She also announced a $750 million investment initiative targeting ten (10) South and West Side neighborhoods to provide economic resources and incentives for improving and rebuilding those neighborhoods, creating jobs, new business enterprises, affordable housing, and expanded service delivery.
In an editorial commenting on the Mayor’s plan, Crain’s Chicago Business suggested that attracting black folks back to the city would be key to the City’s revitalization.
If that assertion is true and city officials believe it is true, then we should be supporting all efforts to help black folks who are already here build and grow institutions that support wealth creation and decrease the wealth gap that The Chicago Community Trust has spotlighted as the centerpiece of its “moonshot” effort to turn around Chicago’s low-income neighborhoods.
To us, that means supporting access to and delivery of the capital investments required for increasing homeownership, business ownership, creating clean and safe communities, ways to decrease violence, job creation levels, and wealth-building by black folks, so that blacks who return here have the opportunities for a better life that will entice them to stay here. And, we who are already here have to take the leadership role in creating, developing and operating those institutions.