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Effective Date:Nov 8, 2026
CHICAGO - The Chicago Housing Authority has released its final Cabrini NOW Development Framework Plan, a blueprint for roughly 4,100 mixed-income homes across 43 acres of agency-owned land remaining in the former Cabrini-Green public housing community on the Near North Side.
The framework divides 16 CHA-owned parcels into four development areas - Rowhomes, Division, Larrabee and Sedgwick - and sets targets for housing, public open space and street connections in each. It follows a year-long planning and community engagement process involving hundreds of residents, developed alongside the Cabrini-Green Local Advisory Council, the Near North Unity Program, the 27th Ward and city agencies.
"Every year that CHA-owned land sits vacant in Cabrini-Green, it's a cost to the families waiting to come home and to a city that needs housing," said CHA CEO Keith Pettigrew, who said the framework establishes clear expectations for prospective development partners and provides a basis for moving projects forward.
The Rowhome sites are planned for roughly 1,100 new units spread across townhomes and low-, mid- and high-rise buildings, with a number of vacant historic rowhomes retained and rehabilitated rather than demolished. The Larrabee sites, spanning six parcels, would bring around 1,200 units, primarily in low- to mid-rise buildings. The Division sites are slated for about 1,000 units, mostly mid- and high-rise construction, plus roughly an acre of new public open space. The Sedgwick sites would hold around 650 units in mid- to high-rise buildings.
Across all four areas, the framework calls for 33 to 40 percent of units to be designated as CHA housing, with no more than 20 percent affordable and no more than 50 percent market-rate. That mix is not optional: it reflects the requirements of a federal consent decree rooted in the Gautreaux litigation, the landmark case that found CHA had engaged in a pattern of racial discrimination in selecting public housing sites and ordered a comprehensive remedial plan. A 2000 court authorization allowed revitalization of the Cabrini-Green site to proceed, and every new building in the footprint must still honor the court-ordered housing mix.
The plan identifies about 9.1 acres of new public open space, anchored by a green corridor connecting Durso Park, the Jesse White Community Center and Seward Park. The Rowhome area plan calls for extending Durso Park toward Seward Park to form a unified seven-acre park, one of the largest new green spaces on the Near North Side in decades.
Street improvements will include rebuilding sidewalks and establishing safer pedestrian routes around Skinner North Elementary School, a response to longstanding community concerns about children crossing construction zones and wide arterial streets in the neighborhood.
The framework also directs that community programming be incorporated to recognize the history and legacy of Cabrini-Green, once one of the most concentrated public housing communities in the country. At its peak the neighborhood's high-rises and rowhomes housed more than 15,000 people. The last of the high-rises came down in 2011, and much of the land has sat empty ever since.
CHA said the framework grew out of three community meetings and roughly 30 stakeholder meetings and engagements, with a draft version open for public comment from May 30 through June 15, 2025. The agency said the review and approval process needed to finalize the report was delayed during an extended leadership transition period.
The engagement matters because Cabrini-Green's redevelopment history is freighted with broken promises. Thousands of families were displaced when the high-rises fell, many with a promised right to return, and community organizations have spent two decades pressing the authority to rebuild at the scale of what was demolished. The Local Advisory Council and the Near North Unity Program were formal partners in shaping the final document, giving returning residents and their advocates a direct seat in the process.
CHA plans to begin applying for zoning changes and issuing site-specific solicitations for development partners on the first sites throughout 2027. Development partners will be recommended by CHA and the Near North Working Group, subject to approval by the CHA Board of Commissioners.
Previous redevelopment efforts on parts of the land have stumbled. A Hunt Development Group-led team walked away from a deal in August 2024 after failing to secure financing for a project that had pursued 480 units in mid-rise buildings. David Block of the newer Cabrini New Vision team cited shifting tariff policies and persistent interest-rate pressure as factors complicating construction costs, and said his team sought to avoid similar financial pitfalls.
That separate proposal, known as Cabrini New Vision, calls for about 450 apartments across four buildings, at least 180 of them CHA-subsidized, plus roughly 75 condo and townhome units developed in five phases over five to six years. It has been approved by CHA and is proceeding on its own track, independent of the broader framework.
The new framework builds on more than twenty years of work under the Plan for Transformation launched in 2000 under former Mayor Richard M. Daley. CHA says it has brought more than 3,500 homes back to the community since the early 2000s, a tally that includes 1,226 low-income units and 867 affordable units across 25 mixed-income sites, along with projects like Parkside Phase 5, a 99-unit development with a community and fitness center.
