Revitalization for Whom? A Critical and Spatial Analysis of Chicago's Neighborhood Opportunity Fund

Decades of segregationist housing policies, disinvestment, and structural racism have stratified urban America into wealthier and whiter neighborhoods, and poorer communities of color. The former typically have healthy commercial districts, while the latter struggle to keep businesses alive and attract investment. In response to this, government, non-profit, and private sector actors have attempted place-based solutions, which aim to improve the lives of residents in historically disinvested communities by creating new resources, including businesses. This study examines one such place-based strategy: the City of Chicago's Neighborhood Opportunity Fund (NOF), which is only about six years old and is little studied. It is one of an extremely limited number of large, municipally-run and -financed commercial revitalization programs. The qualitative section of this mixed-methods study analyzes the structure of the NOF, evaluating it against the literature on commercial revitalization and hypothesizing about its efficacy and potential for gentrification considering this literature. The quantitative section uses several datasets from the City of Chicago and the US Census Bureau to answer three questions: What is the spatial distribution of NOF grants? Are grants disproportionately awarded to certain groups, with regard to demographic, social, economic, housing, and transportation characteristics? And are grants being awarded to gentrifying areas? Given that the ultimate goal of the NOF should be the improvement of people's lives in Chicago's most under-resourced neighborhoods, the study finds that the program is structured poorly to do so, and it may exacerbate gentrification and displacement. The study also finds that grants are distributed unevenly across space, with clustering in Little Village, Bronzeville, and South Shore; grants do not disproportionately affect any particular group; and while the program does not disproportionately award grants to gentrifying neighborhoods, certain neighborhoods at high risk of gentrification do receive a large number of grants, namely Bronzeville. These results are used to craft policy recommendations. This study will be most directly useful to the City of Chicago as they realign NOF eligibility criteria and structure to achieve better results. More broadly, urban planners and policymakers will find this study useful as they craft future neighborhood revitalization efforts.