Last week, the Southland Development Authority held a bus tour to highlight its work as "a non-profit business organization designed to grow the economy of the South Suburbs."
Participants could board the bus at 118 N. Clark St. in the Loop, or 14829 Dixie Highway in Harvey. The topics discussed included housing, commercial, industrial, and grocery store development, including transit-oriented development.
One of the first stops on the tour was the Amazon facility in Harvey. SDA CEO Bo Kemp explained that Amazon has about a million square feet of space here. "One of the things that isn't here as much as could be yet is workforce housing," he said. "Right across the street from Amazon... there's probably a solid ten acres of property that's available for us for us for development. We're looking to try to leverage some of the new legislation, HB1377 and others, that will allow us to play an active role in developing workforce housing that's directly across the street."
"You'll see this in a lot of places," Kemp added. "Intermittent blight. So you'll see parts of the neighborhood which are very well-kept and strong. And you'll see in the same block blight. We use the land bank to try to adjust those issues. But we're very focused on building property density."
"This is an interesting dilemma," Kemp said as the bus passed a stretch with no sidewalks. "When they put this here, to get to and from work... there previously hadn't even been buses. So people would actually come out here and wait for their buses."
However, Kemp pointed out that there was was plenty of land nearby available for development. "In a perfect world, and frankly the deal for this Amazon was done before [SDA] was even created, we were born in November 2019, that should have been part of the deal in the first place... to facilitate actually allowing this area to be developed. But there is still the opportunity for us to take advantage of it. Amazon spent about $3 billion and has about 18 or 20 different locations in the area. The investment kind of comes up and goes down. Because as the economy goes, and as the supply chain goes, they are managing not just this particular site, but they're managing all their investments."
Kemp explained that Amazon investments typically follow the [Elgin Joliet and Eastern Railway]. "The EJ&J goes all the way around [the Chicago region.]" he said. "There's basically two ways to get around. From Chicago, there's a basically a two to two-and-a-half-day drive to anyplace in the continental U.S. 60 percent, almost two thirds, of every single container that you see on a boat, on a rail or anything, actually comes through the city of Chicago or through the south suburbs. About 30 percent goes through New Orleans in the south. The rest of it comes through here, and that's whether it hits Mexico, Canada or the United States. That's why all the rails here stop you whenever you're driving around, most of the time it takes two and a half days to get here by rail. It takes two and a half days to get through Chicago. So the EJ&J rail line takes actually takes you around through all of the suburbs and goes specifically through these southern suburbs here."
"They've been building through this corridor to follow I-57, I-80, the EJ&J line, all the things that were on the outskirts, in order to facility having this area be the place where you 'pick and pack,'" Kemp said. "So you ship everything here, whether it comes from Prince Edward Island in Canada, or it comes down through New Orleans, or it comes through the Panama Canal, or what have you. Bring it up here, break it up, and you put it on rail, you put it on a ship, or you put it on a plane, and you ship it to the rest of the country. That's one of the reasons why this is a core transportation logistics area for the entirity of the United States."
"There was a great piece in Crain's over the summer, about the idea that 'climate migration' will bring more people to the Upper Midwest than the African-American Great Migration did from the '40s to the '60s," said commercial real estate attorney Jay S. Readey during the tour. "And so we're looking at mass migration, and you have to ask, 'Where are you going to put those people?' And Harvey is a perfect answer. It's an example of many of the other places that were hit hard by the housing crash in 2008-9 and have had trouble coming back."
The bus arrived in downtown Harvey, where Readey talked about the current local transportation situation. He explained that the Pace Harvey Transportation Center "has more bus traffic than anywhere else in the south suburbs. You put that next to the newly redesigned Metra station, you've got City Hall a block away, and there's the Harvey Lofts [affordable housing development]."
"Transit-oriented development is what you're seeing all around you," said SDA Director of Municipal Economic Development Nicholas Greifer during the tour. "We're going to see the Harvey Lofts. It's a five-story building that I worked on with a really experienced private developer, Pivotal Realty partners... You'll see in minutes, a beautiful new building. The exterior is basically 100 percent done, and now they're working on the interior... The combination of the Harvey lofts plus the Metra station that's being redeveloped, those two things will change the future of Harvey's downtown."
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