That’s especially true with the University of Chicago, founded in 1890 and now a juggernaut of a research university with 15,000 students and an endowment of more than $6 billion. But for all the university’s successes—it was ranked as one of the top 10 global universities last year by U.S News & World Report—Woodlawn and some of the other neighborhoods surrounding the university, including Englewood and Washington Park, still struggle with crime, abandoned buildings, and a lack of retail.

(Google Maps/The Atlantic)

Woodlawn was a center of mortgage fraud during and after the housing crisis, and there are still homes that are so mired in confusing paperwork and ownership questions that they may have to be demolished. The empty lots are easy to spot on different blocks just a few steps from the university, gaps like missing teeth in the orderly rows of greystone and brick homes. In many college towns, employees and students hope to find somewhere to live that’s walking distance from the university; in the area around the University of Chicago, which has 15,000 employees, there’s a surfeit of vacant and abandoned homes that could be rehabbed if only they had less-murky title histories.

But that might be changing—albeit slowly—as the city, community groups, and even the University of Chicago, set their sights on certain South Side neighborhoods. Getting people into the vacant and abandoned homes in the area, planners say, could help attract more retail to the neighborhood and also reduce crime.

That’s part of the reason why when Maurice Samuels moved back to his hometown for a job at the University of Chicago a few years back, he not only decided to live in Woodlawn, but he decided to buy a home there. The University of Chicago gave him $7,500 worth of downpayment assistance, and with his new employer’s help and money from the Obama stimulus bill, Samuels was able to get a three-bed, three-bath condo for $199,000 and pay less for a mortgage than he would have paid in rent in some of the pricier neighborhoods in Chicago.

The Woodlawn he now lives in is different from the one he remembers, he said.

“Now I feel safe. I bike to work,” he said. “It’s a gamble,” he said, “but I hope it pays off.”

The program that helped Samuels buy his home, called employer-assisted housing, is one tool that the University of Chicago is using to try and mend the neighborhoods that surround it. It’s a program that was pioneered in Chicago in the early 2000s with help from the city’s Metropolitan Planning Council to help working families of all incomes buy homes in the city and the increasingly-expensive suburbs. While the initial goal was to help employees live near their workplaces and save money and time commuting, the program is now seen as an effective way to stabilize neighborhoods and promote mixed-income housing in areas hard hit by the housing crisis, said Robin Snyderman, who now works as an independent housing and neighborhood consultant but who helped launch the program with the planning council.

Since the University of Chicago launched its employer-assisted housing program in 2003, it has had 230 employees receive assistance to purchase homes in Woodlawn, North Kenwood, South Shore, Washington Park, and a few other nearby neighborhoods. The university is now relaunching its program to focus on Woodlawn. While employees previously received $7,500 in downpayment assistance if they purchased in a handful of nearby neighborhoods, they now can get $10,000 if they buy in the Woodlawn focus area—directly south of the university between Cottage Grove Avenue and Stony Island Avenue, and above 67th Street—and $5,000 for other neighborhoods. Renters are now eligible for university assistance, too—up to $2,400 if they rent in the focus area, which goes for seven blocks south of the university and 13 blocks east to west. To buy, employees must go through a mandatory homebuyers class, and must be able to put down at least a 3.5 percent downpayment towards the home.