A decade ago, a row of North Park storefronts was cleared for a university housing project that never came. The businesses are gone, the buildings are mostly empty, and neighbors are still pushing Northeastern Illinois University to act. Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Bernice Radle, an incremental developer in Buffalo, and Alex Montero of Strong Towns Chicago to ask why places like this get stuck. What begins as the story of one vacant block turns into a deeper question: once a place has been cleared for a future vision, what happens when that future never arrives? The conversation explores why smaller, incremental approaches can succeed where larger plans stall, and what gets lost when neighborhoods are left waiting.
Hi there, and welcome to a member week-themed episode of Upzoned. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be joined today by Bernice Radle and Alex Montero, who are Strong Towns members and doing the work in their communities to build stronger, more vibrant, more inclusive places.
As we celebrate members this week, we just want to acknowledge that there are so many people who are part of the Strong Towns movement. I always say many of you are already member-adjacent. You are putting in the time. You are taking note of things in your community that are a real challenge, and you're addressing them in ways that are so conducive to a Strong Towns mindset and addressing the things that we need in our places.
With that, I hope as we take this time during member week to really think about what we can continue to do, one of the questions we have is: What can we do right now about our places and the struggles that we face? One of the struggles that we're going to talk about today, as part of a bigger pattern that we certainly see, probably in your neighborhood as well, is that 10 years ago, Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago used eminent domain to assemble an entire block of neighborhood storefronts on Bryn Mawr Avenue between Kimball Avenue and Bernard Street in Chicago's North Park neighborhood.
They closed the businesses that were there. Then the property owner stepped in and said, "Wait a minute, why are you using eminent domain for this?" They fought it in court, which meant that it dragged on. The university did win those court cases because they had these powers, and their plan to build additional student housing on these sites, as well as some retail, was still potentially going to go forward. But the student housing never arrived, and still today, a decade later, much of that block remains vacant.
Earlier this year, neighbors marked the 10th anniversary with a birthday party, posting signs that read "10 years of decay" and filling storefront windows with sticky notes imagining what they would like to see there instead: coffee shops, better housing, bookstores, grocery stores, ice cream, and other neighborhood-serving businesses. The story comes from a May 28 article by Molly DeVore in Block Club Chicago. I'll put a link in the show notes if you'd like to read the reporting for yourself.
We know that this isn't just a story about Northeastern Illinois University or one block on Bryn Mawr Avenue in North Park. It's a story about what happens when communities, and especially community leaders, try to put all of their chips into one big plan and take some pretty big swings to make it happen. Then, what do you do when that plan no longer makes sense, or maybe, from a Strong Towns perspective, never made sense in the first place?
To help us unpack that question, we're joined by two people who bring very different but complementary perspectives. First is Bernice Radle, an incremental developer in Buffalo, New York, founder of Neighborhood Evolution, and co-leader of the Strong Towns Buffalo Local Conversation group. Bernice has spent years helping bring older buildings and overlooked commercial corridors back to life through really interesting, small-scale, incremental investment and development. Her work brings her face to face with some of the real challenges that happen when buildings are left vacant, when communities sit in a state of idleness, and what alternative paths might be available in order to take the next step.
Also joining us is Alex Montero, co-leader of Strong Towns Chicago. Alex is an urbanist. He's also a stand-up comedian, and fittingly enough, someone who was just a few blocks away from the site we're going to talk about when I reached out to him to say, "Hey, can you come on this podcast to talk about North Park?" Alex has a deep understanding of Chicago, how neighborhoods evolve and adapt, and also, as we see, how they sometimes get stuck.
Let's talk about land assemblies and what's going on at this site. Alex, as you were nearby in that area, can you share some of the ways this is unfolding in your community?
Yeah, of course. So happy to be on, Norm, and to talk about this as an interesting case study of some of the other things happening in Chicago and with land use in general.
I don't live in North Park. I live on the southwest side of Chicago. North Park is on the northwest side of the city, but I was in North Park recently because North Park is the home of not just Northeastern University, but a major hospital here in Chicago, Swedish Hospital. It is an enormous hospital complex with a lot of smaller clinics and related healthcare businesses nearby. It's a destination for a lot of folks in the city. A lot of nurses and doctors work there. Obviously, a lot of patients go there from across the city for different procedures and different things.
Because it has those two major employers, the university and the hospital network, there's a lot of demand for housing in that neighborhood, but not necessarily easy ways to build it, which I'm sure will come into the conversation itself.
