| The Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois is a study in contrasts. On the one hand it is a robust community with a strong Latino cultural presence that provides stability and a focus for community-building activities. On the other hand, the community is threatened by both poverty and gentrification. Racial discrimination, language and skill barriers, and real estate disinvestments have resulted in a neighborhood-wide poverty rate of 35 percent and an unemployment rate of 15 percent. At the same time, trendy stores, galleries and restaurants are already becoming prominent in certain sections of Humboldt Park, due to its close proximity to Chicago's commercial and wealthy residential communities, and to the 200-acre park that bears its name.
DePaul University is using a New Directions COPC grant to help its community partners implement a strategic plan that calls for creating economic development opportunities in Humboldt Park and ensuring that residents have full access to a wide range of housing opportunities. The Humboldt Park Empowerment Partnership (HPEP), a grassroots organization, carried out the independent, bottom-up strategic planning process as part of the neighborhood's application to HUD for Empowerment Zone designation. Because of DePaul's involvement in that planning process, the university's Egan Urban Center (EUC) has been asked to support implementation of the plan's economic development and housing goals. In these efforts, EUC, which administers the university's COPC, will be working with the Near Northwest Neighborhood Network (NNNN), a coalition of residents, churches, and community groups.
DePaul's original COPC grant, awarded in 1995, focused on empowering the African-American community of West Humboldt Park. The New Directions grant will allow the COPC to focus on the entire Humboldt Park neighborhood, by adding the predominantly Latino portion, located east of the 200-acre Humboldt Park, to its target area. The broader focus reflects community perceptions that the park should not be an east-west barrier separating portions of the Humboldt Park community, but a center of community social life and identity.
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