Former Harold Ickes Homes Site Adding 80 New Apartments

Construction started this week on a 12-story apartment building at the former Harold Ickes Homes site in the South Loop, adding 80 units to a mixed-income development that has been reshaping one of Chicago’s most historically significant public housing footprints.

The project, known as Southbridge 1C, is the third phase of the larger Southbridge development at 2305 S. State St. Developer The Community Builders broke ground Monday alongside project partners and city officials. The building will also include 1,500 square feet of ground-floor retail space. Construction is expected to wrap in June 2027.

Harold Ickes Homes stood for decades as one of the city’s largest public housing complexes before the Chicago Housing Authority demolished it as part of the Plan for Transformation, the sweeping effort that cleared high-rise towers across the South and West sides beginning in the early 2000s. What replaced Ickes has been slower to materialize. Southbridge represents one of the more concrete answers to what comes next for that land.

The Community Builders finished the first two phases of Southbridge in 2021. Southbridge 1C brings the development into its next chapter, and the pace isn’t slowing. Funding has already been secured for a fourth phase, which will also offer 80 units, according to Will Woodley, senior vice president of real estate development for The Community Builders.

That’s 160 more units on the way.

“We’re excited to deliver homes and neighborhood amenities that help residents of all incomes live, work and thrive,” Woodley told the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Southbridge master plan was designed by Gensler, the global architecture firm with a Chicago office that has worked on major projects across the city. The site sits directly adjacent to the Cermak-McCormick Place Green Line stop, which gives future residents immediate transit access to the Loop and points south. Woodley said the location is also close to schools, parks, and job centers, and serves as a connection point between Bronzeville and Chinatown, two neighborhoods that don’t always get linked in city planning conversations but share the same corridor along State Street.

That geographic positioning matters in a way that goes beyond real estate marketing copy. The South Loop has seen significant private development over the past 15 years, but the blocks closest to the old public housing footprint didn’t always benefit evenly. Bringing mixed-income housing into that gap, with retail anchoring the ground floor, reflects a model the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has pushed since the 1990s as an alternative to concentrated poverty.

Whether it works depends on execution. The Community Builders, a nonprofit developer with projects across the country, has a track record that includes affordable and mixed-income work in Illinois. The first two Southbridge phases gave the project a foundation, and phase three will test whether that momentum holds through a tighter construction and financing environment than the one that existed five years ago.

Chicago’s housing market has tightened considerably since 2021. Rents across the city rose through 2023 and 2024, and the affordable unit pipeline has struggled to keep pace with demand citywide. The Chicago Department of Housing has identified the South Side as a priority area for investment, though funding constraints have slowed several projects in neighborhoods farther south than the South Loop.

Southbridge 1C doesn’t face those same obstacles, at least not yet. The financing for phase three is in place, and phase four already has its funding secured. That kind of stacked development pipeline is unusual and gives The Community Builders a clearer runway than most developers working in the affordable housing space right now.

The Cermak-McCormick Place Green Line stop gives the project a transit asset that many comparable South Side developments lack. Access to the CTA Green Line at that location connects residents to jobs in the Loop within 15 minutes, a meaningful advantage for lower-income households that depend on public transit.

Woodley said the project’s location as a connector between Bronzeville and Chinatown was intentional in the master plan. Those two communities have distinct histories and demographics, but they share State Street as a common artery, and Southbridge sits in the middle of that corridor with the potential to serve both.

Phase three is expected to be complete by June 2027, at which point The Community Builders will likely be well into construction on phase four.