Northwestern's gleaming outpatient clinic shows Bronzeville is ripe for investment

It’s been open for four months now, but Northwestern Medicine’s new outpatient center in Bronzeville still makes me smile whenever I cruise past it.

The five-story, 120,000-square-foot facility at 4822 S. Cottage Grove Ave. opened in September. Sleek and modern, the outpatient center is a much-needed addition to the Greater Bronzeville area, which includes many communities on the lower end of Chicago’s life expectancy scale.

Life expectancy in Grand Boulevard, where the center is located, and the surrounding Douglas, Oakland and Washington Park communities are all below 75 years, according to 2023 figures from the Chicago Health Atlas. That puts them in the bottom third among all city community areas.

The outpatient center offers immediate and primary care along with a range of specialties, including oncology care and infusion services, pediatrics, women’s health, dermatology and mental health services.

“Increasing access to world-class health care in Bronzeville will make a generational impact on the health and wellness of this community,” said Dr. Kimbra Bell, the center’s medical director, in a statement when the facility opened. “We are committed to help build stronger, healthier communities. For over 20 years, we have collaborated with local organizations in Bronzeville and surrounding neighborhoods that share our vision to make the center a reality.”

But the outpatient center’s impact might stretch beyond providing a state-of-the-art medical facility in an area where they’re in short supply.

At a cost of more than $100 million, the outpatient center appears to be the most significant new development in Greater Bronzeville in the last 20 years.

I reviewed city data on new construction permits dating back to 2006 and no other project in Bronzeville topped the outpatient center’s overall cost. And there were just a handful of others on the South Side with higher price tags, most of which were projects connected to the University of Chicago, UChicago Medicine or the Obama Presidential Center.

I still have vivid memories of driving past the outpatient center during its construction and noticing the construction crane spanning across Cottage Grove Avenue.

“Is it OK for me to drive under this thing?” I can remember thinking at the time.

A rare sight on South Side: construction cranes

For sure, I’d seen construction cranes before — but never in Bronzeville or many other South Side neighborhoods, for that matter. It was an unfamiliar sight.

What I have been far more accustomed to witnessing is the loss of community anchors in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods — both public and private institutions.

Ironically, the outpatient center sits just a few hundred feet south of the shuttered Walmart Neighborhood Market at 4720 S. Cottage Grove Ave., which closed in 2023. It was one of four stores the retail giant closed that year, including neighborhood market stores in Lake View and Little Village and a supercenter in Chatham.

As someone who frequented the neighborhood market on Cottage Grove and the supercenter in Chatham, those closures stung. They were also painful reminders of how fleeting economic interest in Black Chicago can be.

Walmart, Target, Walgreens, Whole Foods and others have opened locations on Chicago’s South and West sides with bold promises and great fanfare, only to back away years later, leaving empty storefronts and vacant lots in their wake. Many of those locations remain vacant, possibly serving as cautionary tales discouraging other institutions from investing in underserved communities.

But underserved doesn’t always mean underresourced.

Black people’s money spends just as well as anyone else’s, and there’s plenty of it in Bronzeville.

“The Low End,” as it was once called, has been on the come-up as of late. Bronzeville is doing much better economically these days than in decades past.

In all of Black Chicago, Bronzeville might offer the widest range of incomes, with residents spanning both the highs and the lows of the economic spectrum. But the median household income in most Bronzeville census tracts is comparable to the city’s median household income. Bottom line: there’s a market in Bronzeville for economic development.

Northwestern Medicine’s outpatient center is sure to improve health care access for many in Bronzeville. But I’m hopeful it will also stimulate economic development that is just as desperately needed as the medical services the center will provide.

As the saying goes, game recognizes game. If Northwestern Medicine feels confident enough to invest more than $100 million in Bronzeville, perhaps other institutions will take notice and follow suit.

Alden Loury is data projects editor for WBEZ and writes a column for the Sun-Times.