Bernice, Buffalo has examples like this as well, so I would imagine there would be some parallels. What were some of the things that struck you as you initially covered this article?
Buffalo is not similar to Chicago in the sense that we've lost a ton of population, but we actually deal with a lot of these really great small- to medium-sized buildings that either get gobbled up by developers who do nothing with them, or they sit there because it's really hard. They are in neighborhoods that have been redlined, and they're vacant because we can't find the financing for them. So there are similarities with this article, and it made me think so much.
There's so much pressure on the country in areas, just as Alex said. Whether it's in Buffalo or any communities that we live in, medical campuses usually put pressure on housing, or specific districts put pressure on housing. When I read this article, I was really surprised that 10 years have just gone by and nothing is really being done.
But when you read through it, what you realize is that the model big development likes to do and universities like to do is just not granular. They cannot think granular if they want to. I'm not trying to offend anybody, but their business model is not granular. We need more granular, locally focused business models if we want to see buildings like these get renovated.
Can you have mixed-use retail with some student housing on top and have it at a finer scale than what was probably proposed, where this would be a full-block development? Often, Bernice, you may run into the challenge that people say, "Well, that doesn't pencil." You have proof that it can. You can say, "No, I can find ways to make even the smallest site viable, and even to add height to sites." We can see that in most major cities. Small parcels have been built upward.
Yet in my community, I shared an example that is unfolding right now. My city did virtually the same thing. They bought a bunch of land near the little waterfront, riverfront area. There were seven different sites on it, and they knocked down four of them, so only three remained. There was a great little antique store and a bunch of other spaces using these old, dilapidated buildings. They were still functional.
Then the city said, "Wouldn't it be great if we had a hotel?" So they got rid of the other three tenants and knocked down those buildings. Now we have a large asphalt pad, and they really reflected what the university is doing in this story. The university has put out a request: "Can somebody please do something with this land and be a partner with us?" That call has gone unheeded.
In my city, the city is already millions of dollars in on laying out a platform for somebody to do something with this site. The trouble is, they consolidated all seven lots into one lot. I thought, "Come on, you could have just left it at seven, and on the day that you need the change to occur, switch it back to one." But no. Ahead of time, they wanted to make it easy, streamlined, and simplified: one parcel. Now they're waiting for hotels to show up.
I asked, "Why a hotel?" They said, "Because we need one." I said, "If we needed one, we would have one." That is a little bit of my perverse response to it. I'm grappling in my community with the fact that we've done essentially the same thing. We just don't have 10 years yet on the clock, and we don't have the post-it notes saying, "Hey, we've missed a huge opportunity here."
Alex, in your observation, North Park needs small businesses. North Park needs something to be happening there, rather than nothing. What are some of the longer-term impacts and costs that you see in what's happened there?
I think this is an example of what happens when the costs of holding onto land indefinitely are very low. Universities have access to the power of eminent domain. State universities have access to the power of eminent domain, and that means that if they want a parcel, not necessarily because there's something urgent, but because something could be convenient in the future, it's pretty easy for them to acquire that land.
Because they're state-level entities and function on a quasi-government nonprofit basis, they also often don't need to pay property taxes on that land. So there is essentially no holding cost once they acquire a parcel like this. They can just hold onto it and say, "At some point, we might want to do something useful with it. There's really no rush. There's no urgency behind it."
I think that's part of the problem. If there isn't an opportunity cost that people feel for holding land and not putting it to any productive use, then it's really easy for these zones to remain underutilized indefinitely.
I also think it's easy to demonize entities like the city or universities and say they can only think big. They can't think smaller. They can't think more granular. I think in a lot of cases, the reason larger institutions and larger private developers seem to be the only ones building anything anymore is because a lot of that more granular urban fabric, the middle housing, the small-scale businesses, and those neighborhood-level uses have essentially been legislated out of existence.
I think the parcel that the university acquired through eminent domain is an interesting case study in this. It is a business designation. It's B1-2 zoning, which essentially means you have ground-floor commercial and are allowed to have some apartments above it, but the apartment cap is very small. If you see the building there today on Bryn Mawr Avenue, this parcel is pretty much maxed out. They built the maximum number of apartments they were allowed to, and they probably would have built more if they were allowed to.
