The Sports Star Who Emptied The Block

 

On a tucked-away edge of West Pullman, bordered by commuter railroad tracks and largely disconnected from Chicago’s street grid, 141 apartments sit empty and rotting today under the stewardship of a former NBA star and his business partners. These men arrived in 2019 with big promises of revitalization for the area, experienced with luxury development and keen to try their hand at making a profit managing affordable housing in a disinvested neighborhood. Their vision played well to the press, and attracted funding from social impact investment sources. But instead of transforming a troubled apartment complex into a safer, more dignified place to live, the group’s involvement quickly spiraled into unpaid bills, lawsuits, and a whole city block boarded up and fenced off.

Built between 1963 and 1967 on former marsh land that briefly held a neighborhood baseball diamond, the apartment complex known today as Baric Commons was initially planned by Robert A. Kahn, a south side developer whose work ranged from single family homes in Auburn Gresham to low-rise condo complexes in Clearing. Beginning with two three-story buildings that bookended a set of his newly constructed townhouses in the 12100 block of South Indiana Avenue, Kahn’s construction firm worked to expand east toward Front Avenue throughout the middle of the '60s, resulting in 24 one-bedroom apartments, 115 two-bedroom apartments, and 2 three-bedroom apartments by the time the project filled out the property. At the time, the development was christened “Fine Heritage Homes” after Kahn’s company.

 

The 10-building complex was intended to house lower middle class families who were largely employed by nearby industrial firms at the time, when postwar manufacturing was still booming on Chicago’s far south side. But not long after completion of the project, the Calumet Region experienced hard shifts as the domestic steel industry collapsed and segregationist sentiments fueled white flight from Roseland and West Pullman. By the 1980s, the vicinity of 121^st & Indiana was home to a new community of nonwhite residents who had previously been excluded from the neighborhood, standing on shakier economic ground than their predecessors due to a combination of the accumulated generational effects of racism and a severe contraction in available opportunities nearby for well-paying jobs in heavy industry. This made the neighborhood more vulnerable to business instability and residential foreclosures than before, and brought a wave of neglectful building owners to blocks where big apartment complexes had previously been carefully managed.

 

In 1986, the original property developer’s family sold the apartment complex and townhouses to a partnership controlled by a family based in wealthy Highland Park. Those new owners soon began to attract city fines for upkeep while falling behind on a large mortgage they had taken out on the property. Eventually, they lost the apartments to foreclosure in the face of a $2.1 million lien. The five townhouses were separated out and sold to private owners.

 

The next owners were Barry Chernawsky and Rich Czerlanis of Baric Properties, who purchased the complex out of foreclosure in 1993 and renamed it “Baric Commons”. Based on the North Shore like the previous owners, Baric specialized in buying distressed properties and eventually earned a reputation for mismanaging a handful of large apartment complexes in Chicago and elsewhere.

For 25 years, that ownership group stewarded Baric Commons as an entry level non-subsidized apartment option for area residents, inexpensive to rent but minimal on upkeep or other property management services. Major systems were replaced when they failed outright, and some of the buildings even got new windows in 2005, but other big jobs were left undone. The complex also suffered from a litany of easily fixable issues, repeatedly cited by city building inspectors for things like missing smoke detectors, broken door locks, and improperly capped boiler chimneys. This pattern was consistent in other Baric properties, including those outside Chicago – a 336-unit apartment complex they owned in Indianapolis was subject to that city’s largest ever health department raid in 2001, in which inspectors found standing sewage and non-functional heating systems inside and took Baric to court over it.

Barry Chernawsky, whose hundreds of units’ worth of rental income eventually bought him a 13,000 square foot mansion in Highland Park, has largely wound down his portfolio in recent years. Baric Properties retains ownership of one building in Rogers Park, but sold off another Rogers Park apartment building in 1999, a set of commercial storefronts in 2007, a bundle of small vacant North Lawndale apartment buildings in 2009, Baric Commons in 2019, and a west side multi-building complex similar to Baric Commons in 2021. Altogether, those sales of Baric’s Chicago holdings fetched more than more than $23 million for Chernawsky and his company. Barry Chernawsky’s son, Paul, recently purchased two large apartment complexes in the northwest suburb of Crystal Lake through a partnership with his father, but those are much newer buildings and are marketed toward upper income earners, generally kept up better than Baric Properties’ buildings were known for. Rich Czerlanis, the other Baric Properties partner, appears to have retired.

When Baric Properties sold Baric Commons in 2019, it was a tired set of buildings with plenty of deferred maintenance, widely acknowledged to need major renovations in order to remain viable. Then, things got much worse.

