North Lawndale, Chicago

North Lawndale
Community area
Community Area 29 - North Lawndale
The former Sears Merchandise Building's Tower, as seen from the Sunken Garden
Location within the city of Chicago
Coordinates: 41°51.6′N 87°42.6′W / 41.8600°N 87.7100°W / 41.8600; -87.7100
Country	United States
State	Illinois
County	Cook
City	Chicago
Neighborhoods	List Lawndale Homan Square Douglas Park
Area
• Total	3.20 sq mi (8.29 km2)
Population  (2020)[1]
• Total	34,794
• Density	11,000/sq mi (4,200/km2)
Demographics 2018[1]
• White	3.00%
• Black	87.39%
• Hispanic	8.83%
• Asian	0.17%
• Other	0.61%
Time zone	UTC-6 (CST)
• Summer (DST)	UTC-5 (CDT)
ZIP Codes	parts of 60608, 60623 and 60624
Median household income	$26,781[1]
Source: U.S. Census, Record Information Services

North Lawndale is one of the 77 community areas of the city of Chicago, Illinois, located on its West Side. The area contains the K-Town Historic District, the Foundation for Homan Square, the Homan Square interrogation facility, and the greatest concentration of greystones in the city. In 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stayed in an apartment in North Lawndale to highlight the dire conditions in the area and used the experience to pave the way to the Fair Housing Act.

The community area was annexed from Cicero Township in 1869. After the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, plant workers moved to the area to support a new McCormick Reaper Company plant. Demographics shifted in 1890 towards immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with many Czech cultural institutions and churches established in the area. The Czech in the area migrated towards the suburbs until a new influx of residents, Jewish former residents of Maxwell Street, became the majority around 1918 before moving northward around 1955. In the 1950s, another wave of residents, black people from the South Side and American South, became the new majority. Real estate brokers used blockbusting and scare tactics to remove white residents throughout the next decade.

Beginning in the 1960s, riots, housing discrimination, predatory lending, and other social and economic disasters led to many businesses and residents leaving, with waves of job loss, abandoned property, and poverty ensuing. Community residents formed the grassroots organization the Contract Buyers League in 1968 to combat the discriminatory and predatory housing practices targeting the area. Assisted by a Jesuit seminarian and twelve white college students, the organization fought the discriminatory real estate practice known as "contract selling", renegotiating around 400 housing contracts and saving an estimated $25,000,000 for exploited black homeowners. In 1986, the Steans Family Foundation was founded to concentrate on grantmaking and programs in the community; the foundation noted signs of revitalization by the 1990s with new shopping and dining, the creation of Homan Square, and new residents moving in – this time Hispanic, and a stabilization in population decrease. Beginning in 2021, violence prevention groups led by READI Chicago, Communities Partnering 4 Peace, and Chicago CRED began using large-scale relationship-based intervention tactics in the neighborhood, and city funds created a Community Safety and Coordination Center to centralize community resources. From 2021 to 2022, North Lawndale saw a 58%^[2] decrease in gun violence.

Reinvestment efforts in the decades following 1990 include proposals of new raised greenway parks and new affordable/mixed-income housing development, though the community has raised concerns of how to reinvest into the area without gentrification pricing out longtime residents. In 2022, the area had a new grocery store to alleviate the area food desert and received a proposal for a new STEAM academy.