“In the heart of Chicago’s South Side, Bronzeville is one of the most influential neighborhoods in the story of Black homeownership in America,” says REALTOR® Rashauna Scott, co-partner at Keller Williams, OneChicago. “Bronzeville’s story started as a journey, back during the Great Migration, when thousands of families traveled north to find opportunities and create pathways towards generational wealth.”
Beginning around 1916—years after Reconstruction failed to protect Black civil and economic rights—hundreds of thousands of Black Americans left the South and moved to Chicago, encouraged by the Chicago Defender, a highly respected African American newspaper founded Robert S. Abbott in 1905. The Defender said jobs were available as people left the city to fight in World War I, explains Bernard Turner, executive director, Bronzeville-Black Metropolis National Heritage Area, designated a National Heritage Area by Congress in 2023. The newspaper was distributed in the South and shared by Pullman porters on trains, says Turner, author of “A New View of Bronzeville” and a children’s book, “When We Came to Bronzeville.”
Black Americans found their way to other northern enclaves, too: New York’s Harlem neighborhood and Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward and North Philadelphia.
In Chicago, the Bronzeville area appealed for its location near Lake Michigan and the city’s downtown, Scott says. It also had a rich stock of homes built with light-gray Indiana limestone that became known as greystones. Built beginning around the 1880s, the greystones are distinctive not just for their coloring but for turrets, wide front steps and detailed carvings.
The area became a mecca for African American entrepreneurs who used their savings to build homes, businesses and cultural institutions in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Facing ‘Fierce Systemic Boundaries’
Initially, it proved hard for Black area residents to purchase these homes.
“There were several barriers that prohibited people from buying homes in the community, including restrictive covenants, redlining, [and land] contracts that were bogus,” says Turner. “Families faced fierce systemic boundaries.”
“To overcome these barriers, when the system shut them out, they built their own Black-owned [financial institutions] like Binga, Supreme Life Insurance, church-run sponsored credit unions,” Scott says. “The community insured itself, financed itself, and in doing so, financed homeownership for thousands of families who had nowhere else to turn.”
“This community was really built by resilience, by people being determined to be successful, and it was built on pride,” Turner says.
As more Black people moved in, white residents relocated to the city’s North and West sides, leaving the area in transition, Turner says. In fact, the name Bronzeville emerged sometime in the 1930s or ‘40s to give the area positive recognition versus its former derogatory term “Black Belt,” he says. “And then the name kind of stuck.”
“In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled racially restrictive covenants unenforceable,” Scott says. “That happened in large part because Black homeowners kept buying, kept challenging and kept fighting until the law eventually caught up.”
Chicago’s Black Metropolis: ‘A City Within a City’
Turner credits the main driver of area growth to the increasing number of Black-owned businesses, which provided for the needs of neighbors, so they didn’t need to go downtown. Their earnings enabled them to purchase homes.
“Bronzeville is now known as a "Black Metropolis" because it emerged from a neighborhood that was segregated,” he says. “So many businesses that developed here in the community to meet the needs of the people. Clothing stores, grocery stores, newspapers, community organizations, churches. It was virtually a city within a city.”
“Owning a home here means the ability to be proud of where you live,” says homeowner Quincy Liam Mingo who bought an 1890 greystone four years ago and likes living in a city, having grown up in several along the East Coast. He also appreciates Bronzeville’s extensive historical Black connections.
“Ida B. Wells used to live in Bronzeville, Muhammad Ali,” Mingo says. “We're four blocks from where the Obamas used to have their main home. It has a rich Black history. I could come back to a community that is of me, that's like me, that has a history beyond me.”
There were many others who found a sense of community in Bronzeville. “So, you think of Louis Armstrong, Robert Abbott who owned the Defender newspaper. It's almost like being in a little museum,” Turner says.
Many historic homes and buildings have markers proudly highlighting key sites such as where Wells, Armstrong and Nat King Cole lived; Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1894 Robert W. Roloson Houses, the only row homes he designed; The Forum, a community hub from 1897; the Defender building from 1899, and the Supreme Life Building, where the first African American insurance company was founded in 1919.
Monuments honor other watersheds—Alison Saar’s Great Migration sculpture and Leonard Crunelle’s Victory Monument for the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, an African American unit in France during World War I.
A Target for Millennial Investment
“Bronzeville helps shape the conversation on housing equity and equality for all,” Scott says. “Historically in this community, agents advocate for access to homeownership. Whether it’s a down payment assistance grant program, [we] definitely help connect homeowners to opportunities that can help catapult their wealth, especially in a neighborhood like here.”
“Homeownership means generational wealth for my family," Mingo says. "We’re not here as renters. We’re invested. And so, for me, it’s like, it’s a piggy bank for my son. The city is making investments so I, as a homeowner, like that my investment’s likely to appreciate, and I do my part to care for my property."
Being present is part of the magic of homeownership, he says. “You have to be able to be in the community and be of the community so you can create the community.”
Bronzeville continues to evolve. Many greystones have been rehabilitated, and some coach houses have become accessory dwelling units that homeowners occupy or rent out, according to area guidelines.
“Many young families like the area because of its proximity to downtown or because of being able to have a garage, parking, backyard and more square footage than they would elsewhere,” Scott says.
The Bronzeville area was once home to large public housing buildings. With those projects torn down, there’s incentive for new development.
“Millennials are buying greystones or other buildings with a few units and living in one and renting out the others for investment—what’s called ‘house hacking,’” Scott says.
Mingo followed that path. He lives in one unit in his greystone and rents out the other three. “It helps to pay the mortgage,” he says. “We also like living not too close to downtown to experience neighbors better, living in a Black neighborhood, on a one-way street … and near amenities, such as Washington Park one block away and Hyde Park, a five-minute drive with the University [of Chicago campus] and hospital.”
Long Dormant Land Becomes Needed Housing
Even before the new 19.3-acre Barack Obama Presidential Center opened just a few miles to the south of Bronzeville, the area began to experience its latest renaissance, making it harder to find housing as prices climb, Scott says. “My business is right in the middle of the renaissance with new construction, some restaurants and some commercial spaces,” she says.
There’s concern that gentrification may displace many, Turner says. “At the same time, there’s a lot of people and families who have owned some of these buildings for generations and have passed them along to their families,” he says. “And those families are stable in the community.”
New multifamily rentals are giving many a chance to live in the area before they’re ready or able to buy a home. “These developments also bring new life to once dilapidated areas,” Mingo says.
Adjacent to the 43rd Street CTA Green Line station where there was vacant land for more than 50 years, Chicago developer Habitat, in partnership with P3 Markets, constructed 179 mixed-income apartments in the first and second phases of its 43 Green community. “The successful lease-up of its first two phases of development underscores the area’s demand for high-quality, mixed-income housing,” says Charlton Hamer, senior vice president of Habitat Affordable Group.
A potential third phase is being considered as part of 43 Green’s long-term planning. The combination of new housing and an equitable transit-oriented development hub, the first on the South Side, has become a catalyst for broader investment of $100 million in the area, Hamer says.
“Today, Bronzeville continues to honor its rich legacy through restoring greystones, revitalized landmarks and ongoing investments,” Scott says. “Its story reminds us that homeownership is about more than just owning property. It is about identity, opportunity, community and the enduring belief that everyone deserves a place to call home.”