But by then, the Chicago zoning code was in place and put in significant density restrictions and parking requirements that precluded building more apartments or larger apartments. So in a lot of cases, when people ask, "Why hasn't more of this incremental development happened in the neighborhood for housing, for businesses, for all of those things?" the answer is because it can't. The zoning rules and the land use rules are such that none of those projects are allowed or would pencil in practice.
The only people who can really play are the people with very low holding costs, like the university or other entities, or people who have lawyers, PR firms, and others to apply pressure for a big project that will be worth all of the effort and brain damage at the end of five or 10 years to actually get forward.
I think that's part of the story as well: How do we make the alternative that we want to see legal and viable in the first place? Because in many cases, it's not that the alternative to the university building dorms would be something else. There would be essentially nothing.
Bernice, if you were in the responsibility of a university administrator to do something with a block, even if the decision had already been made to acquire it, what would you do in the interim? They've just sat on it because they could, and left things dormant, which is wild that that has been the standard. Not only have they missed the last 10 years, but they've also been all in on a strategy that has proven not to work. What would your approach be, and how would that create the conditions where, down the road, there would be more housing, the retail that was needed, and revitalization happening?
That's such an interesting question. I don't work for universities. I like working on little baby buildings. But one thing I've learned working more on the nonprofit side is that nonprofits can be big also and need buildings. It's not as if universities are developers or nonprofits are developers. We expect them to do the right thing. They don't know everything. People waste all kinds of money on lots and land with plans that don't make financial sense.
It's literally why Neighborhood Evolution exists. I'm not trying to drop that in, but I can't tell you how many times we get pulled in because people buy land and don't know how to make it work. Right now, here in Buffalo, I'm working on a building that was originally built as a brothel. I absorbed it. It had a bad kind of team, and they had gone through all these plans that didn't make sense. As soon as I walked in, I knew how to make it work because my brain is more developer, real estate brain.
If I were working in the university, I probably wouldn't know what to do, because I hate that. I'm not trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm not in this fight. But I would imagine that they thought this was going to be really great. It's going to pan out. We're going to have housing. We're going to have storefronts. They probably had the best intentions.
Now, what they should have done is probably done temporary pop-ups and allowed those spaces to stay open. At the very least, they could have gotten some small businesses in there on the ground floor. They could have easily done pop-ups. People don't like pop-ups. I love them, but some people don't like them because they take a lot of work. They require utilities to be on. I have used a torpedo heater in the middle of winter in vacant properties to do pop-ups, so I'm not the person to ask, because I would solve that problem.
To me, they could have done more and thought more that way. Again, Alex is right. It's not set up for them. The code and the fact that they're sitting on this land and these buildings because they can makes a lot of sense to me.
One of the things I like about the Upzoned podcast is that it is solution-based. If you're working out there in the realm of a university, nonprofit, or non-developer realm, and you have properties like this, that's why you have to bring in experts. You have to think more granular. A market study is going to tell you one thing, but will the banks finance it? That's why you have to have a really good, solid team to try to accomplish what you want to accomplish.
Something happened. I bet they had the best intentions. I also want to give a super shout-out to the community for doing that 10-year event, because as a community activist, when I read that, I thought, "These people know what's going on. This is cool." That's really what we need to do.
One of the things I want to make sure I point to is ways that the city could take on things like receivership. There are tools. I don't know if they exist in Chicago, but there are tools nationally that states or communities are using that could try to avoid property sitting there for 10 years. There's receivership. In Buffalo, we have receivership. There's foreclosure. There's obviously code review.
I think about solutions like, maybe if they're not doing their thing, the city could step in and say, "We're going to appoint a receiver," if they have those receivership laws on the books. I think about that a lot because we see it throughout Buffalo and throughout the world and the country. There are always people who sit on properties. I'm not a therapist, so I can't diagnose them, but sometimes there's a sense of delusion.
I'm not saying the university at all. I'm just saying in general that you'll meet people who own a building, and they think, "This is going to be a 14-story tower." I'm asking, "What bank is financing 14 stories in Buffalo, New York, in 2026?" Zero banks. Zero.
There is a sense of delusion, because that's the word that comes to my mind. There are so many buildings that are locked up with people who own properties and think that way. Abandonment and receivership are solutions. I've talked on Strong Towns podcasts in the past about how they could be used.
Are they going to go after a university? Probably not. But if the city could threaten and say, "We're going to do building code enforcement. If you don't occupy these, we're going to get receivership or declare them abandoned," communities can do that. Especially for the planners listening: What are your abandonment rules? What are your receivership rules? Can somebody else take them on temporarily, get them occupied, and then go back to the owner? That's what that's meant to do: churn out solutions for vacant properties. I digress. I'm so sorry, Norm.
