Chicago Changing the Local Investment Game

"In a budget speech last week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that $100 million of city investment dollars over three years would soon go into a new local investment fund to create jobs, grow businesses, improve infrastructure and provide capital for projects in Chicago neighborhoods that have survived years of neglect from investors," reports Oscar Perry Abello.

The vessel for these investments will be Community Development Financial Institution that builds on the tradition of ShoreBank, "which many consider the first true community development bank" and called Chicago home. That's why Abello says it's appropriate that with this investment Chicago becomes the birthplace of the latest evolution in the existence of CDFIs: funding directly from cities.

"The initiative, nicknamed “Fund 77” after Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods, was the result of a yearlong effort by City Treasurer Kurt Summers, working closely with Chicago CDFIs to shape and advocate for the building of a fund to take city investment dollars (which the treasurer manages) and, rather than leaving them in various big bank deposit accounts or the stock market, invest them in historically marginalized neighborhoods of Chicago," according to Abello.

The article includes more details about the history of CDFIs, which stretches back to the Clinton Administration, as well as the potential of the Fund 77 initiative.