Category: Real Estate

Rendering of a single-family house but which has a "junior ADU" in the front half of the first floor

Greenline Homes is building brand new houses with junior ADUs

June 22, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Greenline Homes builds all-electric 1, 2, and 3 unit houses in Chicago’s South Side, and this year they’ve started building single-family houses with a “junior accessory dwelling unit” on the first floor. An accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, can mean a few things, but generally it means a smaller home within a house that has one or more dwelling units. In Chicago, this is most commonly done by adding an apartment in a basement space of a single-family house or a two-flat, and on the ground floor of an older courtyard building during a renovation that moves shared laundry from the ground floor to in-unit.

Over in Woodlawn, however, Greenline Homes has built what appears as a single-family house but has an apartment with one bedroom and one bathroom in the front half of the first floor. It occupies about one quarter of the houses’s overall floor area. In the rear half of the first floor is the primary unit’s kitchen, living and dining room, and a half bathroom. Upstairs, the space belongs all to the primary unit and has three bedrooms and two bathrooms.

Many Greenline Homes have previously been built as two-flats with a lower level full-floor apartment and an upper level duplexed apartment for the owner. The intention is that buyers have an immediate rental income opportunity, or a place for multigenerational living. Think having an adult child living nearby (on-site!) as they transition from college graduation to full time job or having their first child.

Floor plan for the house at 6537 S Rhodes Ave (view the sale listing on Redfin).

The house is for sale, and there are several others like it, so if you’d like a tour contact Wayne Beals. Here are similar ones under construction that will deliver this year:

Further reading: junior ADUs can also be lockoff units, where the smaller unit is connected to the primary unit via stairs or a locked door, but maintains its only exit to the outside.

photo of the interior of an ADU coach house in Lakeview built in 2023
Interior of Brian’s coach house

AARP Illinois talks to Brian and Steven about legalizing ADUs citywide and statewide

March 25, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Adam Ballard, the Associate State Director for AARP Illinois, the local chapter for AARP, interviewed Brian P. and I about accessory dwelling units. We discussed:

The conversation is 28 minutes long; if you haven’t dived into ADUs yet, this is a great video to help get you up to speed!

Bonus content: AARP is the largest organizational supporter of allowing accessory dwelling units in all communities because of how they expand the options for people to “age in place” (continue living in the same neighborhood when their housing needs change), earn additional income, or rent their big house to their adult children’s families. Explore AARP’s ADU resources.

Aerial photo of a bank’s parking lot. The camera is facing the city of chicago and the Logan square neighborhood is in the foreground.

If parking relief is granted to just about every development, why require parking in the first place?

March 9, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The Chicago zoning code requires nearly every development, new or renovated, to provide on-site car parking. The code also provides relief from that requirement, most often in the form of cutting the requirement in half if the development is in a “transit served location”. Further relief – getting closer to zero parking spaces required – can be requested via administrative adjustment to the Chicago Zoning Administrator. (Learn about other methods of relief from Chicago’s parking mandates.)

Sometimes, however, that administrative adjustment must be converted to an application for variation that’s heard by the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA).

Pete Snyder and I tabulated all of the requests for parking relief – by way of a variation application – heard by the ZBA from January 2022 through January 2025.

Here’s what we found in that 37-month period:

  • There were 73 applications for parking relief (an average of two per ZBA meeting).
  • A little more than half of the applications (39) explicitly mentioned the development being in a transit-served location.
  • Those 73 applications requested relief from having to provide 661 car parking spaces.
  • At $10,000 per surface parking space that reflects a savings of about $6.6 million in construction costs.
  • Assuming all spaces would be on the ground, this is the equivalent of 3.5 acres of land which does not need to be acquired or if already acquired can be used for other purposes. Bell Park in Dunning is approximately 3.5 acres.
  • Each applicant pays $500 for the 72 variations and one applicant paid a $1,000 application fee for their special use.
  • Most applicants hired and paid an attorney to handle their application. Lawyer fees vary and are not made known to the public, but for variations are usually multiple thousands of dollars. Lawyers typically charge more for special use applications.
Google Maps aerial photo of Bell Park

Understanding how much relief from costly parking mandates is incomplete if we only study variations. The default method, at least for locations within transit-served areas, is to ask for an administrative adjustment, which has a lower bar of obtaining approval – but we don’t have data about the number of these. Another way to get parking relief is to apply for a rezoning and bundle the relief request within that application; data on that is forthcoming.

