Category: Uncategorized

construction equipment building a soccer stadium, with Roosevelt Road in the foreground

Chicago is about to spend millions on a new parking garage and nothing on transit at The 78

July 10, 2026 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

This week I asked my alderperson to defer the finance committee’s vote on a massive funding package that would have the city own a parking garage while at the same time making zero investments in transit.

Dear Alderperson Conway,

I think it’s prudent and appropriate if you would, as Finance Committee Vice Chair, to defer voting on the $425 million TIF package for The 78 until several questions and planning issues are resolved. I think you’re the ideal alderperson to insist that a commitment this large has greater scrutiny before it moves and I’m asking you to defer the vote and build consensus on the committee, and gain more support from Chicagoans, to hold it until there’s more analysis and understanding of the pros and cons.

This public commitment deserves more vetting and public engagement than has happened so far and the current timeline will permit. Three concerns stand out.

First, a large share of this package would build an approximately 1,200-space, below-grade garage that the City would own and operate, and I don’t believe public TIF dollars should be underwriting a permanent and expensive parking structure, especially given the city’s track record as a steward of its own parking. In 2006 Chicago leased the garages under Grant and Millennium parks to investors for $563 million over 99 years, a deal that later cost taxpayers roughly $62 million in 2015 ¹for allowing competing parking and eventually collapsed into default for the investors. Operating parking garages is a risky investment. Before the committee votes, I’d want to understand why a new City-owned garage is a wise use of this money, when it would actually begin generating revenue, and how any proceeds would be directed toward community needs rather than servicing the project or paying back debt used to construct it.

Second, this package includes no transit investment. The original vision for The 78 was anchored by a new CTA Red Line station inside the site, at roughly 15th and Clark, which would ensure that the future residents, tenants, and visitors would not have to rely on cars to get around and add to the local traffic. Public funding to build a new ‘L’ station (approved by City Council in April 2019) would do far more for the city’s climate and equity goals than attracting more driving to the site. Why is the city planning to fund a single-purpose garage while the transit that was supposed to anchor the project is left out?

Third, The 78 has a tenuous plan for its second phase once the soccer stadium is built. The project has long promised thousands of homes in future phases but assurances that residential will be built, and how and when essential infrastructure will be built and funded, are inadequate. The September 2025 presentation² to Chicago Plan Commission showed the residential area being used as surface car parking for an indefinite period of time. Before the city puts up roughly $425 million, there should be a defined phase-two plan that includes a substantial residential component. The transit-adjacent site is the ideal location for new housing: it would help ease the region’s shortage and give people the option to live near jobs and transit.

I’m asking for your help to get better answers, a better plan, and additional public input, by deferring the vote in Finance. And thank you for the scrutiny you’ve already brought to the city’s finances.

Respectfully,

Steven Vance

BUILD would legalize pocket neighborhoods across Illinois

May 21, 2026 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

BUILD fact of the day: The plan includes a middle housing component that would allow cottage clusters, courtyard buildings, and pocket neighborhoods across the state.

A pocket neighborhood with 12 homes broke ground in Evanston this year. The rest of Illinois has most likely never seen one built in decades. The BUILD plan would change that.

*Photos of the construction site by Steven Vance and renderings of UrbanEco*

What is a pocket neighborhood?

A pocket neighborhood (also called a cottage court or cottage cluster) is a small cluster of detached homes arranged around shared outdoor space. Each home has its own front door and a measure of privacy, but the units face inward toward a common courtyard or green space rather than outward to the street.

Chicago has pre-1950s examples, mostly on the South Side, but current zoning in Chicago and most Illinois municipalities makes new ones nearly impossible to build.

What’s being built in Evanston

Developer David Wallach of BluePaint Development broke ground this month on UrbanEco on Grant, a 12-home pocket neighborhood at 1915 Grant Street in Evanston, steps from the Metra Central/Union Pacific North line. Each home is approximately 600 square feet with two bedrooms and one bathroom over one story. Prices start at $369,000, and five of the twelve homes were already under contract at the time of the groundbreaking ceremony.

The project occupies roughly 30,000 square feet across two parcels (inspect this property on Chicago Cityscape); there was previously a vacant lot and a single-family house. Evanston updated its zoning code to allow the project, but it wasn’t easy: the development faced substantial neighborhood opposition before City Council approved it in March 2024.

At the groundbreaking, Evanston Community Development Director Sarah Flax acknowledged the challenge: “I don’t think there’s any one thing that’s going to solve the problem — we got to be open to lots of different things.” Developer Wallach credited the city directly: “This city takes on really, really big issues, and they’re certainly to be commended for it.”

One of the twelve homes is currently listed for sale at $369,000 — a 600-square-foot, two-bedroom detached home with shared outdoor amenities including a landscaped courtyard with fire pit and grill, near parks, schools, and transit.

