Bronzeville Pete's Fresh Market Heads to City Plan Commission After Six-Year Delay

A grocery store project that has sat stalled in Bronzeville since 2019 is set to reach a decision point next month, when developer Zeb McLaurin appears before the Chicago Plan Commission to seek approval for a land sale needed to build a Pete's Fresh Market on the former Stateway Gardens public housing site.

McLaurin told residents at a town hall hosted by Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd) on Monday at the Green Line Performing Arts Center that he plans to go before the commission Aug. 20. The meeting would clear the way for a 70,000-square-foot grocery store and surrounding retail development at Pershing Road and State Street, land McLaurin partly owns already but needs the city to help assemble further.

"All the obstacles are behind us now, and we've got a clear path forward," McLaurin told the crowd. He said the project is also moving through the city's entitlement process and, if the Plan Commission signs off, he hopes to close on the land with the city and finish all remaining approvals by the first quarter of 2027. Construction would begin "as soon as weather permits" after that.

The project has been stuck for more than six years because of a tangle of ownership among the city, the Chicago Housing Authority, Chicago Public Schools and McLaurin himself, all of whom hold pieces of land on or near the site. McLaurin said getting those parties, along with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, to agree on a path forward proved difficult for years. He added that CHA going without a permanent CEO from late 2024 until earlier this year made things harder still.

To get the project moving, McLaurin said he and the city agreed to scale it back. "So what you see here is truly, I won't call it a compromise, but it is an efficient way to move forward and to get this project online as quickly as possible," he said.

Even at reduced scale, the planned grocery store would be bigger than the Mariano's at 3857 S. Martin Luther King Drive and the existing Pete's Fresh Market at 2333 W. Madison St. McLaurin compared it to Pete's locations now under construction in suburban New Lenox and Oak Park, both expected to open this year. With those two projects wrapping up and nothing else in the company's pipeline, McLaurin said the Bronzeville store will become Pete's primary focus once it breaks ground.

The development has also grown to include more than just groceries. McLaurin said the site will now feature a locally operated True Value hardware store next to Pete's, a drive-thru bank, an office building for a medical provider that has not yet been named, and a locally run restaurant or cafe. A second phase, to be built later, would add a residential component with what McLaurin described as "a few hundred" multifamily apartments.

McLaurin said housing makes sense for the site given its access to the Green and Red Line trains, nearby bus routes, and a planned medical education campus and pathology lab that Malcolm X College and the University of Chicago are developing on Garfield Boulevard. He said his team is also studying traffic patterns with the Chicago Department of Transportation to determine whether State Street needs a turn lane into the site, and is still working out parking.

Bronzeville has gone without a full-service grocery store in the immediate area for years, a gap Dowell has pointed to repeatedly since the project was first proposed. At Monday's meeting, she recounted the project's history, tracing it back to a deal she had in place under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel that fell apart after he left office.

"I had a deal on the table. Rahm Emanuel was the mayor then, and he lost, and the new mayor that came in, I didn't get the support that I wanted to get this thing done. We also had COVID. We also had increases in construction costs," Dowell said. "I'm nervous about bringing this presentation to you tonight because I don't want anything to go wrong. But I feel that we are going over the finish line right now."

Dowell said bringing a grocery store to the 3rd Ward remains one of her top priorities, especially as other grocery locations around the city have closed in recent years. She told residents she believes she can secure support from her City Council colleagues when the land sale and related approvals come up for votes following the Plan Commission's review.

The Aug. 20 hearing will not be the final step. McLaurin still needs to close on the land with the city, complete the entitlement process he expects to wrap up by early 2027, and settle outstanding questions on traffic and parking before construction can start.