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Walking briskly through the courtyard of his company’s latest acquisition, a 31-unit yellow-brick midrise in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, Jay Yancy (BS ’84) was not shy about sharing the challenges of converting distressed properties into affordable housing. “Tenants not paying, quasi-squatters. You have just a whole litany of issues that you have to deal with when you buy distressed property in this neighborhood,” Yancy told me.
Even still, Yancy, who co-owns LJ Promise Realty Management with his wife LaJune, believes it is a calling worth pursuing. “For my wife and I, this is more of a ministry than just us being landlords, trying to make as much profit as we can,” Yancy said. “We’re always looking for an opportunity to be able to give back to the community, to be part of the solution.”
In many ways, the Yancys are living proof that second acts are alive and well. For the past 20 years, the self-described “social entrepreneurs” who met as undergraduate students in an English class at Loyola University Chicago, have been acquiring neglected buildings in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood and rehabilitating them to rent out at prices attainable to low- and middle-income residents. While keeping prices affordable—one-bedroom apartments start at $850 and some subsidized units are available at below-market rates—the Yancys say they strive for “Gold Coast” quality.
“Every zip code deserves to have beauty, and that’s what we do,” LaJune said. “We don’t just fill units, we actually elevate our communities. We’re a business of second chances.”
A pledge of support from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott
As with the other three properties they own and operate in South Shore, the Yancys’ work to rehabilitate their latest building, now nearly fully renovated and occupied, has been a labor of love. When they bought the $3 million property in November 2023, broken radiators leaked water into the floors beneath them. Units needed to be torn down to the studs, refinished, repainted, and furnished with modern appliances and fixtures—all told, a roughly $500,000 investment on top of the purchase price.
After being rejected by several traditional lenders, the Yancys turned to the Community Investment Corporation, a nonprofit lender for small owner-operators. The organization, which has helped finance the purchase and renovation of several of the Yancys’ buildings, agreed to provide a low-interest acquisition and construction loan, supported, in part, by a $15 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.
Stacie Young, the CIC’s president and CEO, calls Scott’s gift “manna from heaven” and says it follows an $8 million gift from the billionaire donor in 2020, which enabled the CIC to launch a Community Equity Partner pilot program to help bridge the equity gap for small local developers with proven market experience, such as the Yancys.
“Jay is a great example of a small owner-operator who knows the market, understands buildings and the community, and wants to make a long-term commitment to steward these buildings as great assets for tenants and anchors for the surrounding neighborhoods,” Young said.
Closing the affordable housing gap
As in many large U.S. cities, affordable housing options are desperately needed in Chicago. A March 2024 report by Housing Action Illinois and the National Low Income Housing Coalition found a gap of 126,165 affordable rental homes for those with the lowest incomes, with only 32 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.
It’s worth noting that many of South Shore’s 52,000 residents are well off; the lakefront community is home to public beaches, three yacht clubs, and the South Shore Cultural Center, where Barack and Michelle Obama held their wedding reception; the Obama Presidential Center, scheduled to open in the spring, is within a mile of Yancy’s properties. But the neighborhood’s income distribution is uneven. According to 2023 data from the Chicago Health Atlas, 30% of South Shore residents live in poverty.
Housing rehabilitation efforts like the Yancys’ are hailed by many city officials as vital to expand affordable housing options for low-income individuals, particularly as inflation, strict design regulations, and legal fees have contributed to soaring costs for new construction.
In his policy newsletter A City That Works, Richard Day, who worked in the mayor’s office for the Lori Lightfoot administration, reported that the average price for a new affordable housing unit in Chicago rose from about $400,000 per unit to nearly $750,000 between 2019 and 2024, underscoring the need to restore and refurbish vacant and neglected housing stock.
The city has enacted grant-incentivized policies like Chicago Rebuild 2.0 to encourage such investment, but the prevalence of absentee landlords on Chicago’s South and West sides complicates the picture (that’s part of the reason the city requires projects funded through the initiative to be sold to owner-occupants).
“It can be very profitable for a management firm in New York [to rent properties], but they are not hands-on, dealing with the day-to-day challenges. And the properties, a lot of times, get away from them,” Yancy said.
By offering on-site building management and keeping buildings secure and well-maintained—in some instances, hiring off-duty police for building security—Yancy says LJ Promise Realty Management offers a safer and more trustworthy alternative.
Every zip code deserves to have beauty, and that's what we do. We don't just fill units, we actually elevate our communities.
— LaJune Yancy, co-owner, LJ Promise Realty
“Our presence here affects the whole block,” Yancy said. “If there’s a pothole in the street that’s not being taken care of, or a vacant car, or the next-door building has become a drug house, we work with the alderman, CAPS [Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy], and police officers” to address it. “We’re very engaged in addressing these issues and concerns, and people like that.”
Building tenants run the gamut—from security guards and warehouse workers to electricians, school teachers, and physicians. An Amazon warehouse worker who earns $18 an hour, roughly $36,000 a year, can live in a one-unit apartment by devoting roughly a third of their annual income to rent, Yancy says. The company hires local tradespeople and sources supplies from Midwest True Value Hardware and Paint and South Shore Plumbing and Heating Supply to prop up the local economy, Yancy says.
Through partnerships with nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Charities, Thresholds, and the Chicago Housing Authority, LJ Promise Realty Management offers housing and social service referrals for financially challenged and formerly unhoused people, including those with mental health challenges, seniors, veterans, and the physically impaired.