Why this housing type is almost impossible to build in Illinois today

Outside of Evanston, pocket neighborhoods collide with standard zoning rules at every turn. In Chicago, I identified at least six separate zoning barriers that prevent them:

Most codes allow only one principal building per lot — pocket neighborhoods need multiple detached buildings on one site
Minimum lot-area-per-unit rules make small clusters economically unworkable
Lot subdivision rules block individual fee-simple ownership of units
Rear setback requirements conflict with inward-facing courtyard designs
Side setback standards prevent the close clustering the typology requires
Parking rules restrict placement in ways that break courtyard-oriented designs

Getting around these barriers, as Evanston did, requires a years-long rezoning process with no guaranteed outcome — and, as the UrbanEco project shows, significant community opposition along the way.

Next door to UrbanEco is another kind of pocket neighborhood, a set of five ranch townhouses built in 1962.

Five ranch townhouses next to the new UrbanEco development.

What the Illinois BUILD plan would change

Governor Pritzker’s BUILD plan includes a middle housing reform (SB 4060) that would require all Illinois residential zoning districts to permit cottage clusters — along with duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, stacked flats, and attached and detached courtyard housing.

The bill allows between two and eight units per lot depending on lot size, with middle housing types permitted on lots as small as 2,500 square feet. Crucially, municipalities couldn’t simply decline to update their codes. Whatever barriers each municipality maintains would have to come down.

Evanston spent years navigating a contentious public process to allow a single pocket neighborhood. Under the BUILD plan, that fight would be nearly moot everywhere in Illinois — the housing type would be legal by default.

Two views of the same one-story floor plan showing two bedrooms, a bathroom, a terrace, and combined kitchen, dining, and living rooms.

One of the twelve UrbanEco on Grant homes is currently listed for $369,000. Delivery is scheduled for summer 2026.

Show your support for pocket neighborhoods and unbanning other middle housing types by sending emails to your two state legislators.

Chicago crash data updated to show monetary damages based on a person’s situation in the crash

February 27, 2026 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

The Chicago Crashes page that is hosted on Chicago Cityscape shows weekly and year-to-date crash statistics along with estimated costs of those crashes, broken down by person type. Today I published a major change to present the stats better, in a way that matches the costs of the crash that are said to be different based on the person’s situation – whether they were a pedestrian, bicyclists, or motor vehicle occupant – in the crash. Prior to this change, every person in the crash was assigned the same monetary cost as “driver” even if they were a pedestrian or bicyclist.

Improved cost tables

The “Costs of these crashes” tables have two improvements.

Each injury-severity column now shows a count alongside the dollar figure, so you can see exactly how many people of each type were killed, had incapacitating injuries, or had non-incapacitating injuries for the selected time period. This makes it easier to verify the numbers and understand the scale behind the cost estimates.

The tables previously listed three person-type rows: Driver/Passenger, Pedestrian, and Bicycle. The CPD dataset actually includes six person types. The two remaining types — non-motor vehicle occupants and non-contact vehicle occupants — were being silently folded into the Driver/Passenger row. They now appear in their own “Other” row.

What’s interesting is the differences in value. Pedestrian is “worth” less than bicyclist. Cost estimates use values from the CDC’s WISQARS Cost of Injury study and vary by injury severity and person type.

A pedestrian who is killed is said to result in $14,169 in medical costs and $10,500,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,514,169
A bicyclist who is killed is said to result in $19,750 in medical costs and $10,800,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,819,750
A motor vehicle occupant who is killed is said to result in $11,556 in medical costs and $10,600,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,611,556

I haven’t figured out why the pedestrian has a lower non-medical cost.

A note on count differences

You may notice that the injury counts in the “Costs of these crashes” table differ slightly from the totals in the “killed or injured” summary above it. This is expected and I will try to reconcile them 1:1 soon. The two figures come from two Chicago Police Department datasets and may be modified at certain times in ways that my import system does not catch. They differ by a small number of records at any given time.

Crash data is sourced from the Traffic Crashes — Crashes and Traffic Crashes — People datasets on the Chicago Data Portal.

Chicago home builder: Parking mandates limit the number of dwelling units we can build

March 26, 2025 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

Chloe G, a co-lead of Strong Towns Chicago, asked this question at the 2-to-4 flats panel that I moderated earlier this month:

“How do parking mandates affect your businesses?”

“It really just limits the amount of units we can do”, Nick Serra answered.

Learn about reform efforts in Chicago to drop costly parking mandates that raise the cost of housing.

Nick, a small local homebuilder, starts to describe how the city’s parking mandates limit how much housing he can build. Watch the full panel video.

The Brooklyn Tower is based.

October 23, 2024 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

Kudos to the developer and architects for finding a site and designing a beautiful building in downtown Brooklyn that can be seen from nearly everywhere. I have dozens of photos of The Brooklyn Tower, designed by SHoP Architects, from the north, east, south, and west.