Category: Cities

Two-flat journal 9: other two-flat rehab blogs

January 20, 2025 / / 0 Comments

It’s been nearly two years since I’ve written a blog post about the gut rehab of the two-flat I bought in 2020 so I figured an update was necessary. The status is that I’m working on finalizing a contract with a general contractor and I have a loan application in progress. Read the other two-flat journal posts.

Two-flats – and their cousins the three- and four-flats – are the second most common building type in Chicago. There are approximately 254,800 homes in 2-to-4 flats in Chicago, according to data collected by the Cook County Assessor’s Office. And according to the U.S. Census they make up 27.2 percent of residential structures in Chicago. That’s compared to 25.5 percent detached homes, 3.8 percent attached homes, and 43.5 percent of houses, apartment, and condo buildings with five or more units (2-to-4 flats can also be condo buildings).

Thus it makes sense that there would be a handful of blogs to discuss their renovation.

(Although in the same vein it would probably make sense that there are blogs to discuss renovating condos, and I haven’t come across those.)

That’s my house on the left, captured in December 2024.

I’m glad each one of these is pretty well-organized because it takes a lot of time to peruse a project-oriented blog for specific information if you haven’t read it from the beginning.

Here are the blogs

Most recently updated is listed first.

Two Flat: Remade
This is the story of a deconversion (to a single detached house) but the renovation process is pretty much the same as restoring two units; gas service remains in the house. By Matt and Sarah, who bought the house circa 2011 and are still renovating it (check out “The Plan” page to learn about their phasing).

Reshaping our Footprint (One Watt at a Time)
Follow our journey of a deep energy retrofit (or energy efficient rehab) on a 100+ year old masonry two flat in Chicago. The goal is to turn the building into a zero-energy home with a sustainable and resource-efficient landscape. Most posts are by Marcus de la Fleur.

Yellow Brick Home
Kim and Scott bought the dilapidated two-flat in 2019 and completed the renovation in 2021 or 2022. Each unit and the outside are detailed in three groups of articles. Yellow Brick Home is the most design-forward of the blogs.

Little Chicago Two Flat
Corey and Emily bought their two-flat in 2021 and did a DIY renovation over the next eight months.

Chicago Two-Flat
Jocelyn and Steve started this blog in 2005! The most posts are in 2005 and 2006 so use the blog archive menu on the right side to go back to that time. Perhaps start by reading this post from March 2005 about removing the drop ceiling.

If you know of another blog about renovating a 2-to-4 flat in Chicago, leave a comment with the link!

Bonus links

Back To The Studs
This a video series by Brad and Sean who have been renovating a Brooklyn brownstone into three units since 2021. I’ve been watching their progress on TikTok, but given the “soft ban” it’s better to look at their YouTube page.

Home electrification case study in North Lawndale
“Through Elevate’s electrification program, contractors installed electric, energy efficient appliances at Ms. McGee’s house in Lawndale. The upgrades included an electric stove, washer and dryer, as well as a heat pump that powers a central heating and cooling system.”

Zoning assessment: Old Town Canvas

December 14, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The alternative headline is “Zoning assessment: how to propose a large building outside downtown Chicago when the current zoning code doesn’t typically allow that and the current zoning code goes against historical development norms for the city”.

I’ve said many times on social media how the Chicago zoning code doesn’t allow many extant buildings to be built because a zoning district that would allow the height, bulk, or density (“size”, for short) doesn’t exist anymore. All of those examples were outside of the downtown district because the downtown district still allows the size of all the extant buildings there.

The Old Town Canvas development would replace the Walgreens building. The development’s size is in line with all the other nearby high-rise residential buildings.

I am going to describe how a building with the size of the proposed Old Town Canvas development is allowed outside of downtown (view the boundary). The development shows how to use multiple standards in the Chicago zoning code to build a lot of needed housing and serves as another example of the Chicago zoning code being much more restrictive than its previous iterations.

I won’t belabor the point any further, but it shouldn’t take “zoning cleverness” to build more housing in Chicago.

About the development

The Old Town Canvas development’s size – proposing 500 homes in a building 395′ tall – is largely possible because of two longstanding standards in the Chicago zoning code, neither of which are unique to the site – there are no loopholes here.

Those standards are:

  1. the “-5” zoning district’s allowance for nearly unlimited height if the property has a sufficient length of street frontage
  2. the ability to establish a Planned Development and shift zoning capacity from one parcel to another, even across a roadway

1. Height limits in “-5” zoning districts

In a B-5 or C-5 zoning district, the height limit is based on how much street frontage1 the property has. For a property that has 100 feet or more of street frontage the height limit is normally 80 feet. However, an exception2 in the zoning code allows buildings to “exceed the maximum height” if approved and reviewed as a Planned Development3.

This means there is no maximum height, but there are certainly influencing factors: the support of the local alderperson, the support of the city planning staff, and guidelines from the FAA.

2. Planned Developments can move zoning capacity between parcels

A basic zoning assessment of the parcels for the building results in an estimate that 179 homes would be allowed here. This is much fewer homes than previous Chicago zoning codes allowed, and much fewer homes on a similar sized parcel than the four nearest high-rises which have about the same or more than the proposed number of 500.