Sharing her story in a YouTube video, Gervonne Williams, a tenant living below 30 percent of the area’s median income whose apartment is subsidized by the Chicago Low-Income Housing Trust, praised the Yancys for providing access to a clean, affordable space where she can reestablish herself. “I’m not in Timbuktu, like I used to be. I was, literally, just pillow to post.”
Now Williams, formerly without a permanent residence, plans to return to school and become an emergency room technician. “Access to [housing] programs like these should be pillars in every community,” she said.
A ‘person for others’
Karen Fleshman, the president of Loyola’s Black Alumni Board, says Jay Yancy’s compassionate approach to property management traces a direct line to the Jesuit values instilled at Loyola.
“Really being a person for others, that’s what he’s doing,” she said, adding that, as an active member of the Black Alumni Board, Yancy has helped moderate the Black Light Speaker Series featuring influential alumni and has been the “driving force” behind the Mamie Till-Mobley Scholarship.
Named after the late 1971 Loyola graduate of the Graduate School of Education, the endowed scholarship honors the legacy of Mamie Till-Mobley, a former Chicago teacher, and her son, murdered Civil Rights icon Emmett Till, by supporting low-income Chicagoland high school graduates engaged in service and leadership in the Black community.
LaJune, who enjoys working closely with Jay and admires her husband’s service achievements, acknowledges that he was not always as poised and confident as he presents himself today. “He would come up to me and ask me silly questions,” she said, recalling an English class they had together. “But he was trying to talk to me, and it just went straight over my head. One of his friends was the campus gorgeous guy, the playboy, so I didn’t know if Jay was the playboy too.”
Over time, she came to learn Jay’s intentions were pure. After honing his writing skills and earning a computer engineering degree at Loyola, “a game changer” that Yancy says “opened up doors to all the major corporations,” he landed a job as a programmer at TransUnion. LaJune took a role at TransUnion years later, and the two reconnected at a holiday party, a proper meet-cute that foreshadowed their eventual path to the altar. “I literally did a prayer, and I asked God to have him as my partner. He’s smart. He is. He’s not just handsome,” LaJune said, smirking.
In time, Jay founded his own computer consulting business, Microtech, where he designed custom software for large clients, including several corporate law firms and the Chicago Housing Authority; and in 2007, he became the HR Oracle and Technology Manager at the Chicago Transit Authority. However, the couple’s good fortune took an unexpected turn in 2014, when LaJune, who was then working as a biopharmaceutical representative at Amgen, was laid off just seven months before Jay suffered a similar fate.
At the time, the Yancys owned a single building at 2836 East 77th Place. They decided to build on their success. They pooled their savings and, with the support of a CIC loan, purchased a second building and became full-time property managers.
It was a bold leap but hardly outlandish given Jay’s childhood experience. His father, Willie Yancy, a property manager who worked nights as a maintenance engineer at Loyola and sang in his church’s gospel choir, owned and managed several apartment buildings on Chicago’s South Side. Beginning at age 7, Jay would tag along on repair trips “with my little tool bag and my hammer, nailing shingles on a roof or something,” he said. “I’ve grown up around these buildings my whole life.”
Many years later, he and his sister Jullia Yancy (BS ‘91) graduated from Loyola with nearly their entire tuitions waived, thanks to the FACHEX (Faculty and Staff Children Exchange) program, which provides 90 percent tuition remission for eligible employees at 26 participating Jesuit universities.
The undergraduate courses Yancy took at the School of Business Administration (now the Quinlan School of Business), made more attainable by his father’s service to Loyola, proved instrumental to the real estate business’s success, helping him understand how to forecast and track revenue and expenditures and manage the workflows of complex rehabilitation projects.
“I always say about Loyola, I got a world-class education,” Yancy said.
A place to call home
Kila Goodwin, 27, can attest to that sentiment now that she has come to know the Yancys and begun her own educational journey at Loyola. A single mother of two, Goodwin moved into a LJ Promise Realty Management-owned apartment at 2836 East 77th Place on June 1.
Formerly employed as an emergency medical technician, she was pushing through the final stages of a licensed practical nurse program at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illinois, when a near-fatal car accident on a trip from Chicago to the Quad Cities led to severe injuries, including a brachial plexus injury that limited the function in her left hand and forced her to abandon her nursing studies.
Despite the setback, she has remained optimistic about her future and entered a new role as a health advocate concierge for BlueCross BlueShield. “I don’t call myself disabled. I am challenged, physically challenged, but that’s what I like to refer to it as,” she said.
After the accident, Goodwin also enrolled in Loyola’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in Management degree, which she is hopeful will help advance her career in health care administration. Discovering that her new landlords were Loyola alums was a welcome surprise, but not the reason she chose to attend the University.
“The scheduling, the convenience of being able to work from home, and then having classes via Zoom at a time that worked with my work schedule and when my children would be winding down for bedtime: that was big for me,” she said.
So far, she is delighted with the academic experience. “I think it’s great that the professors get to know each student in a class. They know your name; they reach out to you if they feel like anything is wrong,” she said, adding that they are “very understanding and lenient when it comes to work; they know that you have a life outside of being a Loyola student.”
Her apartment, meanwhile, has become a cozy live/work/parenting space, where she handles client correspondence, takes online classes, and enjoys cooking and reading with her 3- and 8-year-old children. The unit is furnished with modern decor, well-maintained, and with a plush blue sofa to snuggle up on with her kids, just the right fit for her to begin her second act.
“First impressions mean a lot to me,” she said. “This was not the first landlord that I met when I moved back [to Chicago]. I just felt more comfortable here. The Yancys respect you creating a space and making it your home.”