No, you're exactly where I'm at. One of the things we say about the suburban pattern of development is that you intend to build everything all at once to a finished state. The trouble with that mindset is that we've smuggled that into our cities as well. Then, in the interim period where you're getting all the ducks in a row to build that 14-story tower, perhaps you basically say, "Why would we put anything into that site until we're ready to go for the full thing?"
When we think about those interim measures, that is a much more important thing. It's sort of like if I think my 10-year-old is going to play in the NBA one day, I may have some high hopes, but I've also got to do the core things that set them up for other types of success along the way. If they reach that pinnacle, that may happen. But we get into this situation where, and this is a landlord problem and cities do this too, it's, "We know that we're going to eventually rebuild that, so we're not going to do anything with it right now."
I love what you're saying. Pop-ups are one of those tools that we have to have at hand. They benefit the community, probably do a lot of good things for crime stats, certainly improve local health, and provide pathways for small entrepreneurs to get their start. The idea of having this just sit there as a vacant, soulless space is so brutal.
I often wonder if there are ways that we can shield people from some of the liability and challenges that they face, where someone says, "I don't want to go in and do something for only eight years." But if there's a way to get eight good years out of that, and then celebrate as the next stage of that building emerges, that can go a long way.
Alex, as you're looking at this, one of the challenges the community identified was the need for more affordable housing options. As Strong Towns Chicago continues to advocate on the housing front, this feels like one of those sites where aspiration meets critical reality. It's harder for the community to get those things if there is not a lot of funding available or if the primary partner, the university, says, "Our market case just evaporated for this."
In the meantime, it would have been student housing. Now they're saying, "If it's not going to be student housing, it should be affordable housing." What are some of the ways that you're saying we can navigate that conversation? The prospect of saying, "Can we make it cheap or cheaply available?" is a really bad way of characterizing what the quest for affordable housing is, I know. But that can sometimes also look like, "We don't want it to be 14 stories. We want it to be three stories and affordable." I'm thinking, "You can't have that in a built-up area." I'm sure that in the Chicago landscape, you're grappling with that a lot with sites like this, where the first response of many people, really graciously, is to say, "I want some of the units to be affordable." What are some of the ways you grapple with that?
One thing I will point out is that Chicago has what we call the ARO, the Affordable Requirements Ordinance. For larger multifamily buildings that have 10 units and above, 20% of the units in those buildings have to be set aside at a certain affordability threshold. Rentable to families making 60% of AMI is the usual number.
Sometimes they are negotiated for planned projects that are larger and have some more zoning exceptions, but it tends to be a 20% affordability set-aside. In a lot of larger housing projects that get built in neighborhoods, some of those units are baked in from the beginning. They are set aside in that way. When you get more market-rate development in larger buildings built in Chicago, you also get some mandated set-aside affordable units.
There are discussions about how effective that ordinance has been and whether 20% is the right threshold for it. The city is currently getting fewer affordable units built per year at 20% than it was at 10% before 2021. Ultimately, this is a form of a subsidy. When fewer projects pencil, you get fewer of them. You might get fewer total buildings or even units, even if there is a larger proportion of them in different buildings. So there's discussion about the ARO and ways it could change and be more effective in the future.
But there's that same attitude in a lot of cases that we don't need to decide whether something is a fully market-rate project or a fully LIHTC affordable project. There are ways to build not just mixed-use but mixed-income buildings in the neighborhoods where there's demand for it in parts of Chicago.
One thing I will say as well is that often, part of the reason the big projects tend to get the most press, your 11-story towers and opportunities to build more units, is that doing things at more modest thresholds is so hard. If you look at the residential areas that surround this specific business on 3418 Bryn Mawr Avenue, it's almost all a sea of RS-3, which in Chicago lingo is one of the single-family-only zoning designations.
The neighborhood has a lot of examples of what we call in Chicago two-flats, three-flats, and four-flats: stacked apartments where each floor is on a small, narrow lot. The standard Chicago lot is 25 by 125 feet, so very narrow but very deep. The front faces the street, and the back faces the alley. That's usually where people have their garages, or sometimes a coach house for ones that were grandfathered in. The most effective way to build middle housing was to stack apartments on top of each other and have each floor be its own one. That's a very common type here in Chicago, and you will find those in every neighborhood in the city, including North Park.
