Some followup notes on housing in Chicago
An Old Town project to support and a few brief bits to read
As a brief followup to Tuesday’s newsletter on housing and zoning in Chicago, I thought I’d drop in a few other interesting notes and articles on housing market. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out in the comments or on email with any thoughts, questions or suggestions.
The Andersonville Project Again
Over at Streetsblog Chicago, Richard Day has some thoughts on the rejected apartment complex in Andersonville that I referenced earlier this week. He brings up some good points, including some I didn’t fully lay out. He also comes to a similar conclusion as I did - local community input too heavily prioritizes local wants over city needs, and we need to make it easier to build across Chicago.
A Project to support in Old Town
In other current development projects, a site at 1600 N. LaSalle is currently under review and is facing some pushback from neighbors. It’s a 36 story tower (in line with the three other tall buildings within a block of this site) which would add 500 rental units to a part of the city where it’s relatively expensive to live today. Alderman Brian Hopkins is still undecided on whether to support the project. I’d encourage you to help voice your support with his office here, particularly if you live in the 2nd or 43rd ward (Hopkins represents the 2nd, but the project borders the 43rd as well).
Why Parking Minimums Matter
I touched briefly on the concept of parking minimums when describing Minneapolis’s zoning reforms, but thought it might be worth spelling this out a bit more in detail. In general, the way to make something cheaper is to make more of it. We can’t make more land,1 so if you want more housing you have to put more units on a fixed piece of land - increasing density. Statutory requirements on how much of a lot has to go towards parking cut against this - every square foot that goes into a parking spot is at least one (or more, for multistory construction) square foot that isn’t going towards housing. That makes housing more expensive, and it’s often unnecessary in places like Chicago where we have a pretty good transit system.2 None of this requires us to get rid of parking if tenants or property owners demand it - but I’m generally in favor of letting the market decide how much parking a building needs, instead of the city mandating it. Here’s some coverage of the Minneapolis reform, and a few articles on Streetsblog Chicago on the concept as well.
Legalizing Single Stair Construction
Parking minimums aren’t the only way we can improve density on a given plot. On the substack Thesis Driven, I really enjoyed this overview on the case for legalizing single-stair multifamily construction written by Stephen Smith, the Executive Director of the Center for Building in North America:
In the U.S., most building codes require apartment buildings to have two staircases on opposite ends (intended as a safety measure against fires). Very few other parts of the world require this until buildings get pretty tall - Switzerland, for example, has no maximum building height for single staircase construction, Italy permits single staircase up to 25 stories, and Germany permits single staircase up to 20 stories. These other countries also do better than the US on per-capita fire deaths, making one question how much the safety tradeoff is worth it.
Meanwhile, given where the two staircases have to be, the codes have a particularly interesting impact on the layout of U.S. apartments. This impact is particularly pronounced for larger multi-bedroom apartments - just the kind of family-oriented construction that we don’t seem to be getting enough of in cities. I’d encourage anyone to give the full article a read if you’re interested in learning more.
Until recently I lived in a condo building where we had 40-45 parking spots for 30ish condos, and nearly half of the garage usually sat empty.