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.
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.
