Author: Steven Vance

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.”

screen grab from Kirsten's video that is an aerial view of the enclosed yard

Exploring Radish: a model for cottage courts from Oakland

December 23, 2024 / / 0 Comments

One of the many benefits of allowing pocket neighborhoods and cottage courts is being able to share high land costs. That, and sharing child care duties, are primary reasons that Phil Levin and Kristen Berman created “Radish”, a pocket neighborhood in Oakland.

Phil founded Live Near Friends, a website advising people on which steps to take to eventually live near friends and family and live happier by focusing on the hard part of finding appropriate real estate, setting up community standards, and arranging rent and legal concerns. He also is a co-founder of Culdesac, in Tempe, Arizona, an apartment complex with a traditional design of close-together buildings and shops near transit.

Phil takes Kirsten Dirksen, who produces videos about uncommon homes, on a tour of Radish, where the viewer can meet the residents, and learn about the architecture of the buildings and outdoor space plus a little about the process to combine two lots into what he calls a “friend compound”.

I previously wrote about cottage courts and how the Chicago zoning code does not allow them, primarily by disallowing more than one house per property. For Chicago, cottage courts can additionally offer the benefit of achieving the same density as a series of two-flats – so as not to reduce the population or population capacity of a neighborhood – while responding to the demand for detached housing and yards – which are putting pressure on two-flats and leading to their deconversions or teardowns. Two-flats have been a typical way for Chicagoans to live in a multigenerational setting, something that cottage courts can also promote.

Radish comprises two properties that started with two existing apartment buildings and an existing backyard house. Levin et. al. added another backyard house (ADU), a small building for a coworking office and shared kitchen (called “Blueberry” on the site plan below), and an RV for housing guests. All of those additions encircle a large shared space with a grassy yard, communal and scattered seating, a fire pit, a hot tub, and a sauna, separated from the car parking area by a privacy fence.

The lot area of the two parcels is about 18,859 s.f. The site plan is from 2020 and the population count reflects that year. Site plan: Supernuclear

In total, there are eight dwelling units on the property in four houses on an 18,589 s.f. set of two parcels. That lot area is the equivalent of six standard size lots in Chicago, on which 12-18 dwelling units will typically be found. But, that large lot size is atypical for Oakland.

Another aspect of cottage courts is that they can facilitate sharing food, high-cost resources (like a hot tub), and child care. Phil, the other residents, and even former residents who live nearby and stop by during the filming, describe how the cooking and child care is shared in the video. Phil’s blog details how he and his wife, Kristen, “built Radish to be a great place to have kids”.

Stay tuned for another blog post on this topic. I worked with Jamin Nollsch to create a cottage court site plan specific for Chicagoans to pair with a memo and sample ordinance that I wrote to promote legalizing this form of housing and living here.

Zoning assessment: Old Town Canvas

December 14, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The alternative headline is “Zoning assessment: how to propose a large building outside downtown Chicago when the current zoning code doesn’t typically allow that and the current zoning code goes against historical development norms for the city”.

I’ve said many times on social media how the Chicago zoning code doesn’t allow many extant buildings to be built because a zoning district that would allow the height, bulk, or density (“size”, for short) doesn’t exist anymore. All of those examples were outside of the downtown district because the downtown district still allows the size of all the extant buildings there.

The Old Town Canvas development would replace the Walgreens building. The development’s size is in line with all the other nearby high-rise residential buildings.

I am going to describe how a building with the size of the proposed Old Town Canvas development is allowed outside of downtown (view the boundary). The development shows how to use multiple standards in the Chicago zoning code to build a lot of needed housing and serves as another example of the Chicago zoning code being much more restrictive than its previous iterations.

I won’t belabor the point any further, but it shouldn’t take “zoning cleverness” to build more housing in Chicago.

About the development

The Old Town Canvas development’s size – proposing 500 homes in a building 395′ tall – is largely possible because of two longstanding standards in the Chicago zoning code, neither of which are unique to the site – there are no loopholes here.

