Leon I. Walker, '94: More Black Commercial Developers: How they Could Change Chicago
How More Black Commercial Developers Could Change Chicago
Leon Walker is on a roll. Neighborhood Housing Services Chicago awarded him its 2019 Community Impact Award for addressing food deserts. The new Jewel-Osco location he co-developed in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side opened its doors on March 7. On the heels of that, the Cook County Land Bank Authority selected Walker’s firm, DL3 Realty, to co-develop the site of the old Washington Park National Bank building, just a couple blocks down the street.
His career as a developer, which nearly never happened, could serve as a template for others like him to come back to — or emerge from — systematically disinvested places like the South Side or West Side of Chicago and provide an often elusive link between longtime residents and businesses and capital for revitalization without displacement.
Walker’s parents arrived in Chicago from Birmingham, Alabama, in the late 1960s, amid the waning days of the Great Migration. Both educators, in 1979 the couple took out a $1 million loan from South Shore Bank to build an early childhood education center on a vacant lot in the South Shore neighborhood.
“I was 13 and got my first hard hat on that job,” Walker says. “I knew then that I wanted to be in the real estate business. I saw it as being fun to go around, meeting the architect, going in contractors’ offices, learning the nuts and bolts, huddling around kitchen tables and on the roofs.”
After earning an MBA and law degree from the University of Chicago, Walker moved to New York City and worked in real estate investing. From there, he went on to work in global investment management in Los Angeles. Then, he got the news that his father was ill.
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