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A Rooted Forward Game
A 20-minute browser game where you inherit a disinvested Chicago ward in 1940 and make a century of zoning, transit, housing-finance, and community-benefit decisions. By 2040, Parkhaven looks the way it does because of the lines you drew.
The premise
You inherit Ward 42 — Parkhaven, a fictional Chicago composite modeled on a North Lawndale and Logan Square hybrid. Close enough to the Loop to be redlined in 1940. Close enough to transit to be gentrifiable in 2010. The decisions you make as surveyor, alderman, planner, and mayor cascade across a century.
Every economic and historical constraint in the game is drawn from a real Chicago source. The HOLC tiles display in their original surveyor colors. The contract-buying markups match the Duke Cook Center’s findings. The Red Line Extension costs what the FTA actually committed to fund in December 2024.
By 2040 you will write — not score — the neighborhood you built.
Four chapters · one century
01
1940 — 1955
You arrive as a new HOLC surveyor and grade Parkhaven's blocks A, B, C, D using the actual 1940 Chicago survey descriptions. The chapter closes with the Interstate Highway Act and a six-lane expressway routed through the C-graded corridor.
02
1955 — 1975
FHA-insured mortgages are denied to Black families arriving during the Great Migration. They can only buy through contract sellers at 84% markup. You decide whether to enforce a fair-housing ordinance and whether to back the 1968 Contract Buyers League strike.
03
1975 — 2000
CHA towers, Gautreaux, and HOPE VI. You decide siting, mix, and whether to fight the scattered-site injunction. The Plan for Transformation looms at chapter close: demolish the towers for mixed-income, or rehab in place.
04
2000 — 2040
The modern toolkit. You set Parkhaven's affordable-requirements tier, route TIF dollars, and decide where a Red Line Extension lands. The chapter ends in 2040 with an editorial-layout end-screen describing the neighborhood your decisions built.
The end-screen
Not a win screen. A two-page editorial artifact rendering your century as a narrative your students can read aloud and argue about.
“The bakery on 22nd closed in 1998. My grandmother’s block is a Chase branch now. The mural on Damen got finished in 2026 and I learned the names of every painter in eighth grade.”
— A 2040 Parkhaven resident, in your run
A four-axis compass plots your run against four named archetypes — the Reformer, the Caretaker, the Developer, the Speculator — with no ranking between them. Every archetype’s epilogue is written with equal craft. There is no good ending.
Design principles
There are no points, no leaderboards, no three-star endings. The end-screen is an essay, not a report card.
AMI, LIHTC per-unit costs, TIF capture, contract-buying markups, Red Line Extension funding — every figure clicks through to HUD, IHDA, the Civic Federation, NCRC, the Duke Cook Center.
Five latent variables — displacement, wealth extraction, community memory, political capital, equity delta — are surfaced through the world, not in numbers. The bakery closes. The mural fills in. The bank changes signs.
HOLC surveyors were professionals doing their jobs inside a federally sanctioned system. The game quotes them accurately and lets you feel what it was like to write those words.
Sources
AMI bands from HUD’s 2024 Chicago-Naperville-Joliet HMFA. Per-unit LIHTC costs from IHDA. TIF capture from the Cook County Clerk. HOLC polygons from the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project, attributed and CC-licensed. Full bibliography exportable from the game.
Launching 2026
We’re running educator and community playtests through fall 2026. If you teach high-school history, civics, or geography — or if you organize in a Chicago neighborhood this game is about — we want you in the room.
Join the playtest list