Affordable housing on CTA Green Line opening by summer in Bronzeville

A CTA train shuddered into the 43rd Street station in historic Bronzeville and, standing in its shadow, Phillip Beckham III smiled thinking of everyone who would use it after moving into the high-rise that just went up beside it. 

“That’s the coolest sound in the city right there,” said Beckham of P3 Markets, one of the developers behind the new building.

Until recently, the lots around the South Side CTA station were vacant, like many others owned by the city. 

On Tuesday, Beckman, other developers and city officials celebrated the site’s transformation into a mixed-use high-rise through Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s signature Invest South/West program.

“We’re here to welcome our businesses to new customers and new opportunities,” said Beckham, speaking to a crowd that included Lightfoot and local 3rd Ward Ald. Pat Dowell. “We’re here to welcome our residents to new businesses that they don’t have to drive to.”

The building, on the southwest corner of 43rd Street and Calumet Avenue, is 10 stories tall, with 99 apartments and several thousand square feet of ground-floor retail space.

Construction began January 2022, and the building is expected to open this summer. About half the units will be set aside for those earning 60% of the area median income. For example, a family of four could earn up to $62,520 to be eligible for one of those units. The rest will be rented at market rate — about $2 per square foot.

About 500 people already have applied to live there, said Charlton Hamer of the Habitat Affordable Group, one of the developers behind the project. Three retail tenants are planned on the ground floor, he said, including two restaurants.

This first building is dubbed 43G One; Hamer said construction would begin on the second phase, 43G Two, this summer. That’s another 10-story high-rise, on the other side of the Green Line tracks. Construction is expected to last 15 months. It would have at least two commercial tenants and 80 apartments, with 44 of those affordable.

The first building cost $38.5 million. The expected cost of the second is $44.5 million, Habitat said. Both were funded with $15 million in tax increment financing funds, $9.5 million in multifamily loans and $4.2 million in 9% low-income housing tax credits, according to the city. They also received $14 million from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The city and developers hope it will revitalize the dormant 43rd Street commercial corridor and be a bellwether for city efforts to grow the South and West sides by developing sites around CTA and Metra routes.

“We have transit assets all over the city, so they shouldn’t be going just downtown or the North Side,” said Marisa Novara, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Housing.

Other projects in the same vein include a recently announced mixed-use development along the Green Line on the West Side; the Park Stations Lofts development near a Woodlawn Metra station; and another Invest South/West project near the Green Line station at 63rd and Halsted streets.

Novara touted the projects as examples of the city finding the right use for vacant lots.

“If we have land near an asset like transit, we should be leveraging it for the best use,” she said.

As she concluded her remarks, there was another arrival at the station obove.

“We love the sound of that train,” she said.

Michael Loria is a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South and West sides.