Apartment buildings on arterials in Chicago

There has been a large amount of infill residential construction in Chicago in recent years despite the city’s static or declining population.¹ Most of this building has occurred in prosperous neighborhoods on the North Side or close to downtown. “Urbanist” observers have argued that the new construction will support Chicago’s transformation into a more pedestrian-friendly and less automobile-dependent place. In this brief essay, I argue that, because much of the building has been occurring in relatively pedestrian-unfriendly areas, this hope may be misplaced. My argument is somewhat complex, in that it involves a consideration of Chicago’s zoning pattern, a look at the history of Chicago’s neighborhood commerce, and some thoughts on the meaning of “walkability.” Let me explain.

Many writers² have pointed out that zoning laws are one of the reasons that American cities aren’t denser. That is, for example, the reason that Chicago’s multi-unit dwellings are found mostly along the Lakefront

Tracts in Chicago and inner suburbs where at least fifty percent of the housing units are in buildings with ten or more housing units. Data from American Community Survey, 2008-2012.

is not only that, in a flat city that lacks natural landmarks, the Lakefront is the most attractive place to be. It’s also due to the fact that zoning prevents multi-unit buildings from being built anywhere else. Here’s a somewhat simplified map showing where multi-unit residential buildings may be built in Chicago without special permission.

Areas zoned RM, DR, or DX. PD areas (mostly in or near CBD) are also available for multi-unit housing, but special authorization is required. Data from Chicago’s Data portal.

Zoning codes, of course, aren’t set in stone, but they’re not easy to change. One of the reasons that multi-unit buildings in Chicago cover a larger area than is zoned for them is that much of the North Side Lakefront was downzoned during the late 1970s. It would be politically very difficult to restore the old code. Many people would like to do so, however. Blogger Daniel Kay Hertz has made of point of lamenting the difficulty of building more densely in desirable Chicago neighborhoods like Lake View and Lincoln Park, and in the nearly-as-desirable corridor stretching along Milwaukee Avenue on the Northwest Side. Large parts of these neighborhoods are mostly zoned either for single-family housing or for two-, three-, or four-flat dwellings.

In fact, there is what amounts to a major geographical loophole in the zoning codes. Many of the arterial streets in North and Northwest Side neighborhoods in Chicago are actually zoned “business” or “commercial.” Apartments over stores are permitted. In practice, so are apartment buildings as long as they’re not very tall. On this map, the red areas are zoned business or commercial:

Areas zoned B and C on the North Side of Chicago.

Chicago (as many people have pointed out) has much more business/commercial zoning than it needs. A city in which most people shop for food at supermarkets and buy just about everything else at big-box stores and on the Internet does not need the thousands of tiny shops on arterial streets that the zoning code encourages. And, in fact, most of the commercial districts defined in the zoning code are not very healthy. Many of the storefronts on, say, Ashland, Western, and Milwaukee Avenues and Irving Park Road are closed. Others are given over to enterprises that appear to attract very little business. Some of the specialized shops are, I’ll admit, of some interest. There are exotic restaurants on Irving Park, and book and comic-book stores on Milwaukee that could not pay the rent in a more desirable commercial district. But far more common than comic-book stores are, say, auto parts stores, nail salons with few customers, and newly built suburban-style drive-in restaurants and banks. Even commoner than that are older, typically small residential buildings with no stores at all. Any ground-floor commerce that once existed has long since disappeared.

One of the reasons that these commercial districts are so marginal may be that the arterial streets are miserable places for walking. This is especially true of four-lane streets like Ashland and Western Avenues and Irving Park Road west of Ashland. They have a lot of vehicular traffic. During rush hour there are even traffic jams.

