Key City CDC Releases Plan to Improve Neighborhood Housing

Key City Community Development Corporation, a new non-profit organization focused on neighborhood revitalization, has dedicated itself to a new project—the Greenwood Avenue Initiative. Dave Baron, a Key City board member and co-author of a plan for the Initiative, says that Key City wants to channel reinvestment from the public, private, and non-profit sectors to the 18 blocks of Greenwood Avenue that cover the full spectrum of City of Kankakee’s economic, racial, historical, and land-use diversity.

Key City has highlighted a number of potential housing and multi-use projects to be implemented incrementally in order to build momentum and ensure that all citizens can receive the benefits of neighborhood uplift. It would utilize the numerous overlapping incentives in Kankakee, including Opportunity Zone benefits, Enterprise Zone cost reductions, New Markets Tax Credits, Tax Increment Financing reimbursement, and other City housing programs, all while seeking to bring people along the entire Greenwood corridor together to work toward shared goals of uplift.

Importantly, as this pilot plan picks up speed and spreads outward to other streets of the 1st and 2nd Wards of Kankakee, Key City also intends to promote this strategy of linear development throughout other thoroughfares of the City.

Earlier this Spring, The Daily Journal awarded its 2020 Innovator in Real Estate Progress Award to Key City for its work on the Greenwood Avenue Initiative.

Read the Journal’s article detailing the award and Key City’s project here.