Chicago, Illinois

A Case Study of Community Wealth Building (CWB)

Community Profile

Situated on the east side of Lake Michigan with a population of over 2.7 million (U.S. Census Bureau 2020), Chicago is the third largest city in the United States (City of Chicago 2024). Nearly one third of Chicago’s residents are Black. Another third are Latinx, indicative of the city’s rich immigrant history. In fact, Cook County (of which Chicago is the county seat) has the fifth largest immigrant population in the United States (Migration Policy Institute 2022).

Median gross rent in Chicago is around $1,300 (2020)—lower than most cities of its size (DePietro 2023)—but as of 2021, nearly 70,000 Chicagoans were unhoused (Chicago Coalition for the Homeless 2023). 

The median household income in Chicago is approximately $70,000, though over 17% of people live below the poverty line. The story of wealth—as compared to income—in Chicago is characterized by stark racial disparity. According to a recent report, “Color of Wealth in Chicago”, “White families have the highest median net worth ($210,000) while Black families reported a median net worth of virtually no wealth ($0). In Chicago, the median net worth estimates for a U.S. born Mexican family is $40,500 (which amounts to 19 percent of a typical White family), for a foreign-born Mexican family it is $6,000 (which amounts to only three percent of a typical White family), and the estimate for the typical Puerto Rican family is $24,000 (which is about 11 percent of the wealth of the typical White family)” (Bhaskaran et al. 2024). 

Forty-three percent of Chicagoans have a bachelor’s degree or higher while the unemployment rate is at around five percent . The majority of Chicago’s workers serve in the education, health, and tourism industries (U.S. Census Bureau 2020). When it comes to work, Chicago is no stranger to labor activism. Home of the Haymarket massacre, Chicago is considered to be the epicenter of labor movement organizing in the United States. Beyond labor, Chicago has a rich history of broad-based community activism and organizing—from Jane Addams and the Hull House to the Alinsky Organizing Model to the Chicago Freedom Movement—much of which informs the ethos and uptake of CWB today. So, it comes as no surprise that the advancement of CWB in Chicago did not start with the City. 

Background and History

For years, local and national solidarity economy movement groups and values-aligned staff in city government worked to expand the cooperative sector in Chicago. These organizers understood that the disinvestment in majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods on the South and West sides of the city could only be addressed if residents had opportunities to build wealth. Put simply, residents needed to have ownership and direct control of the assets (businesses, homes, land, commercial property, etc.) in their neighborhoods. 

In response to this call, then newly elected mayor Lori Lightfoot—with support from the Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative—established the City of Chicago’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice (OERJ) in 2019, a cross-departmental office tasked with achieving “equity in the city’s service delivery, decision-making, and resource distribution” (City of Chicago n.d.). In the new year, Chief Equity Officer Candace Moore convened a small team including members from the Mayor’s Office, City Departments, and three external partners (LISC Chicago, World Business Chicago, and Black Chicago Tomorrow) to develop a strategy to address inequitable economic development. Moore and her staff also spoke with 44 other entities including six national thought leaders, four local funders, 10 ecosystem support organizations, and 24 community-based organizations prior to the working group kickoff meeting in April  2021. The team came to the ideas of CWB through The Democracy Collaborative, eventually developing their own framework and hiring Nneka Onwuzurike to lead the new CWB initiative. Soon after, a group of 20 community leaders was brought together to form an advisory council responsible for landing on a definition for Community Wealth Building in Chicago and harnessing the energy and enthusiasm of a number of groups across the city, especially in the South and West sides, to land the idea and approach of CWB. TDC worked with the City to produce an action plan which eventually fed into the CWB Initiative report, co-authored by the OERJ and the advisory council. 


Initially, the City was only willing to provide resources to advance on-the-ground work, but not necessarily hold the infrastructure. The advisory council argued that projects without technical assistance and financial support would not be enough. There were also conversations considering how CWB could be embedded within other departments, including the Department of Planning and Development (DPD), so that the approach could be the common transformative thread across all city operations. Finally, after two years of inside/outside organizing, as part of the Chicago Recovery Plan, the DPD and OERJ made an historic $15 million seed investment using American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds in a pilot to advance enterprise, infrastructure, and capacity-building in line with a CWB approach.

Overview of CWB in Chicago, Illinois

The CWB Advisory Council adopted four priority models (or pillars) alongside three guiding principles of the work in Chicago. The four pillars include worker cooperatives, limited-equity housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and community investment vehicles, respectively. The three principles are local, democratic, and shared ownership and control. These principles are essential to building an authentically cooperative and community owned economy in Chicago. In keeping with the wider ethos of CWB and its principles, Advisory Council members noted that they did not want this to become another program for minority contractors replicating traditional ownership structures. Instead, they wanted to make sure that all CWB projects exhibited high levels of community control and high levels of community ownership and were for residents’ benefit.     