That is to say, while I don’t know exactly how to define walkability, it’s surely more complicated than the WalkScore Website metrics imply. I suspect it has a great deal to do with whether motor vehicles outnumber pedestrians. Most pedestrians are perfectly happy to walk on streets like Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and the Champs-Élysées in Paris even though there is a huge amount of traffic flowing nearby. There are just about always a huge number of pedestrians too. To walk by oneself on one of these streets at rush hour (while it’s never likely to happen) would probably feel uncomfortable. Most pedestrians, however, are happy to walk by themselves on residential streets with hardly any traffic. Again, the dynamic seems to be the ratio of vehicles to people. This is not to deny that there are other factors as well—such as the scale of buildings, the presence of high-quality sidewalks, and the existence of places to walk to. Streets like Ashland Avenue in Lake View and Lincoln Park and Irving Park Road west of Ashland are poor streets for walking because they have many more cars than pedestrians. The near absence of interesting commerce and the massive amounts of traffic reinforce each other to discourage pedestrian activity.

But, curiously, one of the places where there has been the largest amount of residential construction in Lake View and Lincoln Park (and elsewhere on the North Side) in recent years is on the arterials. This makes perfect sense in many ways. The neighborhoods are generally considered unambiguously desirable. Most of the side streets in these areas are more or less completely gentrified. Older buildings in poor shape on the side streets have for the most part already been fixed up or replaced, zoning laws in any case discourage denser infill, and there is little opportunity for new building. But, because the older buildings on the arterials have not been seen as very desirable, they have typically not been renovated, and every so often one becomes available to developers. The zoning codes do permit new apartment construction on these “commercial” streets with minimal need for a waiver. Because all these streets have reasonable bus service, there’s even a certain amount of urbanist logic in building on them, although just about all the new housing on these streets comes with plenty of parking.

I took a close look at two mile-long arterial corridors where there has been recent construction, one in Lake View and one in a nearby but still slightly marginal neighborhood.

The first corridor is Ashland Avenue between Belmont Avenue and Irving Park Road. Much of the street once looked something like this:

The neighborhood around Ashland Avenue underwent a considerable amount of gentrification during the 1980s and 1990s, but Ashland itself was somewhat neglected by developers until approximately 1996, when a Whole Foods opened toward the southern end of the corridor and Wieboldt’s, a closed department store across the street, was converted into “lofts.” In the years since, Ashland has been slowly transformed from a tired commercial and residential street into a more densely built-up mostly residential one. Nearly half the older buildings have been replaced, and the process is continuing. Here’s a map:

On this and the similar map of part of Irving Park Road, red is used to show new, generally post-1998  construction (but some quite recent). Only buildings that front on the arterial are colored. Source of data: the building footprint file downloaded from the city of Chicago’s Data portal, modified approximately when there has been building since the dataset’s compilation.

Some of the new construction consists of buildings that are very much like the three-flat four-story condo buildings that have become the commonest kind of new building on the side streets, although they can have a store instead of a stoop and living space on the ground floor:

Most of the new buildings are somewhat larger though. The commonest type is the six- or eight-unit apartment building, like this:

Sometimes two or more of these are put together:

There are also a few much bigger (but not much taller) apartment buildings.

It’s difficult to provide a precise statistical portrait of this corridor, because it’s spread over five (formerly six) census tracts that extend a quarter mile on both sides of Ashland so that the corridor itself covers only a small portion of the tracts. Per capita income was $44,514 in 1999 ($63,253 in 2014 dollars). It rose to $68,529 in the 2010-2014 American Community Survey (which has 2009-2013 income data but reports numbers in 2014 dollars). The number of residents has also increased modestly. In 2000 the population was 11,359. In 2010/2014 it was 12,629. There is no way to be certain about where the new residents were living, but, because new buildings on the side streets were generally not much bigger than the older buildings they replaced, it seems likely that the apartment buildings on Ashland house a large portion (and maybe most) of the neighborhood’s newcomers. The percentage of workers 16 and over who took public transit to work also increased somewhat between 2000 and 2010/2014, from 38.34 to 44.91. There are two CTA rail stations within a block or two of the corridor, and I don’t doubt that some of the residents of the new buildings do take advantage of the bus lines that stop outside their door. But there are still few pedestrians on Ashland Avenue. It’s just not a nice place to walk, and, with the exception of that Whole Foods, there are few destinations to walk to.

