To serve and to uplift

During the Great Migration, millions of African Americans left the South in search of a better life. Between 1916 and 1970, more than 500,000 people moved to Chicago, to places like Bronzeville on the city’s south side. The district’s name hints at the racism they faced. The name "Bronze" was chosen as a deliberate replacement for the racist epithets that had previously been used to refer to the area and its residents. 

In April, a team of University of Notre Dame MBA students took on the challenge of creating a revitalization plan for Bronzeville as part of Harold E. Eisenberg Foundation (HEEF) Real Estate Challenge, an annual contest that invites students from select universities across the country to tackle a high-profile development or redevelopment in the Midwest. 

The winning team included Notre Dame MBA students Josh Silvestri, Mark Giesey, Antanas Riskus and Ankit Vats. Ricardo Álvarez-Díaz, co-founder and CEO of Álvarez-Díaz & Villalón®, advisory board member for the  Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate (FIRE) and faculty instructor for the real estate development course, served as team mentor. 

“We drew inspiration from Bronzeville itself, but also from Greater Chicago,” said Silvestri, a first-year MBA student at Mendoza. “This city is very unique in that it has all of these different neighborhoods. Each has its own culture, but they also all flow together.” 

“The Harold E. Eisenberg Real Estate Challenge gives students reps doing the type of work they’ll do in their careers,” said Michael O’Malley, the executive director of the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, a partner of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “The requirements and objectives of the job are complex, and are the same ones that developers face in the real world. This is a competition with national reach. The best real estate programs in the country participate, so it’s a very meaningful win.”

The HEEF competition challenged students to propose a redevelopment of a disused 48-acre site that would serve as a centerpiece for a wider revitalization of the Bronzeville neighborhood. 

Bronzeville has a rich cultural heritage and a prime location just steps from the shores of Lake Michigan. But so far, plans to revitalize the neighborhood have fizzled. It was proposed as the site for the Olympic Village in Chicago’s ill-fated bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, as well as a site for a new stadium for the NFL’s Chicago Bears, who currently play just a few miles away at Soldier Field. Neither of those plans came to fruition. 

The Notre Dame team won the competition with a vision designed to serve and to uplift the existing Bronzeville community, while also making the neighborhood a destination for all Chicagoans. 

“We wanted to do this in a way that draws people to the neighborhood,” said Silvestri. “People aren’t living and working in this part of the neighborhood today. There's not much reason to — no food options, no entertainment and just not a lot of development.” 

To fill this gap, the team centered their proposal on two features: a 25,000-square-foot community event venue and concert hall, and a 40,000-square-foot food hall with space for 26 vendors. The concert hall taps into Bronzeville’s rich cultural history as a hub for jazz and blues music, and the food hall seeks to make it a destination. “The food hall was meant to draw people in, and we drew inspiration from Greater Chicago on this one,” said Giesey. “The city has a couple of successful large food halls like the Time Out Market in the Fulton Market District, but none is south of the Chicago River. Our idea was to create local jobs and give people a reason to come to Bronzeville.” 

Adjacent to the event space and food hall, three interconnected buildings would offer residential housing and hotel accommodation, with ground-floor retail and some small-scale office space designed to meet the needs of local businesses and community organizations. Finally, a parcel of land would be transformed into a community park with a basketball court, three pickleball courts, green space and a walking path — all centered on a small pond with native grasses, which help absorb runoff from heavy rains. 

The students credit their on-the-ground experience in Chicago with setting their proposed redevelopment apart. 

Both Silvestri and Riskus live in Chicago, and the team visited the Bronzeville site together to understand better what the area feels like on the ground. Their efforts to craft a proposal that benefits the existing community were well-received by the local stakeholders who helped judge the competition. 

All four team members agreed on this approach: They wanted to build on what was already there, rather than doing something totally different. In a highly competitive field, that might have made the difference.