Tag: Brown Line

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.

Read my previous article about courtyard buildings in Chicago

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.

The CTA must remove the Clark Junction bottleneck to modernize the Red Line

March 3, 2015 / / 11 Comments

CTA Belmont bypass rendering

A CTA rendering shows what a bypass track for Brown Line trains north of the Belmont station might look like, alongside a new residential building on Wilton Street.

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Chicagoan Jacob Peters.

“Keep the RPM Project on Track – Uncouple the [Belmont Bypass] Roller Coaster” is the tagline for a new website called “Coalition to Stop the Belmont Flyover”.

Capacity is constrained at the Chicago Transit Authority’s Clark Junction track interchange (at approximately 3300 N Clark Street) which means that fewer Red Line trains can run than could be run if there wasn’t this conflict. In the same way there are opportunity costs in business, there are opportunity delays that are caused by this constraint on rail capacity.

For example, if there was no conflict at Clark Junction, then five more trains an hour could pass through the Red Line subway. This would increase Red Line capacity by 25 percent during rush hour, and fewer passengers would be left waiting for a train to arrive with space for them to board.

The way the website advocates against eliminating the bottleneck is hypocritical to the tagline of “keeping the Red Purple Modernization project” on track. That project, which would completely replace all track, viaducts, and embankments north of X station, and rebuild most stations (as well as widening and extending platforms) is largely based on a future service pattern that would run more and longer trains in the busiest transit corridor of Chicago.

This capacity increase would reduce their average commutes by a few minutes. Since the trains wouldn’t have to be spread out in order to maintain gaps in service for the Brown Line trains that need to cross the Red Line at Clark Junction, average wait times between trains would drop all along the Red Line at rush hour, further reducing commute times.

Lastly, when either the Brown, Purple or Red Lines are experiencing delays, and trains get bunched together, these delays ripple through the other lines. This happens because when a queue of delayed Brown Line trains are making their way through Clark Junction, Red Line trains must be held in order to let the delayed trains through the junction in an attempt to keep things moderately on schedule. If there was a bypass of this junction for northbound Brown Line trains, then a delay on either line would not affect the other. This would result in fewer days in which your commute is delayed.

Future capacity needs and current delay reduction is what the Belmont Bypass attempts to address. There may be other ways to achieve this with other alternatives, but the bypass would be far and away the cheapest and could be implemented soonest. Unless you plan to propose alternative means of resolving these conflicts, and funding mechanisms to make them possible, you are not really advocating to keep the RPM on track. Because without untying Clark Junction there is no true modernization.

Runoff election

The RedEye published on Monday an overview of the transit platforms from the two mayoral candidates that have made it into a runoff. (Mayor Rahm Emanuel didn’t receive a sufficient number of votes, 50 percent +1, in the February 24 election.) Chuy Garcia released his transportation and infrastructure platform about two days before the election.

Garcia paints a beautiful transportation issues platform, but when faced with a truly transformative project he is unwilling to uphold his call for “reliable transportation”. I want to vote for him again, but if he keeps on watering down projects to a point of inefficacy then how are you going to convince anyone to expand transportation funding? How can I trust him to bring about the change is needed on other important issues if on the issue that he received a masters in, he is unwilling to apply best practices?

Emanuel and Garcia should avoid grandstanding on issues of transportation because opposing a necessary transportation investment for political reasons is to let down the electorate that you are campaigning to serve. For both traversing Ashland Avenue by transit and riding Brown, Red, and Purple Line trains through Clark Junction, there is no way to move more people reliably through these areas without infrastructure improvements. Garcia shouldn’t oppose projects without explaining his alternate plan to address the same issues and achieve similar benefits – otherwise there isn’t leadership.

Alternatives

There are few alternatives. First, you could study how to use the existing CTA land around the Belmont stop more efficiently and eliminate track conflicts. It would need to be studied whether a new northbound Brown Line track and platform just to the east and a few feet higher than the current track it shares with the Purple Line could allow for the Brown Line to get high early enough to bridge over the Red Line closer to School.

This option would spare the buildings on the commercial thoroughfare of Clark, and focus demolition on residential streets.  I am not sure if it is possible given how the Belmont station was reconstructed in 2009, but I don’t have a record of it being studied or laid out why it is not an option. Seeing as the anti-bypass group is claiming that the destruction on Clark would turn it into a “permanent under-El wasteland” I would think they would want to prove whether this is possible or not.

Secondly, any alternatives analysis process [which the CTA hasn’t conducted] would include studying a subway alternative for this portion of the Red Line. In the RPM’s subway alternative there was no need for the bypass. The CTA considered a subway from Loyola station to Belmont station, but never studied each section of the potential subway separately. I truly believe that a subway with a portal at Clark Street and a portal just north of Irving Park Road would eliminate the property acquisition, station constraint, and construction phasing issues to outweigh the increased cost of going underground, without needing to consider a two-track alternative.

There was a neighborhood proposal from the 1980s for a subway between Belmont Avenue and Irving Park Road which would act somewhat as a “flyunder”, so to speak. It would include a new Wrigley Field Station that could be built to handle more than the existing constrained Addison Red Line station, including a Purple Line stop in order to match the Purple Line limited service that stops at Sheridan that’s provided on select game days.

The “flyunder” could allow the CTA to forego the large amounts of property acquisition that would be required in order to straighten out the kinks in the elevated north of Belmont, and to smooth out the curve at Sheridan. The CTA could then sell land currently under the tracks for development. In order to see if this is now feasible given the way Belmont was rebuilt, the CTA would have to study whether a bilevel tunnel from Clark Junction to Irving Park would be possible under Clark Street, and parallel to Seminary Avenue.

There is also the alternative of proposing that eliminating the realignment of the Red Line, included in the Belmont Bypass literature, would be a way to eliminate the amount of buildings affected in the scope of the bypass.  But I think that is somewhat tied into the discussion about the other two alternatives. The point is that the elevated bypass is a simple (although in the CTA’s current process, clumsy) solution to the question of how do you eliminate the Clark Junction bottleneck and the unreliability in the system that it creates.