In the beginning, Richard Taub recalls, it was just an idea passed to him over the backyard fence by his next-door neighbor.
South Shore’s bankers have successfully wedded the best aspects of business and not-for-profit groups to create a model for inner-city development. The bank draws and distributes investment dollars from a wide variety of sources. One of its holding companies, City Lands Corporation, wheels and deals with downtown banks and investors to arrange for-profit housing and business deals. And finally, its not-for-profit subsidiary, the Neighborhood Institute, offers education and job-training programs, and oversees the development of housing co-ops for low-income residents.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
To be sure, South Shore still has problems, particularly along its business strips where too many stores are vacant. About 15 percent of its residents live on an income below the poverty level, and its public schools are in poor shape.
Because of the bank, however, South Shore will likely grow, assuming that with the coming of a new administration in Washington, the federal government regains its senses and starts investing in its cities again.
Of course, the real problem was not race, but economics. Many of the new black residents had pushed their way up from intolerable conditions in Woodlawn, Englewood, North Lawndale, and other impoverished south- and west-side communities. They didn’t have the money to maintain their property, and their landlords had no incentive to do it for them. Why bother, if the tenants could not afford to cover the improvements in the form of higher rents?
The killing blow might have come in 1972, when South Shore Bank, a long-standing neighborhood institution, announced plans to move to the Loop.
If South Shore’s bankers had a model, it was Lincoln Park. It too had been a community on the slide. And then, in the 1960s, the federal government financed the reconstruction of dozens of blocks. That investment cleared the way for thousands of private investors, large and small.