But the zoning changed under those buildings to make it so that if those buildings burned down tomorrow, or had some major mechanical problem, foundation problem, or something that couldn't just be remediated, and the building was no longer viable, if it had to get torn down, it legally could not be replaced by anything other than a single-family home. That's really frustrating, because it's gotten rid of many opportunities to build incremental housing and address those needs that aren't these massive projects that take up to a decade to come to fruition in a lot of cases.
The reason everyone is betting on the big stuff is because, again, the small stuff, in a lot of cases, has been legislated out of existence. I think it's also worth noting that I understand and appreciate that people, when they see vacant storefronts, especially vacant storefronts owned by an institutional entity like a university, get frustrated and say, "We could put this to better use. Let's do more of that."
But if you look at the context of that stretch of Bryn Mawr and North Park, there are many other storefronts that are vacant right now, and in some cases have been vacant for a few years, that aren't owned by the university. The reason for vacancy isn't that some institution bought it and vacated it in hopes of building something else. It's that there isn't enough footfall in that corridor to support more businesses than the ones that are already there.
A lot of times we tend to have conversations about what commercial elements we want in neighborhoods and what housing we want as two separate things. I don't think they are. There are a lot of neighborhoods in Chicago that have trouble with commercial storefront vacancies, and a big part of what's driving that is that those neighborhoods have had net population loss over the past few decades, in many cases because of downzoning, demolitions, loss of some of that middle housing over time, or disinvestment.
That's an important part of the conversation. Yes, we want more small businesses, but small businesses need customers. If the customers don't live nearby, they're probably not going to drive across the city to your specific neighborhood to have your specific tamale or use your specific locksmith. A lot of these small businesses live and die by who is near them within walking distance, and that needs to be an important part of the conversation.
I appreciate the recognition that vacancy is not just on this particular block where the university stepped in and took something that was perfectly the most vibrant part of the city and basically said, "What if it's not?" Instead, they were probably identifying something on that street, and some of the language in the early days would have been, "We can actually be a great community partner. We can be the ones that come in and enable a revitalization of a neighborhood."
The challenge is when the neighborhood says, "We weren't consulted." That is a huge and very common problem. Another challenge is if the scale doesn't fit with what is actually feasible. The other challenge is becoming very adversarial through the court process and eminent domain tools.
My recognition is that the problem is that we have a lot of public institutions that certainly can run roughshod. I'm not sure even if that fully applies here. But certainly in my city, the way they've treated that site down near our waterfront. I think, Bernice, you mentioned medical campuses that frequently will do this. The most prolific offender is highway projects and road-widening projects, cutting off not just people's front lawns but actually saying, "We can't just take a portion of your front lawn. We'll take your whole house, because maybe someday we want eight lanes here."
I see this all over the place, where even salvageable properties that could have been reoriented so the front house backs onto the backyard and you create a new laneway, it's not worth the hassle. So with raw power, they just lay waste to what's happening there.
What also stands out to me is that, Bernice, your specialty, and the thing we need to train way more people to think, is not just to say, "I can do something with that," but actually to look at those places that have been marked as blighted, marked as unworthy of keeping, and say, "What would it take for us to give this a second lease on life?"
I want to ask you about the theater that you're at work on, because that feels like this block in North Park doesn't have a theater in it, but if it did, it would look a lot like this scenario in Buffalo that you've been working on and rallying people together around. Or the music venue. Do you want to share a little bit about that? Because people with MBAs would look at this and say, "It doesn't pencil," but people with hardscrabble actual business experience probably would say, "No, I think I can find a way." And you found that way. Can you share a little bit about that?
One of the secrets to any type of project, whether you want a music venue in your community or, with the nonprofit that I run, we're opening a preservation resource center, is having apartments above to pay the bills. We also opened Eugene V. Debs Hall, which is a community center that Strong Towns has talked about in the past. That's another community-based center.
The key to doing cool, weird things that the community loves is having apartments above to pay the bills. It could be apartments or art studios. In the case of Mohawk Place, which is the music venue you're talking about, Mohawk Place is in downtown Buffalo, and it's been a music venue since 1990. It's very institutional and legendary. It had vacated, and the space was closing, but the entire upper three floors were never touched. They had been band spaces for a bit, and somebody was squatting in there. It was a rooming house for a long time.