 

The buyers who spent $10.5 million to acquire Baric Commons were a business partnership called the Confluent Group. Based in Miami and Santa Monica, the company was formed by investor David Gross and former NBA star Luol Deng, with additional involvement from real estate developer Taylor Klemm and lawyer Jonathan Clark. Deng, noted in press coverage for his moneymaking savvy and philanthropy outside basketball, had worked with Gross and Clark for several years on a series of business ventures under the name D3N9, and Confluent was meant as a formalization of some of those ventures.

Before acquiring Baric Commons, Confluent was not in the business of affordable housing. They were a spec mansion and luxury multifamily housing developer, active mostly in the Hamptons. But they had a bold vision for Baric Commons: Gross and Deng would recruit several other notable NBA stars to invest together in this housing complex in a disinvested neighborhood, delivering “enhanced safety measures, community gardens, art projects, and an outdoor playground . . . a work space for local entrepreneurs and organizations providing wraparound services, a dedicated STEM facility, community library, and health and wellness space.” Through a real estate investment fund spun up by Gross, they also hoped to recruit nearby neighbors to be small-scale investors in the project, experiencing a small stake in ownership and governance and reaping some of the proceeds. In a press release issued by the National Basketball Players Association, which agreed to fund fitness and sports initiatives on the site, Gross proclaimed: “we want to help define a new normal of concentrated, sustained investment in inner-city communities, led by people who care deeply about them.”

 

But by the time those lofty promises went out to press in late 2020, attached to other NBA names like Matt Barnes, Robert Covington, and Pops Mensah-Bonsu who had decided to invest in Deng and Gross’s venture, the ownership group was already in trouble. Within months after taking control of Baric Commons the year before, several vendors had filed liens against the property owners for unpaid invoices related to small initial improvements like paint. And the buildings themselves were crumbling with people still living inside. Between 2019 and 2023 there were more than 300 building code violations documented on site during city inspections, some so severe that they prompted court action. As the Confluent Group attempted to empty the property by offering buyouts to tenants or carrying out evictions, their local representatives often secured recently vacated units with methods that created exit hazards, adding to the violation tally. And the biggest challenge facing the buildings was mounting instability of their California-style exterior balconies, which had been neglected by previous ownership for long enough to risk eventual structural failure. Some of the poor building conditions were not strictly the fault of the Confluent Group, but those conditions were worsened by inexperienced out-of-town owners and bad on-site management.

Big loans came and went. In 2022, Confluent received a $2.5million loan from LISC’s Black Economic Development Fund, an impact fund meant to bolster investment in majority Black communities by majority Black business entities. Another round of press releases went out. But Confluent was in court with the city over unpaid water bills, battling with contractors over uncompensated labor, and trying to pay down an $8 million mortgage with these new loan funds. From public records alone, it’s clear that things weren’t working out financially for the ownership group.

Between 2022 and 2023, the complex was emptied of residents. Some units were boarded up in full, some in part. After being vacated, a metal fence went up around the bulk of the property, leaving aside the two buildings that sit next to the privately owned townhouses on the apartment complex’s western edge. And then, activity stopped. Confluent didn’t keep up appearances on the block, and many of the vacant units were soon broken into. A handful of vehicles were brought onto the property and abandoned, and garbage from nearby construction sites was dumped on its fringes. No new permits for repair or renovation work have come into the city since the apartments were vacated.

 

It's unclear whether the Confluent Group still formally exists. The parent company of the Confluent-linked LLC that owns Baric Commons last filed an annual report with the state of Florida in 2023, with Gross and Clark still listed as involved at that time and the entity’s principal address listed as Deng’s waterfront Miami home. The company's website is gone, and so is the website of the “Our Opportunity” economic development initiative that Gross founded to spur small-dollar neighbor investments through its “Own Our Own” real estate fund. Klemm seems to have moved on, with a new business developing spec mansions in coastal Florida and partial ownership of a coffee shop on the North Fork of Long Island, though he was involved in the Baric Commons ownership group for long enough to be named in an ongoing lawsuit over unpaid loans related to the complex. The Black Economic Development Fund settled with Deng and Gross in a similar lawsuit over their $2.5 million mezzanine loan in March of 2025, setting up a payment schedule for the pair to repay $444,065.97 over the next three years.

At 121^st & Indiana, hundreds of people who lived here three years ago are now gone. In their place is a set of ten empty buildings, most of them open to the elements in at least a few places, fenced off and strewn with garbage. External signage installed by Baric Properties was never updated when Confluent took over, so there’s no visible phone number to reach the current owners, whose once proud online presence has disappeared. As Baric Commons proceeds through local building court cases and its owners deal with other lawsuits brought by their creditors, it is unclear what happens to the block now. There’s no shortage of abandoned apartment complexes in economically vulnerable Chicago neighborhoods, but this didn’t have to be one of them.