To be able to build 321 additional homes the developer has proposed incorporating the unused zoning capacity of Piper’s Alley, a mixed-use development, and Moody Bible Church, where the most recent community meeting to discuss the traffic study was held this month.

I can’t get into specifics because I don’t have knowledge of how much unused FAR and MLA per unit that each of those other properties can transfer. To do that I would need to see architecture drawings showing how much floor area the buildings have already.

In this case, the owners of the other properties must give their consent to the Old Town Canvas developer to be incorporated into a new – or in this case, an amended – Planned Development and show this consent to the City of Chicago4.

That process is essentially the definition of what many people would call “air rights” (which I think more specifically means being able to build above something, like a railroad or roadway) and municipal governments would likely call “transfer of development rights”.

Neither “air rights” nor “transfer of development rights” are commonly used terms in Chicago. There are several buildings, however, that use air rights granted to them by the railroads that own the tracks under Riverside Plaza buildings.

In New York City, to explain an alternative implementation of TDR, development rights include the ability for owners of landmarked buildings and of buildings in special districts to transfer the zoning capacity beyond the geographic limitations of the Chicago Planned Development standards. For example, a landmarked theater in the Special Midtown District can be a “granting site” of development rights to a “receiving site” within the Theater Subdistrict.

Notes

  1. In some other jurisdictions height limit is based on street width, and in Chicago’s first zoning code height was based on building depth and how much each upper section was set back from the street. ↩︎
  2. See 17-3-0408-A[1] in the Chicago zoning code. ↩︎
  3. There are codified standards regarding height in the Planned Development section of the Chicago zoning code, starting with the guideline, “High-rise buildings or towers should respect the context and scale of surrounding buildings with setbacks at appropriate heights which will also reduce the apparent mass from street level.” Other standards for high-rise buildings within Planned Developments are found in 17-8-0907-C. ↩︎
  4. Section 17-8-0400 of the Chicago zoning code has a regulation affecting ownership and site control and how Planned Developments can have multiple owners controlling multiple sites. ↩︎

Lake Calumet had a lot more water surface area 50 years ago

November 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I visited Big Marsh Bike Park with a friend three weekends ago to ride mountain bikes on the single track, check out the park’s campsite, see if people were still drag racing on Stony Island Avenue (they were), and finally, try to get a sense of where the access trail from Pullman in the west will cross over Lake Calumet by viewing the “land bridge” from the air.

According to the “preferred alignment” map below, the future bike trail will cross the lake at the shortest opening where the spit is on the left. The photo is facing due west.

While researching the proposed multi-use trail, boardwalk, and bridge, I decided to look up historic aerial photos to try and understand when and where the land around the lake was filled in. (I think the Illinois International Port District is the proposer.)

Renderings and map by Epstein.

The Lake Calumet diptych I made shows two aerial photos – taken from airplanes – of Lake Calumet in 1970 and 1995. The images come from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s collection of three decades of 6,300 aerial photos across the six country region.

In the 1995 image you can see the Harborside International Golf Center built on landfill (also in 1995), additional slips for ships, and other land and water feature additions and subtractions.

The two photographs were taken slightly offset from each other but I scaled and adjusted their alignments to match each other as best as I could.

Density bonuses in transit-served locations should be available by right

September 17, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Update October 23, 2024: I’m aware of one project that has been withdrawn in part due to complications complying with resident-requested changes that would have been lessened if the applicant did not have to also apply for a Type 1 zoning map amendment in order to take advantage of the Connected Communities ordinance’s density bonuses and the “ZBA bundling” streamlining that was adopted by City Council last fall. The applicant was requesting to rezone from the B2-3 to B3-3 (the new zoning district). If the new zoning district already existed and some of the changes I mention in the comment below were in place, then the applicant would have likely already applied for a permit.

This is the original version of a public comment I planned to give to the Chicago City Council zoning committee on Tuesday, September 17, 2024. Due to an overwhelming number of commenters the amount of time allotted to each speaker was reduced from three minutes to two minutes. I edited and cut the comment on the fly.

Video recording of my comment to zoning committee.

Hello, my name is Steven Vance, I’m a South Loop renter and a member of Urban Environmentalists Illinois.

The ordinances to proactively upzone Western Avenue from Howard Street to Addison Street will be voted on today in this committee. The ordinances will rezone nearly all of the 4.5 mile stretch to B3-3 zoning, allowing multifamily housing to be built as of right without further approvals from the local alderperson or this committee. I fully support this plan. 

However, there is a technical flaw in this plan that could hinder the initiative’s goal of adding more housing, both market rate and subsidized affordable. 

To take advantage of the Connected Communities bonuses that allow even more or larger homes to be built when a property is both in a B3-3 zoning district and a transit-served location, the property owner must still obtain a Type 1 zoning map amendment. To sail smoothly, such amendments need support from the local alderperson, most of whom require community meetings before deciding to offer such support. Thus, in some circumstances, the proactive upzoning may not have one of its intended effects of cutting the tape for building new housing. 

