Category: Zoning

A four-story red brick apartment building with ornate white terra cotta diamond and scroll details on the facade, viewed from a corner sidewalk. An elevated train structure is visible behind the building on the left. A large evergreen tree stands to the right, and brick gate pillars with decorative urns flank the building's entrance. Shrubs and an iron fence line the front of the property.

Built in 1912, banned in 1957: the courtyard homes at the Damen station

June 11, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Finding an affordable home near the Brown Line in Ravenswood is hard. Not having enough homes to rent or buy creates cutthroat competition and drives up prices — wait lists for apartments, offers over asking for anyone trying to buy. The retail and day care workers who serve this neighborhood face the same shortage as everyone else: too few homes that meet their needs and budgets, too close to where they need to be.

Half a block from the Damen station there’s a building that shows how local zoning codes can inhibit and prohibit multifamily housing from being built, and how the BUILD plan was designed to start allowing lower-cost housing types again.

The building

The courtyard building at 4615-33 N Damen Ave has 45 homes: studios through three-bedrooms, wrapped around a landscaped courtyard, a few hundred feet from rapid transit that connects to jobs across the city. It went up around 1912 (the Cook County Assessors’ Office’s records also say 1914) more than a decade before Chicago adopted its first zoning ordinance. There was no restriction on how many homes could fit on the lot, no required parking, no formula setting a minimum amount of land per apartment required before a permit could be obtained.

(This attached courtyard building is also known in land use and architecture as a point access block because there is a single block of housing with multiple points of access, where each point has a level of two to four apartments sharing a single stair core.)

You could not build this kind of housing on this block today. The law has not allowed it since 1957.

A Sanborn fire insurance map excerpt showing the area around N. Damen Avenue in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood, approximately the 4600 block. The Chicago Rapid Transit Lines Ravenswood Branch elevated rail runs east-west across the upper portion of the map, with a station visible near N. Damen. B
Sanborn map showing the Brown Line station and the courtyard building.

Evolution of Chicago’s housing suppression rules

Each time Chicago has revised its zoning rules, the housing capacity of this lot has shrunk:

  • 1912: 45 homes built. Chicago had no zoning ordinance — no parking requirement, no cap on homes per lot, no minimum-lot-area formula.
  • 1957: The city’s first major zoning rewrite added off-street parking requirements and a minimum-lot-area formula. Maximum allowed on this lot: roughly 33 homes. The parking requirement was just as prohibitive: nowhere on this lot to add it without tearing out apartments to pour concrete.
  • 2026: The current code is stricter still. Maximum allowed: 30 homes — three fewer than the 1957 ban permitted, and 15 fewer than actually exist.

You can see it in the property report on Chicago Cityscape: a building fully occupied for over a century, serving its neighborhood, standing half again as dense as current rules in the B3-2 zoning district would allow on its own footprint.

This is what a ban on affordable home choices looks like in practice. The courtyard building style didn’t fall out of fashion. People still choose to live in them. The bans on building new ones were written in 1957 and have only tightened since.

What the BUILD plan would do

The BUILD plan is relevant to this specific address. The plan’s provisions don’t simply gesture at more homes. They name the specific home types that municipalities would be required to allow, and courtyard apartments are on the list. The kind of homes here, in the kind of community that needs more home choices near transit, is the kind of flexibility for responding to housing needs that the bill specifically restores.

Pair that with the BUILD plan’s investment to actually finance construction, and you have a path to more homes — near the jobs, the schools, and the transit that the people our communities rely on need to reach.

Illinois already knows how to build this housing. It’s standing half a block from the Brown Line, a century old and against the rules. Pass the BUILD plan.

ADU vote, 46-0

City Council finally passes a permanent ADU law

October 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The ADU pilot program the City Council passed in December 2020 and took effect on May 1, 2021, will finally convert to a permanent law on April 1, 2026 – just shy of five years old. The new policy will increase the permanent eligibility area by a little more than double what the pilot areas allowed (a 135 percent expansion to be more precise). Further expansions are optional and up to each alderperson to decide when and where to “opt in” additional parts of their wards. Additionally, the construction of coach houses will have to comply with unusual labor requirements tacked on by an alderperson who called ADUs “an attack on the working class”.

I was shocked when the ADU ordinance (read it here) passed unanimously, 46-0. The ordinance number is SO2024-0008918, and when you open the legislation details page look for the filename called “SO2024-0008918 ADU 9.23.25 (LRB 10a) (2) (1).pdf”

How do I feel? I’m relieved this seven-year-period of ADU advocacy is over, and I’m disappointed in the outcome. More advocacy will be needed to ensure that most alders maximize the eligibility areas in their wards.

Highlights of the new ADU ordinance

  • the ADU eligibility area increases from 12 percent of the city to 29 percent of the city, with options to increase further
  • the arbitrary cap of 700 s.f. of floor area allowed in each coach house has been removed (there is still a site-specific cap)
  • existing off-street parking can be removed in order to build a coach house on the ground level
  • B (business) and C (also business) zoning districts are now part of the eligibility area
  • ground floor space in mixed-use buildings in B and C zoning districts can be converted to ADUs without having to get a “special use”

I wrote an ADU FAQ for Abundant Housing Illinois.

Media coverage of the passage

All of these articles include quotes from me:

site plan and rendering showing the features and buildings planned for the first game at the stadium
site plan and rendering showing the features and buildings planned for the first game at the stadium. Image: Gensler

Chicago Fire share the stadium plan they plan to share with the Plan Commission

August 22, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Updated September 10 to add this link to the traffic and transportation study, and the town hall video hosted by 3rd Ward Alderperson Pat Dowell.

The Chicago Fire owner, Joe Mansueto, plans to build a soccer stadium on “The 78”, a vacant property in the South Loop. The 78 is a planned development that was approved about six years ago to have office towers and about 10,000 homes in multiple buildings. Since the stadium will significantly alter the approved plan, Related Midwest, the owner of The 78, needs to present the revision to Chicago Plan Commission and gain their approval before also gaining approval from the City Council’s zoning committee and City Council.

Rendering of the stadium, looking north-northeast. Other renderings from the set show the area between the stadium and the riverwalk eventually being redeveloped into buildings and differently-designed outdoor spaces.

Here’s what’s changed

We can see what Mansueto and RM are proposing because they submitted their zoning change application to revise the PD back in July, which was subsequently posted in the City Clerk’s online legislation database. (A zoning change application and a Planned Development amendment are amendments to city law; refer to the approved plan in this PD 1434 document.)

  • The soccer stadium would be located approximately between 13th and 14th Streets. The rights of way for these two streets would be delineated and “dedicated” to the public.
  • Metra tracks would remain where they are. At the north edge of the site they enter the site about 185′ west of Clark Street, and then gradually shift to the east to hug Clark Street. The original plan would realign the tracks so that new streets could intersect Clark Street.
  • For the planners, the PD subareas’ boundaries are reconfigured.
  • Crescent Park is out of the plan. This central park would follow the historical Chicago River alignment, before it was straightened from Polk Street to 18th Street in 1926.
  • The riverwalk would be narrowed to 40′ from the currently approved plan for a 75′ wide riverwalk and 25′ “riverfront amenity zone” adjacent to buildings. (City law requires riverwalks to be a minimum of 30′ wide.)
Proposed open space plan

The stadium would have these pedestrian and bicycle access points:

  1. Wells Street, south from Polk Street
  2. Wentworth Avenue, north from 18th Street
  3. A newly built LaSalle Street, south from the elevated Roosevelt Road. This is also where transit riders from the Roosevelt ‘L’ station or any of the buses that use Roosevelt or Clark would access the site.

There would not be access from Clark Street and points east; some of the Dearborn Park and Burnham Station residents may prefer this, given how some of them reacted when a new CTA Red Line station was proposed at the existing substation on the east side of Clark Street at 15th Street. RM eventually moved the proposal to be within The 78.

The proposed site plan also shows a publicly owned parking structure in phase one, below the Roosevelt Road elevation.

Site plan showing the stadium and a publicly owned parking structure

What’s next

Expect another 3rd Ward town hall, in September before the next Plan Commission meeting on September 18. The Plan Commission agenda hasn’t been set so it’s not confirmed that the development team will present on September 18.

The plan can also change again, between now and the Plan Commission meeting. What’s presented at Plan Commission will be what is presented to City Council.

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. ↩︎