🏢ChiFreshKitchen –the food-service worker cooperative that gives formally incarcerated a second chance, is expanding with the launch of an affordable housing co-op. | ✍️ annabelrocha93| jhaylin_benson| jfloyd134| city_bureau 👇
From left: Edrinna Bryant, Daniel McWilliams, and Kimberly Britt, worker-owners of ChiFresh Kitchen, are hoping to purchase a building to launch an affordable housing co-op.This article was originally published by City Bureau, a nonprofit civic media organization based on the south side.Cardboard boxes of food stacked across the kitchen might appear scattered to outsiders, but make sense to staff working in a building on East 71st Street in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood.
“Everybody wants three times the rent on your paycheck,” Britt said while reflecting on her own struggle to find housing. “Everybody wants to do a background check.” As formerly incarcerated individuals, the ChiFresh worker-owners faced barriers to safe and affordable housing like cost, and credit and background checks, forcing them to live in areas that felt unsafe.
“Being able to have someone who knew what a co-op was and just walking us through, we [were] able to plan this on our own and come up with our own ideas,” Bryant said. Yittayih Zelalem, codirector of the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement at the University of Illinois Chicago, has worked on community development issues and affordable housing. He said the strength of the co-op members is vital to building a financial entity together. So things like membership dues, fundraising, inspecting properties, and deciding on rules and guidelines must be established as a collective.
But Hatcher said the first step for emerging housing cooperatives is forming a legal entity. That process is often broken down into two options: formally incorporating a business in the state or forming a nonprofit and applying for recognition by the Internal Revenue Service for tax exemption. “It’s not easy to get anything from them,” Hodges said. “They push you . . . they make you have accountability,” she said, referencing the training they had to go through to get funding.
Potential lenders will likely ask to see the group’s bylaws and funding structure. They’ll ask how much tenants will pay each month toward the loan, how much money has already been saved in the shared account, and how much the construction costs are. This information typically falls into what is called a pro forma document, which is essentially a financial blueprint or outline for a cooperative. It typically breaks down things like estimated expenses, annual revenue, and debt coverage.
“If you can see where a problem is, often it’s fixable. If you don’t know what the problem is, then it could be even a bigger problem than you think,” said Peter Landon, the founder of LBBA, a Chicago-based architectural practice that’s worked with housing cooperatives like the Pilsen Housing Cooperative. “You don’t want a money pit if you’re really trying to make it be affordable.”
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