Figures on the overall size of the master plan have shifted slightly in public reporting: an earlier version of the Cabrini NOW plan described about 4,080 mixed-income units across roughly the same 43 acres, while the finalized framework and subsequent reporting cite approximately 4,100 homes.
For the families on CHA's waiting lists, the framework's significance is its scale: if built out as planned, Cabrini NOW would more than double the number of homes returned to the Near North Side footprint, on land that has sat largely vacant while Chicago's housing costs have climbed.
Pettigrew said the document gives the market a predictable basis for moving projects forward. Whether the 2027 solicitations draw stronger financing than the failed 2024 deal will determine how quickly the first new buildings rise, and whether the families waiting to come home see doors open or another decade of empty land.
Key milestones include the first zoning applications, the initial site solicitations, and the Board of Commissioners votes that will formally select development partners. Each will be a public test of whether Cabrini NOW is a building program or another plan on a shelf.
The court-ordered housing mix embedded in Cabrini NOW traces back to one of the most important fair housing cases in American history. A 1969 federal judgment in the Gautreaux litigation found that CHA had engaged in a pattern of racial discrimination in selecting public housing sites, concentrating Black families in segregated neighborhoods, and ordered a comprehensive remedial plan. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court and produced a pioneering mobility program that moved thousands of Chicago families to opportunity-rich neighborhoods.
For Cabrini-Green specifically, a 2000 court authorization allowed revitalization to proceed under rules designed to guarantee that former public housing residents would share in whatever was built on the cleared land. The requirement that 33 to 40 percent of new units serve CHA families, with affordable and market-rate housing making up the balance, is the direct descendant of that legal history.
Advocates for former residents have long argued that the pace of rebuilding has failed the promise of the decree. Families displaced from the high-rises received vouchers, relocation assistance and, in many cases, a right to return, but the homes they were told to wait for took years longer than projected, and some sites have remained fenced-off grass for a generation.
Cabrini-Green sits in one of the most valuable real estate markets in the Midwest, bordered by Lincoln Park, Old Town and the booming Fulton Market corridor. Every acre of vacant CHA land in the footprint represents foregone homes in a neighborhood where a one-bedroom apartment can rent for more than many working families earn.
The framework attempts to convert that underlying value into construction momentum by giving developers clarity before they spend money: defined sites, defined unit targets, a defined affordability mix, and a defined approval path through the Near North Working Group and the CHA board. The 2024 Hunt Development Group collapse showed what happens without durable financing; the framework is CHA's answer, pairing public land with explicit expectations so that site solicitations in 2027 attract partners who can actually close.
For other public housing authorities watching from around the country, Cabrini NOW is a test of whether large-scale mixed-income redevelopment can still work in high-cost markets after two decades of mixed results. Chicago's experience will shape how federal officials, lenders and advocates judge similar plans on former public housing land elsewhere.
CHA officials said the framework is designed to be a living document, with unit counts and site plans refined as zoning and financing come together for each parcel. The agency committed to continued engagement with the Local Advisory Council and Near North Unity Program as individual projects advance, and to regular public reporting on progress against the framework's targets.
The Chicago Housing Authority has released its final Cabrini NOW Development Framework Plan, calling for roughly 4,100 mixed-income homes across 43 acres and 16 CHA-owned sites in the former Cabrini-Green footprint on the Near North Side.
The plan divides the land into four areas - Rowhomes, Division, Larrabee and Sedgwick - with unit targets ranging from about 650 to 1,200 homes per area and building types from townhomes to high-rises. Vacant historic rowhomes will be preserved and rehabilitated.
Under a federal consent decree rooted in the Gautreaux litigation, 33 to 40 percent of units must be CHA housing, with affordable units capped at 20 percent and market-rate at 50 percent. The framework also calls for about 9.1 acres of new public open space and safer pedestrian routes around Skinner North Elementary School.
The plan followed a year-long engagement process with hundreds of residents, the Cabrini-Green Local Advisory Council, the Near North Unity Program, the 27th Ward and city agencies, including a public comment period on the draft in mid-2025.
CHA plans to seek zoning changes and issue site-specific solicitations for development partners beginning in 2027, with partners recommended by CHA and the Near North Working Group and approved by the CHA Board of Commissioners.
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