Follow the parking reform advocacy work in Chicago by visiting these websites:

rendering of the proposed project showing two buildings connected at the ground and podium level
Rendering of the apartments proposed at 1840 N Marcey St. The building is being designed by SCB.

How the Connected Communities ordinance prevents new development approval from languishing by forcing a vote

January 26, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I want to clear up confusion about how the inclusionary application process, included in the Connected Communities ordinance that took effect in June 20221, works to prevent new proposed projects from languishing in City Council.

It does not bypass alderperson prerogative, the custom of every alderperson supporting and going along with every other alderperson’s support or disapproval of a proposed project.

The inclusionary application process forces a vote for a proposed project that meets certain requirements. Sterling Bay is in the middle of this process, the first time the process has been activated, for their proposed project at 1840 N Marcey St, which would have 615 homes in place of a one-story office building.

How the process should work

An “inclusionary application” is a project that’s proposed to be approved as either a Planned Development or Type 12 and meets these requirements:

must meet these requirements:

  • it has a residential or mixed-residential use
  • the location is in an “inclusionary housing” area3
  • the location is in a transit-served location4
  • either that the full portion of ARO units is provided on-site (20 percent of all units) or that 20 percent or more of the units are affordable via some other agreement or code5
  • it has been approved by Plan Commission
  • a public meeting is held, in the ward of the proposed project, to explain the proposal and solicit comments

The Zoning Administrator and the Chicago Department of Housing Commission must concur that the proposed project meets those requirements6. Another requirement is that City Council’s zoning committee has not voted on it within 300 days of Plan Commission approval.

Chicago Plan Commission approved the 1840 N Marcey St proposed project on June 20, 2024. To stay in the approval process, zoning committee needs to not vote on the project before April 16, 2025 (300 days later).

However, and this is important, the zoning committee can take up the matter before that time and vote to approve or deny it. An approval would mean the project goes to City Council for approval or denial and concludes the inclusionary application process.

After that 300 day period elapses and the zoning committee has not voted on the proposed project, the applicant can submit written notification to the zoning committee chair to request that the committee act on the applicant’s inclusionary application. A clock starts. There are three outcomes at the end of 60 days:

  1. zoning committee has voted and did not approve the proposed project
  2. zoning committee has voted and approved the proposed project (a “do pass” recommendation)
  3. zoning committee does not vote on the project and reports a “do pass” (approve) recommendation to City Council – this is the key part, the “shot clock”, of how the Connected Communities can ensure that a compliant residential project’s zoning change application doesn’t languish in City Council.

If it’s approved via #2 or #3, it proceeds to City Council which still vote on the project. And they can approve or disapprove it; there is no bypassing zoning committee or bypassing City Council.

Typically at City Council meetings, the Council votes on a motion that approves, in a single vote, all of the zoning change applications that the zoning committee approved (a.k.a. those proposed projects that have a “do pass” recommendation). If that happens, then the project has been approved by City Council.

But an alderperson could make a motion to vote on zoning change applications separately, and pull this proposed project out of the group. This is when alderperson prerogative might come out to play, and 26 or more alderpersons may go along with the alderperson of the ward where the project is located and who doesn’t support the proposed project, and the proposed project/zoning change application is killed.

It’s also when 26 or more alderpersons can make choices on behalf of the city and not on behalf of a discriminatory practice and vote to approve the project.

