymous Internet commenter who said he wants the
site left alone so that lots of new people don’t move in and screw up his
isolated neighborhood. An attitude that is the perfect public policy recipe for
a whole lot of nothing to occur for decades to come.
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