Now we're looking at this model where instead of housing, we can put art spaces upstairs and rent them. Whether they are apartments, art spaces, or small business spaces, what goes on above you starts to allow the creativity to flow for the ground floor apartments to be legendary. That's what you want. You want the pie shop. You want the cake maker.
This is where I feel I do so much of this work. Right now, I'm working on this building that was built as a brothel. The building does not pencil. Everybody would throw it away. It was donated to our nonprofit because it doesn't pencil. But by partnering with a nonprofit, and with us taking the first two floors, all of a sudden we were able to tap into all kinds of nonprofit funding. Now it does pencil because of nonprofit funding and historic tax credits.
With Mohawk Place, that doesn't make a lot of sense. It really doesn't. But what makes sense as a building owner is everything above it. Universities are going to look at renting this storefront to a music theater, community center, or nonprofit. Renting that is hard because then you need $3,000, $4,000, or $5,000 a month, and your baby nonprofit can't really afford that. But if you can allow local people to own the building, allow the music venue owner to own the building, or allow our nonprofit to own the building, all of a sudden the ownership makes so much sense.
It doesn't work for the university, but it sure as hell works for our nonprofit. We're going to make a little money. We're going to rent upstairs to other small businesses. And I will say this, though it will not get me love: We need a ton of housing. What I've found is that sometimes these spaces that are empty make good art spaces, small business spaces, or office spaces. Sometimes we're doing housing above. Sometimes we're doing art. Sometimes we're doing offices.
I'm not saying not to put residential in. Don't get me wrong. Nobody come at me. We need tons of housing. But in Buffalo, where our market is different, we haven't had all that growth. We have a ton of artists and a ton of bands that need space. We grew 17,000 people in the city. We lost half our population and then grew about 17,000 in the last decade. So we have a different level of pressure.
What sometimes stops a small-scale developer is that we have to put in an elevator or have two means of egress, which I know Chicago is working on. There are codes that will stop it if it's three or four stories. If you have a mix of uses, that becomes an expensive problem. Working around that has been art offices and other uses, because the residential is not in it. The residential is what kicks it into higher code.
The moral of this story, at least my story, is that if you thought you needed to be creative before COVID, post-COVID, the creativity has to be off the charts to make these projects work. You may say this doesn't pencil. Have you partnered with your nonprofits? Have you partnered with your artists? Have you partnered with the local developers? Get them in the hands of the Bernices and Alexes of the world, and we can make the magic happen. That's really the truth. We make it pencil.
If it really doesn't, then cities like South Bend have shown up with so many incentives for small developers: TIF money, vacant funding, low-interest loans. That's where you hit it. Each community is different. Chicago obviously has much different pressure than South Bend or Buffalo. But if you're out there thinking, "How do we combat this?" there are so many ways that you can tackle this, and there are so many opportunities.
To me, at the core, you have to get it in the hands of a smaller-scale person who can be creative but still has the wherewithal to make the project work, go to the bank, and do all those things. That's why we have to train all these small developers. That's why IncDev is needed, Neighborhood Evolution, and all of these trainings. All of this is so important because we need to find the Norms and Alexes of the world to make it make sense.
I 100% agree. That is the next evolution from the people who are posting the post-it notes of, "I would like to see this in my community." Many of them are never going to be in a position to take on that mantle of saying, "All right, I'm going to now do the next level, which is I'm going to start to find that way, squirrel my way through this process, in order to create the conditions for this to happen."
But that's not to say that it can't happen. I believe more and more that if we can get the conditions on the ground right for that next increment of development, going back to Strong Towns core stuff, it actually matters, and it will make a huge difference.
Alex, I want to get your thoughts in terms of outcomes as a resident. If you can put yourself into the shoes of somebody living in the North Park neighborhood, what is an outcome along the way that you would say can really begin to help heal this wound that has been created and the challenges it has faced there?
I think some of the things we brought up in this conversation, finding ways to put places to productive use without committing to commercial leases, which at least last five years as the standard, are important. If you're an institution like the university that might want to do a project that makes sense and build dorms or something there someday, you're never going to sign those kinds of tenants because you're afraid it will block you from getting started when you're ready to.
But to Bernice's point, there is space for pop-ups. There is space for community activation. There is space, even when you know a particular parcel or building is going to be redeveloped, to not just have it sit empty the entire time. There are examples of people doing good work like that across the city of Chicago.
