Real estate agent Wayne Beals recently took Alderperson Andre Vasquez (40th Ward) on a tour of a new construction all-electric house in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago. It was built by the same company, Greenline Homes, as the house tour I co-hosted with Wayne and the Climate Action Museum in February. In this 8-minute video of their tour, Vasquez asks how electric houses are heated, gets to see the swap-in heat pump water heater, learns about the heat pump condensing dryer, and the two check out the outdoor heat pump heating and cooling unit. The developer, Benjamin van Horne also pops i ..read more

A new 15-unit apartment building exemplifies smart development by forgoing a gas connection and taking full advantage of financial incentives. Darshan Desai, in his first new construction development, is responding to construction costs by building all-electric homes in an Enterprise Zone in Chicago. Darsh, as he’s called, said he wanted to develop an all-electric building “to simplify” the operations. “As a long term operator the idea was to take extra variables out of the equation. Add another utility that adds initial installation complexity and cost, and over time it becomes another u ..read more

Building permits tell you about projects that have been permitted by the city and can begin construction. Chicago Cityscape’s new Pending Permits map can show you projects that are still in the permit application process and are days or months away from being permitted. Pending Permits is how we know that Lendlease is preparing its third high-rise residential building in the Southbank development. If you’re a Chicago Cityscape member, give Pending Permits a try — it’s available to all membership tiers. Left to right: The permit application description indicates a forthcoming 21-story building ..read more

The five events include two opportunities to tour new construction all-electric houses in Woodlawn, webinars to hear from builders about the electric homes development, electrifying one’s own home, and a bonus free cooking class with opportunities to win a home cooking prize set. 1. ComEd electric homes incentive Tuesday, February 13, 2024, 3-4 PM RSVP for the webinar Join Rewiring America for a discussion with Slipstream’s Energy Operations Researcher, Sophia Seol, Greenline Home’s CEO, Benjamin Van Horne, and Wayne Beals, Chair of the Chicago Association of Realtors Sustainabi ..read more

Chicago Cityscape presents its first multimedia Chicago Permits Wrapped, looking at building permit activity in Chicago in 2023. Watch it as a video, sift through the slideshow on our website, download it as a PDF, or read the Wrapped highlights below. Topline figures are that in 2023 the City of Chicago issued permits for 5,640 units in 253 multi-unit buildings and 281 single-units (detached houses), totaling 5,921 new construction units in 534 buildings. The first and second largest residential projects that were permitted in 2023, by unit count, were Related Midwest’s 400 N DLSD and Magella ..read more

Chicago Cityscape ends 2023 with the biggest set of improvements. Q4 has the most updates since we started publishing them — there are 19 in this post. At Damen Ave & Lake St, both a new CTA Green Line station and a 96-unit apartment building are under construction.Property Finder improvements The 2021 Cook County annual tax sale properties are now included in Property Finder with their own filter. There are 27,930 properties in Chicago and 26,971 properties not in Chicago included in the sale occurring January 9-16, 2024. An arms length transaction filter in Property Finder and ..read more

In October Chicago Cityscape and AIA Chicago hosted a tour of a new construction coach house ADU that had been completed weeks prior. The real host were the property owners, Brian and Fiona, whose mother [yes, this is a real mother-in-law apartment] would be moving in days after the tour. The Lakeview coach house was designed by Latent Design; the founder, Katherine Darnstadt, spoke to the small group (which was limited by the number of people who can comfortably stand inside of a sub-700 s.f. space). The builder was James Construction Group. The coach house is all-electric, with heating ..read more

Two longstanding federal infrastructure loan funds were revised last month to extend below-market interest rates to private development near rail stations. RRIF and TIFIA have previously funded work for Amtrak and transit agencies but can now fund new construction and significant adaptive reuse and office conversion projects within a half-mile walking distance of rail stations. At the time of writing, the interest rate is 4.84 percent. Proximity to Metra stations makes a project eligible for U.S. DOT below-market interest rate loans. RRIF will fund up to 75 percent of eligible proje ..read more

Head into 2023 Q4 equipped with even more information at your fingertips Take a moment to skim the ten new or updated features we created in the previous quarter. There is improved data for property finders (i.e. developers and brokers), architects, community-based organizations, residential and commercial brokers, and zoning and land use attorneys and analysts. Chicago Cityscape is the best way to view existing, proposed, and new developments in Chicago. 92,000 properties in Cook County now have owner names. These are tax-exempt properties owned by municipalities, hospitals, places of w ..read more

The Cook County Assessor’s Office continues to make more data about 1.8 million properties available, to Chicago Cityscape members’ benefit. Earlier this year the CCAO published a database of the names of tax-exempt property owners, increasing the level of transparency of the convoluted property tax system in Cook County. Chicago Cityscape quickly integrated this data about nearly 100,000 properties into Property Finder, one of our primary features in Property Report and Place Report. This blog post will (1) describe the data’s contents, (2) demonstrate how it’s been integrated, and (3) a ..read more