A Community Benefits Agreement isn’t the only way to get what your community needs from a developer. Here are three alternatives.
By Alma Campos, Sarah Conway and Phoebe Mogharei, City Bureau
(Illustrations: Cori Lin/City Bureau)
This article is part of Will That New Development Benefit Your Community? The People’s Guide to Community Benefits Agreements and Alternatives.
Creating community criteria for all incoming developments
Good Neighbor Policy on Development, Southeast Side
For Alliance of the Southeast (ASE) executive director Amalia NietoGomez, the transition time between learning about Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) and creating one was fast. The Partnership for Working Families led an educational summit in 2013, where the newly hired NietoGomez and others learned what CBAs could do and how to make one. “We didn’t even know what a CBA was when we got started,” says NietoGomez. “All we knew was that there was this big development that was coming in and there were a lot of complaints [from community residents].”
Ultimately, she worked with community residents and roughly 35 allied community organizations to create the proposed Lakeside CBA for developer McCaffery Interests regarding the planned massive residential and retail development on the South Works site, a 440-acre area on the Southeast Side stretching from 79th to 91st Street that was formerly home to a U.S. Steel manufacturing plant.
But this wasn’t easy. NietoGomez says this process consisted of organizing many meetings to figure out what the community wanted. The Coalition held 11 listening sessions to create the Lakeside CBA, and another 2 community meetings to share the results of the listening sessions and present the CBA.
“We started with a list of things,” says NietoGomez. “We came up with three large pieces of paper. It turned out it was jobs, education and real affordable housing.”
NietoGomez knew she needed support beyond just ASE. “We couldn’t do it with just us so we had to broaden and expand to other folks or other organizations that we knew could also be part of the table,” she says.
McCaffery Interests abandoned their proposed development in 2016, and a new developer, Emerald Living, came in with a new plan for a megadevelopment. NietoGomez and the coalition behind the first CBA tweaked it and presented it to Emerald Living as the South Works CBA. But that development fell through as well, in large part due issues with funding, especially for remediation.
While those specific developments were not completed, the Southeast Side has been flooded with 15 new proposals and developments in the past three years. Because of this, the CBA coalition created the Good Neighbor Policy on Development in 2020, a comprehensive set of priorities and expectations for all future developments that want to come into their communities. Residents prioritized jobs and training, supporting local businesses and entrepreneurship, housing, environment, education and quality of life, with an emphasis on community voice, transparency and accountability. “We are inundated with developments on the Southeast Side,” says NietoGomez. “It doesn’t make sense to start a new CBA with all of them.”
The Coalition is using the Good Neighbor Policy as the basis for priorities for Invest South/West in South Chicago. The Coalition has also recently been in negotiations with the CTA assembly plant and NorthPoint.
Building a CBA coalition into a policy movement
Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance, Woodlawn and South Shore
When the Obama Foundation chose Jackson Park as the site for the Obama Presidential Center in 2016, reactions were mixed. In particular, the majority-Black neighborhoods around the proposed site had seen increased housing costs and displacement for years, and they feared that the presidential library would accelerate the process.
Jawanza Malone, former executive director of Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), is a cofounder of the Obama Community Benefits Agreement Coalition. He remembers convening the first community meetings to generate ideas that they wanted from the proposed development. “We categorized everything into six areas: economic development, education, employment, housing, sustainability and transportation,” Malone says. The coalition then met with researchers to provide guidance and data on the issues outlined by community members, as well as connecting with the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights for legal support.
The coalition worked on several CBA drafts over two years. “We started some semblance of negotiation with the University of Chicago, the city of Chicago and the Obama Foundation. I say a semblance of negotiation because they didn't want a community benefits agreement,” said Malone at a Public Newsroom event in 2019.
While they were not able to negotiate a CBA with the developers, they were able to gain public support and persuaded City Council to pass the Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance in 2020. The new law includes stricter affordable housing requirements for redeveloped lots in the area and provides over $4 million in loans, incentives and grants for local residents to buy property, rehab buildings or refinance and renovate their current homes in the Woodlawn neighborhood.
And since April 2021, the Obama Community CBA Coalition has focused on demanding protections for the nearby South Shore neighborhood as well. Those demands include expanding tenant protections, preserving/increasing affordable housing and public housing, protecting homeowners and expanding access to homeownership programs for housing voucher recipients. South Shore organizers have held town meetings, teach-ins and engaged residents door-to-door to capture what else the community wants to see in an ordinance. “If there's not a policy in place that addresses gentrification, folks eventually get pushed out,” says Dixon Romeo, lifelong South Shore resident and organizer with Not Me We, a housing and mutual aid organization.
Imagining new structures for community ownership
Neighborhood Stock Ownership Plans, The Bronx, New York
“The benefits agreement strategy has been used by neighborhoods for decades … But decades of empty promises made by corporations and government officials to communities have hurt the reputation of CBAs,” says Dr. Cary Goodman, executive director of the 161st Street Business Improvement District in the Bronx, New York.
Goodman wants to replace the typical CBA with a new model, the Neighborhood Stock Ownership Plan (NSOP), based on employee stock ownership plans that have been around since 1956. An NSOP is a community shareholder model where residents, workers, businesses and nonprofits in the development’s district would either be given shares in the development company or have the opportunity to buy them at a reduced price based on the length of time they’ve been in the area. This would allow the people who would be most affected by a development to materially benefit from it and have some decisionmaking power as shareholders, Goodman says.
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Goodman says this idea was born out of frustration with the lack of engagement with the Bronx community around the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009. Although the Yankees had what they called a CBA, it was negotiated by elected officials, not community groups. The resulting agreement promised almost $40 million in grants and sports equipment plus free tickets for local organizations. However, critics of the agreement noted the lack of community input in key decisions, such as the elimination of over 20 acres of park land. Goodman also points out that the Yankees does not directly pay property taxes, which he says would have been far higher than the amount they promised to pay toward the community in the CBA.
“People go to the Yankees Stadium to get a turkey for Thanksgiving, and maybe a free ticket. But what we are cultivating [with NSOPs] is that people have a real say,” says Goodman.
Residents are looking into this NSOP model for a proposed professional soccer stadium that has been teased in the Bronx. If an NSOP were to be implemented, community members, organizations and businesses could receive a cut of profits from stadium naming rights and broadcast fees. It would be the first test of the NSOP model. “New York City neighborhoods need a new strategy to safeguard their integrity and create a partnership among residents, local businesses, nonprofits, government and developers,” Goodman wrote in an opinion piece for the Gotham Gazette.
Will That New Development Benefit Your Community? The People’s Guide to Community Benefits Agreements and Alternatives informs, engages and equips Chicago residents to be active participants in the development process. Want to share this zine with your neighbors? You can order print copies in English and Spanish here.
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