Notes

  1. The inclusionary application process may have been added in part to avoid future lawsuits against the city when City Council allows a zoning change application to be deferred indefinitely (the languishing part of this article’s headline). Glenstar sued the City of Chicago after City Council let the proposed apartments at 8535 W Higgins Ave languish. ↩︎
  2. A “type 1 zoning map amendment” changes the zoning district and obligates the property owner to build what meets the zoning district’s standards and what is described in their zoning change application. Contrast this with a “type 2 zoning map amendment” which allows anything to be built that meets the standards of the zoning district. ↩︎
  3. An inclusionary area means a high-income area with a low amount of affordable housing and is considered, informally, not to be in a gentrifying process. See the ARO map on Chicago Cityscape. ↩︎
  4. The proposed project is within 2,640 feet of a CTA or Metra rail station entrance or exit or within 1,320 feet of a CTA bus line corridor roadway segment listed in Table 17-17-0400-B. ↩︎
  5. The code says, “20% or more of the on-site dwelling units are subject to recorded covenant, lien, regulatory agreement, deed restriction, or similar instrument approved by the Department of Housing”. ↩︎
  6. See the full code starting at 17-13-0608 and going through 17-13-0608-B. ↩︎

Two-flat journal 9: other two-flat rehab blogs

January 20, 2025 / / 0 Comments

It’s been nearly two years since I’ve written a blog post about the gut rehab of the two-flat I bought in 2020 so I figured an update was necessary. The status is that I’m working on finalizing a contract with a general contractor and I have a loan application in progress. Read the other two-flat journal posts.

Two-flats – and their cousins the three- and four-flats – are the second most common building type in Chicago. There are approximately 254,800 homes in 2-to-4 flats in Chicago, according to data collected by the Cook County Assessor’s Office. And according to the U.S. Census they make up 27.2 percent of residential structures in Chicago. That’s compared to 25.5 percent detached homes, 3.8 percent attached homes, and 43.5 percent of houses, apartment, and condo buildings with five or more units (2-to-4 flats can also be condo buildings).

Thus it makes sense that there would be a handful of blogs to discuss their renovation.

(Although in the same vein it would probably make sense that there are blogs to discuss renovating condos, and I haven’t come across those.)

That’s my house on the left, captured in December 2024.

I’m glad each one of these is pretty well-organized because it takes a lot of time to peruse a project-oriented blog for specific information if you haven’t read it from the beginning.

Here are the blogs

Most recently updated is listed first.

Two Flat: Remade
This is the story of a deconversion (to a single detached house) but the renovation process is pretty much the same as restoring two units; gas service remains in the house. By Matt and Sarah, who bought the house circa 2011 and are still renovating it (check out “The Plan” page to learn about their phasing).

Reshaping our Footprint (One Watt at a Time)
Follow our journey of a deep energy retrofit (or energy efficient rehab) on a 100+ year old masonry two flat in Chicago. The goal is to turn the building into a zero-energy home with a sustainable and resource-efficient landscape. Most posts are by Marcus de la Fleur.

Yellow Brick Home
Kim and Scott bought the dilapidated two-flat in 2019 and completed the renovation in 2021 or 2022. Each unit and the outside are detailed in three groups of articles. Yellow Brick Home is the most design-forward of the blogs.

Little Chicago Two Flat
Corey and Emily bought their two-flat in 2021 and did a DIY renovation over the next eight months.

Chicago Two-Flat
Jocelyn and Steve started this blog in 2005! The most posts are in 2005 and 2006 so use the blog archive menu on the right side to go back to that time. Perhaps start by reading this post from March 2005 about removing the drop ceiling.

If you know of another blog about renovating a 2-to-4 flat in Chicago, leave a comment with the link!

Bonus links

Back To The Studs
This a video series by Brad and Sean who have been renovating a Brooklyn brownstone into three units since 2021. I’ve been watching their progress on TikTok, but given the “soft ban” it’s better to look at their YouTube page.

Home electrification case study in North Lawndale
“Through Elevate’s electrification program, contractors installed electric, energy efficient appliances at Ms. McGee’s house in Lawndale. The upgrades included an electric stove, washer and dryer, as well as a heat pump that powers a central heating and cooling system.”