The $15 million would be doled out across three phases over two years: 

  1. Strengthen the Ecosystem ($6 million): expand the capacity of the system by funding technical assistance providers working across six key areas—research and convening; education and outreach; legal and governance; business development; financing and fundraising; and assets and operations; 

  2. Build the Pipeline ($4 million): provide up to $150,000 in planning and pre-development grants alongside technical assistance to startup projects that meet community priorities across the four pillars; and 

  3. Invest in Pilot Projects ($4 million): offer large-scale development grants to supporting existing projects that have the capacity to scale, specifically with commercial development. 

Phase 1 also included funding for the Chicago Community Wealth Building Ecosystem (CCWBE), a newly incubated center at the Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED) at the University of Illinois Chicago, responsible for: 

  • convening and facilitating working groups for ecosystem partners; 

  • developing and disseminating tools and other resources (including a web-based platform to house said tools and resources); 

  • brokering relationships and making referrals to build the capacity of ecosystem partners; and 

  • conducting research and documenting/articulating the impacts of the work in order to advocate for CWB more broadly. 

Together, this work is supporting CWB activity across TDC’s Five Pillars in the following ways: 

Inclusive and democratic enterprise and fair work: business ownership

To date, the City of Chicago has directly invested in 10 pre-development (i.e. those moving from ideation and early-stage enterprises to democratic workplaces providing gainful employment) worker cooperatives across various industries, including manufacturing, arts, business services, retail, and food production. The City has also indirectly supported numerous established non-housing cooperative enterprises on the South and West sides of Chicago by investing in 11 CWB technical assistance providers (CCWBE n.d.). 

Just use of land and property: home ownership and land stewardship 

During Phase 2, the City of Chicago invested in seven limited-equity housing cooperatives and five community land trusts (CLTs). Limited or no equity housing cooperatives are critical to get affordable housing units in the hands of Chicago residents. Community land trusts enable locals to steward land outside the speculative market. As a result of the City’s investment in CLTs, there is now a federation of land trusts across the city (the COLT Federation) working together to expand affordable housing and community stewardship of vacant lots across the city (Chicago Community Loan Fund 2024). 

Locally rooted finance: commercial real estate

During Phase 2, the City of Chicago invested in four community investment vehicles (CIVs). According to the Community Desk Chicago, a CIV is “an umbrella term for commercial real estate shared ownership models, regardless of their legal structure (e.g., Perpetual Purpose Trust, C Corporation, etc.). A CIV is a legal investment mechanism that provides collective community investment in neighborhood assets based on shared development goal(s). In its perfect form, it is majority-controlled, majority-owned and designed by residents or local members” (2022). Often used to address gaps in affordable housing and threats of gentrification and displacement, CIVs serve as opportunities for residents to reclaim neglected commercial corridors or business buildings to develop affordable housing or other community needs. 

Challenges & Opportunities

As the City of Chicago prepares to invest the final $4 million in pilot projects across Chicago, several challenges remain. 

First and foremost, because the funding for CWB in Chicago came from a temporary mechanism (American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA), the ecosystem lacks permanent financing. Coupled with the extractive history and practice of the philanthropic sector, this can lead to a scarcity mindset in visioning and programming and increased competition, especially in a city like Chicago with a culture of top down machine politics where gatekeepers govern who gets what. 

However, there are opportunities to tap into existing community development funds across the Departments of Planning and Development, Housing, and Business Affairs & Consumer Protections. Additionally, philanthropy and the private sector can also align their programming and funding priorities to expand CWB efforts in the city. The same can be said for anchor institutions and their procurement strategies to help scale the efforts of CWB by guaranteeing the cashflow for inclusive and democratic enterprises to grow and scale. Beyond funding infrastructure, there is a critical need to embed this work beyond the OERJ and into the central ethos and implementation of the City’s economic strategy (for more details, see pages 43-44 of the CCWBE report). 

Second, the practicality required and urgency of economic development work can often feel in conflict with the aspirations of community organizing for resident participation. CCWBE leaders are thinking through how best they can position themselves via research, education, and advocacy to empower Chicagoans to have the guiding voice in shaping CWB projects across the four pillars. They are also working to expand the necessary institutional and technical assistance supports (e.g. bookkeeping and accounting services, legal supports) needed to effectively assist new, community-driven, grassroots projects. 

Ultimately, the work of building community wealth in Chicago is a long-term game and one that requires deep relationships moving at the speed of trust. CWB leaders in Chicago agree that, even though residents can be distrustful of city government at times, the City’s involvement does add legitimacy to the work and provides the opportunity to bring more people and communities into the fold. At the same time, the politics of city government require deep diplomacy and continued external pressure and advocacy, especially as the City of Chicago, for now, has decided not to continue to financially support or explicitly pursue CWB economic development strategies. 

By continuing to invest in advisory bodies rooted in community, such as the CWB Advisory Council or a future independent intermediary CCWBE body, and advancing broad public awareness and narrative change campaigns, leaders in Chicago will not only increase the visibility of CWB in the city, but also increase trust in the approach’s efficacy and long-term investment of both time and capital to deliver on the overarching promises of the City’s economic development strategy. 

Community Stakeholders

Resources