Writing about cities
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.
Earlier in March I moderated a panel called “Bringing Back 2-to-4 Flats” at the Metropolitan Planning Council office, interviewing three panelists who are developers and designers for these venerable Chicago housing typology.
Two, three, and four-flats are super common in Chicago, representing about one fifth of the city’s dwelling units. These properties are the most likely to have lower rents and family-sized units, according to the Institute of Housing Studies. But Chicago’s zoning laws severely restrict where they can be built. Changing the zoning laws to allow 2- to 4-flats by right makes it easier to increase the city’s housing supply and grow the economy.
Watch the full panel and Q&A in the video below.
Adam Ballard, the Associate State Director for AARP Illinois, the local chapter for AARP, interviewed Brian P. and I about accessory dwelling units. We discussed:
The conversation is 28 minutes long; if you haven’t dived into ADUs yet, this is a great video to help get you up to speed!
Bonus content: AARP is the largest organizational supporter of allowing accessory dwelling units in all communities because of how they expand the options for people to “age in place” (continue living in the same neighborhood when their housing needs change), earn additional income, or rent their big house to their adult children’s families. Explore AARP’s ADU resources.
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:
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:
There are 110 Walgreens in Chicago that are mapped in OpenStreetMap. If a bunch of Walgreens stores are going to close after the company’s acquisition by a private equity firm called Sycamore Partners, what would the redevelopment potential be?
For this analysis I located all 110 Walgreens using a filter in Chicago Cityscape, enabled the real estate data platform’s housing calculator to estimate the number of dwelling units allowed at each location. Then, manually, I removed the stores that were inside larger buildings leaving behind the strip mall-style locations – and a couple of standalone locations without parking lots (like this one in Lincoln Park).
Topline number: the Chicago zoning map is currently set so that if all of the one-story Walgreens stores were converted to housing approximately 3,642 homes could be built.
According to Will Loux, who advises on investing in “triple net” (NNN) leased properties, “Redeveloping these properties in the near term could be challenging due to the nature of the leases Walgreens signs. The leases tend to be long term NNN leases meaning the landlord collects rent while Walgreens is responsible for the majority of the costs associated with property ownership (taxes, insurance, and maintenance), giving the landlord little incentive to negotiate an early termination of the lease even if there are higher and better uses.”
Walgreens stores in Chicago are generally all the same size, with roughly the same size parking lots. But the zoning districts that have been applied to these properties range widely, with some stores allowing over 200 homes and others allowing 9 or 10 homes. Not every property can be expected to be redeveloped in a given year so higher zoning capacities for new housing should be well-distributed across a neighborhood and across a city.
It’s not a perfect analysis; some Walgreens parking lots are shared with other businesses (like the one at 7510 N Western Ave, where the entire strip mall is zoned to allow 267 homes), and I don’t know how much of that area should be “assigned” to the Walgreens store’s zoning capacity. While some, like 7510 N Western Ave and 3000 S Halsted St, might overestimate the number of homes allowed, there are also some that have an underestimate of homes allowed.
Another example is 1500 W Wilson Ave, where there is a Walgreens store and a Staples store which are owned by the same entity and share a parking lot. Excluding the shared parking lot the Walgreens could be converted to 16 homes and including the shared parking lot the Walgreens could be converted to 41 homes.
Galaxy brain take: including the shared parking lot and the Staples store, the Walgreens could be converted to 89 homes. For the purpose of my analysis I used the 16 homes number.
Probably the single best redevelopment opportunity is the Walgreens next to the Sheridan Red Line station, which is currently zoned to allow 97 homes. A future redevelopment could even include a rebuilt pharmacy and convenience store.
At least two two-story Walgreens store were included: