Danny Villalobos lives and breathes Garfield Ridge, where he was raised.
Villalobos knew he wanted to get more involved in his community after graduating from Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2024.
He joined the neighborhood group Vittum Park Civic League, where he’s now vice president. Joining the civic league was the easiest way to get involved in his community, Villalobos said, but it also exposed him to the problems his neighbors routinely faced.
“I saw that we were cripplingly stuck in current issues, and we weren’t being proactive about solving those issues,” Villalobos said. “I felt if I want to be involved in a leadership position within my community, I want to know that we’re working towards something, not just … reacting to every single current issue that we’re dealing with.”
And he thought the best way to tackle Garfield Ridge’s issues was by creating the neighborhood’s first comprehensive community plan.
Called Garfield Ridge 2050, the community plan provides a framework for how residents, businesses and community groups think the neighborhood should look in the next roughly 25 years. It provides a set of goals and suggestions to guide aldermanic decisions that align with the community’s priorities, according to the plan.
Villalobos and other community stakeholders believe the plan is the first step toward neighborhood improvements. Villalobos also has the support of Ald. Mike Rodriguez (22nd) and Ald. Silvana Tabares (23rd), which he said helped legitimize the planning process.
“I think investment follows planning,” Rodriguez said. “It’s on all of us to take this plan off the shelf and make it a reality.”
Villalobos created Garfield Ridge 2050 by himself. But he credits the University of Illinois Chicago with giving him many of the skills and tools needed to make the plan. Villalobos graduated from the college this year with a master’s degree in urban policy and planning.
His courses and studio work gave him the confidence to make “the plans on behalf of my community, and really just show to the rest of the city of Chicago and to my neighbors, that we’re capable of planning for ourselves, and that we too deserve a professional quality plan that allows us to vision for our community,” he said.
Villalobos started working on the plan in August 2025 and finished it in February. He started with a survey — offered in English, Polish and Spanish — and contacted local alders’ offices, in addition to the Vittum Park Civic League, to help share the survey. He also used more grassroots methods, like social media and flyers, and reached out to organizations, including the Southwest Collective, Garfield Ridge Chamber of Commerce, Garfield Ridge Neighborhood Watch Group and Hope Church Midway.
Villalobos said he received 216 responses. Garfield Ridge has a population of about 36,700 people, according to June data from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.
“I wanted this to be as community driven as possible. So I knew engagement was going to be the heart of the plan,” Villalobos said. “That was what motivated me.”
Villalobos found neighbors enjoyed the feeling of a small, single-family home community. But there were common complaints echoed throughout the survey: the lack of a true main street, unsafe road conditions and public safety concerns.
Many of those are things Rodriguez said his office is focusing on improving.
“There are a lot of elements in this plan that are consistent with what I want to see,” Rodriguez said. “We need safer streets; we need more affordability in our housing stock; we need zoning policies that make sense for responsible development. I think that a lot of things that are called for in this plan make absolute sense with many of the priorities that I have for development in the area.”
Villalobos used the survey results to form five community pillars, which he said represent recurring themes and problems in Garfield Ridge. These include public safety, a future business district, housing, people-friendly streets and community spaces.
“Maybe it was a bit different person-to-person, but everyone was saying really the same thing,” he said. “I wanted to really pull through much of those ideas, those concerns in the plan.”
Villalobos said he’s excited about how the plan could help inform community and aldermanic decisions. It suggests more mixed-use buildings along Garfield Ridge’s major thoroughfares, new park space on vacant lots and turning Archer Avenue into the neighborhood’s main street.
Archer Avenue’s establishment as a commercial corridor was something neighbors and the Midway Chamber of Commerce embraced, Villalobos said.
He met with the chamber, who told him Archer should become the neighborhood’s business corridor. Villalobos said this could be possible with more public transportation options, mixed-use buildings and streetscape improvements. One specific call in Garfield Ridge 2050 is to establish Archer as a special service area. That classification would allow property owners in the area to invest extra funds each year to keep the street cleaner, greener and more welcoming for everybody, according to the plan.
Villalobos was surprised by the survey respondents’ interest in increased street safety. Many neighbors told him they didn’t find speed bumps to be an effective way to improve street safety. They were quick to come on board when Villalobos proposed raised crosswalks as a solution.
“People were already thinking about these planning issues, even if they didn’t have the vocabulary for it,” Villalobos said. “They knew exactly what they deserved.”
He said Garfield Ridge 2050 was less about creating a perfect blueprint and more about creating long-lasting conversations about planning. That’s what he hopes to do in his new job as a planner in nearby Lake County.
“You need to at least have something that’s community driven informing communitywide decisions,” Villalobos said. “I’m comfortable knowing that there’s something on file that we can refer back to, that the alderman can refer back to, and that I myself can refer back to as a vice president of my neighborhood organization, and know that we’re working toward something for the greater good of the community.”