Overton Elementary on the South Side in the Washington Park neighborhood, which we in Strong Towns Chicago did a neighborhood walk to and spoke with the primary local incremental developer about, is an old Chicago public elementary school that got closed down about a decade ago after the city was facing population loss and no longer had enough students to justify keeping a lot of buildings open.
That space has been undergoing redevelopment for a long time, many years at this point, but they've been really good about letting community organizations use the parking lot to paint a map of the city on it, use the green space for weekend markets, fairs, community events, small vendors, and nonprofits, and use the space inside when neighborhood organizations needed a place to meet, discuss things, and commune with each other.
There's space to do that in a way where a lot of times we assume, "No, it has to be empty until whatever the big project is that's going to happen." I think we should examine that a little bit. We need people who are willing to be creative with that kind of thing, and we need a city that encourages that kind of thing instead of throwing up obstacles or barriers, or making the easiest path of least resistance to just do nothing with it.
The second part is that it's important that we make it easier for the kinds of things residents say they want to see in their neighborhood, such as more thriving commercial corridors and more housing that feeds customers into those local businesses. We need to make that legal by default. If that is only allowed by exception, and all the caps that we have are so low that there's no opportunity for people to be creative because most of the ways they would be creative are precluded, then there aren't many good alternatives to point to for some of these larger, more disruptive projects.
If this same strip and this same parcel had a zoning designation that allowed more apartments above it, we're talking about a relatively small lot. This is 12,000 square feet. In some suburbs, that's two single-family home lots next to each other. So this is a relatively modest parcel, but there is more than enough space to have ground-floor commercial and then two, three, or four stories of apartments above.
It's currently a two-story building, not because of height limits, but because of the density restrictions saying that on this 12,000-foot parcel, you can build up to a maximum of 12 apartments, and that's it. It's not worth going up more floors because you're not allowed to build anything on those higher floors.
In a lot of cases, revisiting what the defaults are and making it so we have fewer caps that are constraints means you can have your incremental developers, like Bernice, and local folks who want to activate spaces and add additional housing on top of them do it without going through a decade-long negotiation process with the city. Major institutions can afford to do that. Small developers cannot, which I'm sure Bernice can say a lot more about.
It takes so long to put these projects together. I think people don't really realize that. They think they're going to get a building done in six months. It took me four months to get my plans reviewed by the city because it was a complicated project. You're paying taxes, insurance, and all the things on top of it, over and over again.
People really don't understand. Even this building, I was on my way here from there. I was sweating trying to get here to record this, riding my bike really quickly from this building we're renovating. It sat vacant for a long time. Even our nonprofit sat it vacant and went through so many different renditions. There's so much more even I can be doing.
But then it's so expensive, and it's really hard. Things take so long, even if it's zoned appropriately, which is wild. This is me just saying it out loud, but everyone asks, "Why do things take so long?" It just takes a long time. If you've got a grant, we have grant processes that take 30 days back and forth. They need to review things, then I need to get approved at the state, and then it comes back. That's another 30 days, 30 days, 30 days. It's wild when you take a step back to see how deep and long these projects can be.
As I said earlier, they probably still have some of the best intentions. They want that to happen. I guarantee they want that to happen. They just run into all these roadblocks, or maybe the staff turned over, or they had a new person. All these things just take time. Alex, you're totally on the money: make it easier any way you can.
Exactly. There are enough other real barriers and problems to making any kind of incremental development process viable. We don't need fighting the underlying zoning to be an extra one on top of that.
I often think that we would be well served if we had four of our city staff just follow some of our best small-scale developers with an eraser and a pencil to write in, "Oh, you need that. Okay, probably everybody's going to need that. Oh, that's not working for you. Let me just get rid of that."
We would actually be able to deal with a lot of the things we have. Projects come to our city where they require eight variances, and I look at the variances and they're so mind-numbingly obvious. Yet in the hands of an opponent, it's, "They can't even follow the rules." No, folks, we need to be able to help each other on this, because we've gotten in way too deep on what's going on in our building codes, the overlapping requirements, and the things that are at odds with each other. Deeply frustrating.
I hope a deep level of sympathy is also felt for the people who live in the neighborhood, posted sticky notes, and did the awesome work of hosting a little block party. That matters. I would also say, if you are a student at Northeastern Illinois University, join the Strong Towns Chicago group. They're awesome. I can attest to that firsthand. Participate in the processes. Push the administration if need be, or offer ideas. Say, "We would go live there," if you are a student looking for housing.
