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.
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.
My prepared remarks spoken to the Chicago City Council’s Committee on Zoning, Landmarks, and Building Standards on May 21, 2025.
Hi, my name is Steven Vance, I’m a 34th ward resident and a member of Abundant Housing Illinois, a group whose members show up to advocate for approving new housing. I wanted to speak today to support the expansion of the city’s ADU pilot program into a permanent and citywide option.
This month is the four year anniversary of the beginning of a three-year ADU pilot program.
A year ago, in June, just after the three year anniversary, the department of housing fulfilled their obligation and presented their findings and recommendations. They recommended to expand it citywide.
Two years ago, a year before the department’s recommendations, newly elected Alderprerson Lawson introduced an ordinance that would do just that. To my recollection, the zoning committee has substantially discussed that ordinance only once.
During the last four years, nearly 400 ADU homes have been permitted by the Department of buildings, and hundreds of those homes have been built. Homeowners and other property owners have been able to build homes for their parents, friends, and as rental units to earn more household income. None of the ADUs are allowed to be used for Airbnb or other short term rentals.
Chicago was recently recognized as a national leader…in rent increases. Allowing more homes, including in the form of accessory dwelling units, is a way to suppress the rate at which rents rise. In some cases, including this year in Austin, Texas, Minneapolis, and Denver, so many new homes were built that rents started falling.
I urge the zoning committee to adopt an ordinance to allow ADUs citywide. Thank you.
Brian and his wife built a coach house in 2023, pursuant to the ADU pilot program, so their newborn child’s grandma could live close to home and help babysit.
Earlier in March I moderated a panel called “Bringing Back 2-to-4 Flats” at the Metropolitan Planning Council office, interviewing three panelists who are developers and designers for these venerable Chicago housing typology.
Two, three, and four-flats are super common in Chicago, representing about one fifth of the city’s dwelling units. These properties are the most likely to have lower rents and family-sized units, according to the Institute of Housing Studies. But Chicago’s zoning laws severely restrict where they can be built. Changing the zoning laws to allow 2- to 4-flats by right makes it easier to increase the city’s housing supply and grow the economy.
Neelam Dwivedi is a real estate agent and small local homebuilder. She co-founded Nath Construction in 2018. She has developed numerous 3 and 4 flats, particularly in the Near West Side and East Garfield Park.
Nick Serra is a small local homebuilder who founded Grace Street Renovation Lab in 2023 and has completed 15 rehab projects. He was previously a practicing attorney and disliked it so much he pivoted to real estate.
Katherine Darnstadt founded Latent Design, an architecture and urbanism practice in 2010. I met Katherine in 2015 and I think the main thing I remember about her practice is the breadth of it. She’s said that the firm has worked on projects “at the bench, building, and block scale”.
Now that I’ve audited the Chicago building permits for the last four years I can more accurately visualize where new homes were permitted across Chicago’s fifty wards. I was not surprised to see that the 27th Ward carries the team known as City Council, but I was surprised by how big the gap was between the first and second place wards, and the gap between the fewest number of wards where 50 percent of new homes were permitted and the number of wards where the other half were permitted.
In the period 2022-2024…
24.0 percent of new homes were permitted in the 27th Ward
10.6 percent in the 34th Ward
8.1 percent in the 3rd Ward
6.9 percent in the 4th Ward
Those four wards comprise 49.5 percent of new homes permitted, while 46 wards permitted the remaining 50.5 percent. Some of this imbalance is due to how different alderpersons accept new development proposals, and the current zoning capacity of properties in each ward.
Incredibly, when rounding to the tenths place, 24 wards permitted so few new homes in that time period that they round down to 0 percent.
To further illustrate how some wards are where so few new homes are permitted, which may be due to factors beyond the alderperson’s control (local rents not meeting development and construction costs, and racism, to name a couple), consider that six wards permitted fewer than 10 homes each during that three-year period.
While Chicago does not have quotas or goals on how many new homes should be permitted or built either citywide or by ward, the city will maintain a housing shortage if most wards are not facilitating or allowing new housing to be built. The allowance of new housing is heavily influenced by each alderperson’s choices.
The city’s ability to grow and spread the property tax revenue burden fairly depends on new development occurring across the city. This is especially the case in areas where new housing can moderate rising demand housing costs, and transportation infrastructure and amenities are in good supply.
Map 1. Chicago’s 50 wards and their share of new homes permitted in 2022-2024. Tap or click the map to enlarge it. Open the spreadsheet containing data that powers this map.
Other statistics
Table 1. New construction homes permitted, by year
2022
2023
2024
Total
7,574
4,498
4,360
16,432
Methodology
Using Chicago Department of Building permits that are imported to Chicago Cityscape’s Building Permits Browser, I review each new construction permit’s description to count the number of units authorized by that permit. Foundation phases of multi-phase permits and most revision permits are excluded. I do my best to catch projects that change scope between two permits, such as a permit originally issued for a two-flat but changed to a single-family house, or a larger multifamily building losing or gaining units in a subsequent permit.
New construction coach house units are also excluded because they are allowed only in five pilot areas in a subset of wards; view ADU statistics on Chicago Cityscape.
The statistics are also shown in Chicago Cityscape’s building permits analysis table, which is updated daily; look for columns with a heading that says the year and the word “audited”. Data for permits in other years are not yet reviewed and corrected.
This is an imperfect comparison of wards because there was a redrawing of ward boundaries and an election in 2023. This means that some alderpersons are new, and that all alderpersons oversaw new development approvals and the capacity of their zoning map in different areas before and after the remap.
On the flip side, the new ward map also means that the number of inhabitants in each ward was roughly equal at the time of the remap. This supports some level of data normalization (i.e. new homes permitted per capita), which can be done in future analysis.