Those standards are:

  1. the “-5” zoning district’s allowance for nearly unlimited height if the property has a sufficient length of street frontage
  2. the ability to establish a Planned Development and shift zoning capacity from one parcel to another, even across a roadway

1. Height limits in “-5” zoning districts

In a B-5 or C-5 zoning district, the height limit is based on how much street frontage1 the property has. For a property that has 100 feet or more of street frontage the height limit is normally 80 feet. However, an exception2 in the zoning code allows buildings to “exceed the maximum height” if approved and reviewed as a Planned Development3.

This means there is no maximum height, but there are certainly influencing factors: the support of the local alderperson, the support of the city planning staff, and guidelines from the FAA.

2. Planned Developments can move zoning capacity between parcels

A basic zoning assessment of the parcels for the building results in an estimate that 179 homes would be allowed here. This is much fewer homes than previous Chicago zoning codes allowed, and much fewer homes on a similar sized parcel than the four nearest high-rises which have about the same or more than the proposed number of 500.

To be able to build 321 additional homes the developer has proposed incorporating the unused zoning capacity of Piper’s Alley, a mixed-use development, and Moody Bible Church, where the most recent community meeting to discuss the traffic study was held this month.

I can’t get into specifics because I don’t have knowledge of how much unused FAR and MLA per unit that each of those other properties can transfer. To do that I would need to see architecture drawings showing how much floor area the buildings have already.

In this case, the owners of the other properties must give their consent to the Old Town Canvas developer to be incorporated into a new – or in this case, an amended – Planned Development and show this consent to the City of Chicago4.

That process is essentially the definition of what many people would call “air rights” (which I think more specifically means being able to build above something, like a railroad or roadway) and municipal governments would likely call “transfer of development rights”.

Neither “air rights” nor “transfer of development rights” are commonly used terms in Chicago. There are several buildings, however, that use air rights granted to them by the railroads that own the tracks under Riverside Plaza buildings.

In New York City, to explain an alternative implementation of TDR, development rights include the ability for owners of landmarked buildings and of buildings in special districts to transfer the zoning capacity beyond the geographic limitations of the Chicago Planned Development standards. For example, a landmarked theater in the Special Midtown District can be a “granting site” of development rights to a “receiving site” within the Theater Subdistrict.

Notes

  1. In some other jurisdictions height limit is based on street width, and in Chicago’s first zoning code height was based on building depth and how much each upper section was set back from the street. ↩︎
  2. See 17-3-0408-A[1] in the Chicago zoning code. ↩︎
  3. There are codified standards regarding height in the Planned Development section of the Chicago zoning code, starting with the guideline, “High-rise buildings or towers should respect the context and scale of surrounding buildings with setbacks at appropriate heights which will also reduce the apparent mass from street level.” Other standards for high-rise buildings within Planned Developments are found in 17-8-0907-C. ↩︎
  4. Section 17-8-0400 of the Chicago zoning code has a regulation affecting ownership and site control and how Planned Developments can have multiple owners controlling multiple sites. ↩︎

Lake Calumet had a lot more water surface area 50 years ago

November 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I visited Big Marsh Bike Park with a friend three weekends ago to ride mountain bikes on the single track, check out the park’s campsite, see if people were still drag racing on Stony Island Avenue (they were), and finally, try to get a sense of where the access trail from Pullman in the west will cross over Lake Calumet by viewing the “land bridge” from the air.

According to the “preferred alignment” map below, the future bike trail will cross the lake at the shortest opening where the spit is on the left. The photo is facing due west.

While researching the proposed multi-use trail, boardwalk, and bridge, I decided to look up historic aerial photos to try and understand when and where the land around the lake was filled in. (I think the Illinois International Port District is the proposer.)

Renderings and map by Epstein.

The Lake Calumet diptych I made shows two aerial photos – taken from airplanes – of Lake Calumet in 1970 and 1995. The images come from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s collection of three decades of 6,300 aerial photos across the six country region.

In the 1995 image you can see the Harborside International Golf Center built on landfill (also in 1995), additional slips for ships, and other land and water feature additions and subtractions.

The two photographs were taken slightly offset from each other but I scaled and adjusted their alignments to match each other as best as I could.