Development Without Displacement Is a Capital Strategy, Not a Slogan

Every neighborhood that lands a new landmark hears the same promise ...

By J. Byron Brazier

Every neighborhood that lands a new landmark hears the same promise, and too many of them get the same ending. Investment arrives, values climb, and the families who held the block together through the lean decades are priced out before the ribbon is cut.

Woodlawn is watching that story unfold in real time. The Obama Presidential Center opened this summer a few blocks from my family’s church. In East Woodlawn, the median home price doubled between 2019 and 2025 to $440,000, according to DePaul University’s Institute for Housing Studies. One-bedroom apartments that rented for $1,200 now go for about $1,800 a month.

Last month, we broke ground on Woodlawn Central, a $580 million, eight-acre district on land owned by the Apostolic Church of God. The plan calls for roughly 870 homes, a 160-room hotel, retail, a theater, and 700 permanent jobs. People keep asking me how a church ended up as a developer. I think the better question is why more Black institutions have not.

My grandfather, Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, led Apostolic for 48 years. In the 1960s, as president of The Woodlawn Organization, he worked alongside Saul Alinsky to limit the University of Chicago’s expansion into our neighborhood. He understood something it took me years in the field to put into words: whoever controls the land controls the future of the people standing on it.

We usually talk about Black Wall Street as a memory, a symbol of what was taken. I read Greenwood as an operating manual. Tulsa’s Black district flourished as a self-contained hub where residents owned the buildings, the businesses, and the banks, so money earned in the neighborhood had reasons to stay there. The lesson for Woodlawn is structural, because ownership is what keeps value local.

In practice, development without displacement comes down to three financing decisions, and most projects get at least one of them wrong.

First, keep the land

Much of Woodlawn Central sits on what used to be the church’s parking lots, and the church is developing that ground rather than selling it. An institution that sells to the highest bidder collects one check and gives up any say in what gets built. Holding the land means the value the Obama Center is creating stays with an institution that answers to Woodlawn.

Second, set affordability above the minimum, and set it on day one

Chicago requires 20% of units to be affordable. Woodlawn Central targets 30%, with one- to three-bedroom and multigenerational homes so grandparents, parents, and children can stay on the same block. Affordability added late is the first thing that gets cut when budgets tighten. When it is built into the capital stack from the start, it holds.

Third, underwrite jobs, not only apartments

Housing alone cannot keep a family in a rising neighborhood if its income stays flat. That is why our plan pairs homes with a hotel, retail, office space, maker spaces, and business incubators, and why we count 700 permanent jobs as a core return, not a side benefit. A family that earns its living in Woodlawn has a real chance of affording a life in Woodlawn.

None of this is easy, and I will not pretend otherwise. Residents have raised fair concerns about displacement, and the city’s own tools have struggled to keep up. The $2 million set aside under the 2020 Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance went unspent. I take that as a warning rather than an excuse. Policy can slow displacement, but ownership is what stops it.

I call myself a cultural architect because I believe a neighborhood’s culture is its most valuable asset and the one most easily lost. Our first phase, a $134 million pair of 14-story towers designed by Gensler, is scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2028. When it does, I want the people who kept the lights on in Woodlawn through the hardest years to walk in as residents, workers, and owners.

Black churches own land in cities across this country, and much of it sits in neighborhoods that are about to get expensive. Every one of those congregations will face the question my grandfather answered 60 years ago: will you sell the ground, or build on it?

About the Author

J. Byron Brazier is the lead developer of Woodlawn Central and a cultural architect based in Chicago.