The second corridor I looked at—Irving Park Road between Sacramento and Central Park Avenues just west of the North Branch of the Chicago River—is at an earlier stage of what may be a similar process.  Much of the street doesn’t look very different than it did in, say, the 1990s (or maybe the 1920s!):

More of the older buildings, however, have been replaced by suburban-style commerce. There are also a few new apartment buildings on Irving Park Road, some larger than anything on Ashland:

Here’s a map:

This corridor (in the Irving Park community area) is much poorer than the Ashland corridor and has hardly been gentrified at all; very little of the old housing stock on the side streets has been replaced or seriously renovated. Per capita income in the six (now eight) tracts bordering Irving Park Road increased marginally from $16,532 in 1999 ($23,491 in 2014 dollars) to $23,798 in 2009/2013 (again, the corridor itself makes up only a small part of the tracts, which cover an area up to half a mile from Irving Park Road). Population hardly changed. It was 28,990 in 2000 and 28,444 in 2010/2014. There is no way to be certain about population change at the building level, but it seems possible that the addition of new apartment buildings reduced what would otherwise have been a greater decline in population. Public transit use also held nearly steady. The percent of the working-age population that took public transit to work rose from 20.03 to 22.04. (There are no rail stations close to this corridor.) The area’s stability applies to its ethnic mix as well. It was 55.1% Hispanic in 2000,  56.4% Hispanic in 2010/2014.

Despite the area’s lower-middle-class status, it is on the North Side; it’s pretty safe; and developers have had enough confidence to put up apartment buildings when lots on Irving Park Road have become available. The process is continuing; several new apartment projects are in the works. It’s possible that this corridor will look something like the Ashland corridor in a few years. But, in general, despite the new buildings, there is less sign of pedestrian life on Irving Park Road than in the Ashland corridor. There seems to be even more traffic, and there is nothing anything like as attractive as a Whole Foods to walk to.

Compared to, say, a freeway, or a railroad yard, or a coal-burning power plant, a four-lane urban arterial is a minor disamenity. But it is a disamenity, and its presence doesn’t just affect people living along it. It affects the surrounding neighborhoods too, since the arterials are so awkward to cross, especially on foot. (There are traffic lights only every quarter mile or so.) The city does seem to understand the problem. It’s installed green median strips along Ashland Avenue and Irving Park Road, but these help only marginally, especially since they weren’t put in at corners where a left-turn lane was wanted.

Many other North Side arterials have undergone a similar transformation. The streets appear to have been (or are being) transformed on the basis of urbanist principles, but it’s not clear that there’s been much of an urbanist effect. It’s even possible that the increase in population has generated more traffic, and hence lowered the neighborhoods’ walkability. The NIMBY argument that development = traffic may not make much sense in more pedestrian-friendly areas, but perhaps it does here.

It could certainly be argued that any kind of increased density is a good thing, but it’s still odd to have the densest housing in the least walkable parts of neighborhoods.

Chicago’s North Side is hardly the only place where this phenomenon is common. New or newish apartment buildings on urban arterials can be found all over the United States. They were apparently built in many cases for the same reasons as in Chicago: the availability of land; the absence of protesting neighbors; and oddities of the zoning code. I can’t resist adding that there is a precedent in Chicago, which appears to be the only city in Western world whose most prestigious housing overlooks what is for all intents and purposes a freeway, that is, Lake Shore Drive.

It’s hard to see what one could do about the problem except to downsize the arterials radically. If it were up to me, that’s certainly what would happen. The Chicago Transit Authority does in fact have a plan to put bus rapid transit on Ashland and Western Avenues, which would mean eliminating a lane of traffic and forbidding most left turns. The fact, however, that this plan has elicited an enormous amount of opposition has put it on hold. Automobile drivers do not easily give up the right to degrade an environment. Radical downsizing of the arterials doesn’t seem likely to happen soon. Until it does, streets like Ashland and Western Avenues and Irving Park Road present an enormous long-term obstacle to transforming the North Side of Chicago into a more pedestrian-friendly place even if they are acquiring new multi-unit housing.