If you're a university administrator, feel free to reach out. We are folks trying to say, "How do we do this from the bottom up?" If our top-down approaches, which eminent domain and other tools definitely resemble, have found that 10 years later things have not worked, let's talk. Let's have those conversations. Come on the podcast. I would love to do a follow-up discussion about it. I would love that opportunity as well.
As we head into our Downzone, this is the time of the podcast where we just talk about something we're taking in, consuming, or something that inspired us. We can even broaden it. Alex, do you want to go first? What is something that's in your Downzone?
There's a Substack by Pete Saunders called The Corner Side Yard. It has a very Midwestern urbanism attitude. He puts out some great articles that tackle a lot of the issues we have on land use and how our communities develop.
He had a great article recently about alleys and how alleys are underrated as a tool for building good cities. As someone from Chicago, which is probably the alley capital of the world, I'm biased, but I really enjoyed the level of granularity and detail he went into in that article on why these were built in the first place and all of the practical problems they solve.
I would highly suggest it to people who, if you're listening to this podcast, chances are these kinds of down-the-rabbit-hole topics interest you. Check out The Corner Side Yard Substack by Pete Saunders. It's a delightful read.
What about for you, Bernice?
I want to say I love alleys, and I am so jealous because Buffalo has about four alleys. I don't know how we missed the alley situation. We have the Ellicott radial street plan, so ours is radial, and it makes me sad. All of our trash has to go out front.
My Downzone is totally not building-related or urbanism-related. I have been teaching myself how to DJ for the last year. In fact, I'm just saying it out loud: I would love to DJ an event at next year's Strong Towns. I think I mentioned this when we were partying at Strong Towns this year. I've been really working on doing things that I wish I'd done 10, 15, or 20 years ago, and one of them is DJing.
I've been having a good time with vinyl, disco, and house music, and just really finding joy in it. Some of my friends say they see my full smile when I do it, which is wild because I always smile a lot, but with this, you see all my teeth.
I would encourage people, as somebody who is 39 and going to be 40, to take that leap. It has been weirdly hard, although now that I've done it, I'm thinking, "This is super fun." I don't know. Maybe I'm being judged by some 20-somethings, but it's so much fun. I really don't care. I do it for the girls. It's just fun.
I've got a set coming. In September, we're doing an all-day barbecue Sunday thing with me and a couple other women who are DJing, and we're just going to have a good time. So I encourage people not to work as hard all the time. This is coming from somebody who works all the time. Music solves all. Huh, Norm? We all know.
Yeah. All three of us were at karaoke at the National Gathering, so I know.
We karaoke our little hearts out. I also want to say this out loud. If anybody is wondering, "What should I listen to?" I'm going to give a shout-out to this person, this DJ, or I don't know how to call him: Cerrone, C-E-R-R-O-N-E. He has been around since the '70s. It is the craziest, wildest album that I found. It's disco, so look it up, and you'll have a really great summer if you listen to some of Cerrone's music. That's what I've been hanging out with on my Spotify.
That's fantastic. As you said that the 20-year-olds are probably judging you, I thought, no, the 20-year-olds are saying, "We listen to your music now, and it's so cool. None of the new music meets the standards of the old stuff." So that's perfect.
That's right, I know.
I got to do a school field trip with my son that I had flagged back in September, and it was the Britannia Mine Museum, which is on the coast on the way up to Squamish and Whistler, British Columbia. It's a gorgeous drive. If you ever come out to Vancouver, folks, come visit.
If you are interested at all in mining, they dug 240 kilometers of mine tunnels under this mountain to pull out all kinds of copper ore and things like that. It was the biggest mine on the North American continent for quite a while before it closed. It's fantastic, and it was a reminder of how hard life often was, can be, and still is for so many people. It was also a reminder of the many things that I take for granted, even the copper in my computer that lets this conversation occur.
On that front, it's fascinating. It's a reminder that I've driven by lots of these different items and spaces, and just to stop and take notice. As Roman Mars from 99% Invisible would say, always read the plaque. I feel like life is better that way.
With that, we hopefully have touched on some pretty powerful things that are not just for Northeastern Illinois University, but more broadly for these patterns that persist in our communities. I hope that you've appreciated the discussion. Thanks, Alex and Bernice, for jumping in today.
Thank you.
Great to be able to do this, and we'll do it again. Take care, everybody, and have a good rest of the day.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership tonight.