Chicago TREND Asks South Side Residents to buy Strip Mall Stake

Lyneir Richardson continues his quest to address racial wealth disparities by fostering commercial real estate ownership for Black residents and other minority groups in Chicago.

Since the civil unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Richardson’s organization, Chicago TREND, has launched three crowdfunding campaigns to create opportunities for Black investors, particularly within their own communities, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Chicago TREND’s latest endeavor involves the imminent purchase of the Roseland Medical and Retail Center strip mall at 100 West 111th Street, adjacent to Roseland Community Hospital. The crowdfunding campaign, hosted on the Small Change platform, invites community members to invest as little as $1,000 in the project.

“If people have a little ownership stake [in the center], they will patronize it and protect it and respect it in a different way,” Richardson told the outlet. “We want people to … financially benefit from it as the neighborhood gets stronger and as the shopping center gets stronger.”

The purchase price is $6 million, or about $222 per square foot, for the 27,000-square-foot strip mall whose tenants include two medical clinics, a pharmacy, restaurants and a nail salon.

Chicago TREND expects the crowdfunding campaign to raise between $100,000 and $1.25 million; Chicago TREND will fund the rest of an investment of $2.5 million. The source of the other $3.5 million wasn’t reported. The City of Baltimore last year gave Chicago TREND $9 million for investment in two community-owned shopping centers in that city.

The timing of the Roseland purchase aligns with the expansion of the CTA’s Red Line and the Roseland Community Medical District Master Plan, hinting that better days are ahead for the historically disinvested South Side community.

Abraham Lacy, president of the Far South Community Development Corporation, sees Chicago TREND’s efforts as instrumental in the neighborhood’s growth trajectory, adding that the Roseland Medical District has the potential to transform the community.

For Derrick Collins, dean of the College of Business at Chicago State University, the campaign represents more than just a real estate investment opportunity. It’s a chance for residents, particularly those with lower incomes, to learn about investing and financial empowerment.

“Those people that invest, they’re going to learn,” Collins said. “Then the next opportunity comes, they can take that experience and be more confident in how they assess the next deal.”

Chicago TREND’s commitment to diversity in ownership is evident, with 53 percent of investors being Black, 40 percent women and 58 percent residing in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, the outlet reported.

—Quinn Donoghue