The greatest Connected Communities ordinance bonuses, that allow for the most additional housing and family-sized homes, only kick in when 100% of the proposal’s ARO requirement is built on-site. I’m concerned that that requirement combined with the need to get a Type 1 zoning map amendment might limit the number of additional homes added as a result of the upzonings. A solution would be to amend the Connected Communities ordinance to allow the bonuses to be granted by right as long as the other, existing standards about on-site ARO units are met. 

I would like City Council members to implement more proactive upzoning initiatives across Chicago, including on arterials like Western Avenue, Milwaukee Avenue, and Broadway, as well as on less busy streets like 35th Street in McKinley Park and designated Pedestrian Streets. Yet to fully and cost-effectively realize the benefits of housing abundance from this policy lever, further tweaks are needed so housing providers can get to construction sooner. 

The proactive upzoning of Western Avenue, as well as Milwaukee Avenue, reflects real leadership on the part of the alderpersons. It will result in more and better housing for Chicagoans, more affordable units for residents who need them most, and more tax revenue for the city. I’m hopeful that with some tweaks to the density bonuses outlined here, we can establish a model for a more affordable, welcoming and prosperous city. 

A new multi-family apartment building under construction on Western Avenue.

Additional reading

Reviewing the City Council subcommittee’s sixteen revenue-raising ideas

September 16, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Mayor Johnson asked 6th Ward alderperson William Hall to solicit ideas about how to fund the City of Chicago budget. The Chicago Tribune reported on these:

The Google [Forms] survey he included asked aldermen to respond “Yes” or “No” to the following ideas, with no added descriptions: “Sales Tax on Services; Property Tax (CPI Increase); Monthly/Wireless Plan Tax; Increase in LGDF Share; Head Tax; Alcohol Tax; Checking Bag Tax; Video Gaming Tax; Grocery Tax; City Sticker Increase; Congestion Tax; Income Tax Surcharge; Package Tax; Vacant Lot Tax; Ticket Reseller Amusement Tax; Enterprise Zones.”

I’ll briefly describe each one based on my own knowledge of these taxes. Note that these are possibilities and not suggestions.

  • Sales tax on services. Chicago doesn’t have a sales tax on most services (think haircut or tax preparation). (Chicago has a tax on some services, like the “Personal Property Lease Transaction Tax” which applies to services that use cloud computing, including Netflix!)
  • Property tax increase based on inflation. Mayor Lightfoot implemented this for a few years but Mayor Johnson did not renew it.
  • Wireless plan tax. This one confuses me because Chicago already taxes monthly cellular service.
  • Increase in LGDF share. LGDF is the State of Illinois local government distributive fund and the idea here is to convince the state legislature to increase the share that that the City of Chicago receives. Some data points that I think could be in favor of increasing the city’s LGDF share: Cook County receives back only 88% of what it contributes to state taxes (Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, page 37).
  • Head tax. This is a tax employers would pay for each employee they have. Mayor Emanuel and City Council phased out the head tax in 2014.
  • Alcohol tax. Chicago applies its own liquor tax, currently starting at $0.29 per gallon of beer up to $2.68 per gallon for anything containing 20% or more ABV.
  • Checking bag tax. I presume this refers to the existing Checkout Bag Tax, which is set at 7 cents per checkout bag sold at retail stores (the store can keep 2 cents of this to help subsidize the cost of the bag).
  • Video gaming tax. This would mean legalizing video gambling and taxing it.
  • Grocery tax. Governor Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly eliminated the 1% grocery tax starting in 2025, revenues from which are distributed to municipalities. In return, the state allowed cities to implement their own grocery tax. Richard Day opines why it would be a bad idea for Chicago to implement such a regressive tax.
  • City sticker increase. A city sticker is a fee for the privilege of being able to park a car for free across much of the city.
  • Congestion tax. This would create a fee, surcharge, or tax for the privilege of driving a personal vehicle, and for the city to recover the costs and negative impacts, into the downtown area during specified times.
  • Income tax surcharge. I’m not sure what the surcharge means but Chicago currently doesn’t have an income tax.
  • Package tax. I don’t know what this means, but Hall told the Chicago Tribune that the package tax would “look at weights and distribution of packages that move throughout the city.”
  • Vacant lot tax. This would probably act as a kind of land value tax but would probably be implemented as an additional property tax on vacant lots (I assume any parcel that the county classifies as “1-00” would be eligible for this).
  • Ticket reseller amusement tax. Another tax that already exists; presumably this would be increasing the tax paid by people buying tickets for amusements (which includes concerts – you can see a list of all of the registered amusement tax businesses).
  • Enterprise Zones. I can’t make sense of this because Enterprise Zones are an existing state incentive area; there are six in Chicago. This “give” money (in the form of state sales tax breaks on construction materials and waiving the state’s portion of the real estate transfer tax in some situations) to property owners.
A vacant lot in Bronzeville. Land value tax would fix this.

Further reading

The Civic Federation came up with their own list of possible revenue sources and indicated if they require a state statute to authorize.