[BVictor1]

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/comm...infrastructure

City to fund $60M in Michael Reese site infrastructure

The taxpayer-funded plan is part of a broader arrangement that will help move forward a proposal to transform the 48-acre property into a mixed-use campus.

DANNY ECKER

The City of Chicago plans to foot the bill for around $60 million in new roads and other infrastructure running through the former Michael Reese hospital site, part of a deal meant to kickstart the first phase of a plan to turn the sprawling Bronzeville property into a mixed-use campus.

In a key step toward that goal, the developers behind the 48-acre, $3.8 billion project planned for the city-owned site just south of McCormick Place will go before the Chicago Community Development Commission next week, seeking approval of an agreement to buy the property for nearly $97 million, according to sources familiar with the deal.

The financial arrangement—which requires approval of the Community Development Commission and the full City Council—stands to clear one of the last major public hurdles for the developers to begin work on a megaproject that would redraw a high-profile swath of the Near South Side lakefront with nearly 8 million square feet of buildings.

The use of taxpayer funding to finance infrastructure for megaprojects generated controversy when the city approved Sterling Bay's Lincoln Yards campus on the North Side and Related Midwest's plan for the 78 in the South Loop in 2019. Both rely on tax-increment financing to reimburse the developers for infrastructure work they finance up front.

Among other projects that would improve access to the site and revive its street grid, the developers plan to extend Cottage Grove Avenue as a main thoroughfare running through the project, extend Lake Park and Vernon avenues, and add extensions of 27th, 29th and 30th streets running east-west across the property.