Fix Chicago Housing

A rezoned lot can rebuild if it holds homes, or a small one- or two-story shop lot with a street address on a commercial corridor or within ¼ mile of the L (parks, museums, field houses and named landmarks are never touched), was built before 2000, is shorter than the new limit, sits on a lot under about 40,000 sq ft, and the new building adds at least one home beyond what today's zoning already allows there. Your plan only gets credit for those extra homes: rebuilds that are already legal are part of what Chicago builds anyway (each lot's current district and its minimum lot area per home, or floor area downtown, from the city's zoning map). How many rebuild within 15 years comes from Chicago's own record. Each neighborhood has a demand factor from 0.3× to 2.5× (its share of buildings built since 1990 vs. the city average, from the city's building data). Matching 2013–2025 new-construction permits to the small homes standing in 2013 (City of Chicago building permits), lots where today's zoning already allowed more homes were torn down and rebuilt at these 15-year rates: about 0.4% in the softest markets, 3% at average demand and 7.4% in the hottest. The simulation raises those rates by half for rezoned lots, a cautious reading of two findings: in Auckland, permits in upzoned areas went from roughly 3,000 a year in 2016 to about 14,500 in 2021, an estimated 21,800 more homes than the trend (Greenaway-McGrevy & Phillips, 2023), and in Chicago, lots that already allowed more were rebuilt 1.5–2.2× as often as lots in similar markets that didn't, except in the hottest neighborhoods, where teardowns are common either way. So a rezoned lot rebuilds with about a 0.6% chance in the softest markets, 4.5% at average demand and 11% in the hottest. Which lots rebuild is a fixed random draw, so the map and the count always match.

Chicago keeps permitting about 3,916 homes a year, its 2025 total in the Census Building Permits Survey (the Chicago Permit Tracker counts the same 3,916 from city permits; The Real Deal's count of approvals was ~4,900), but the regional shortage keeps growing about 8,760 homes a year, Zillow's 2023→2024 change (Mann Report). Rents rise 3.4% a year, Chicago's 2025 asking-rent growth (CoStar via Matthews). Both trends are held flat for 15 years.

Each 1% added to Chicago's 1,282,248 homes (Census ACS 2024) lowers rents compared with where they'd otherwise be. Estimates differ by a factor of ten, so the simulation shows a range. The cautious end is 0.19% per 1% (Mense, 2025), but that study measures a 1% rise in the year's new homes, not in all homes, so it understates the effect of adding to the stock. The strong end is 2% per 1%, from stock-based estimates that put the demand elasticity around −0.4 to −0.5 (Lauster & von Bergmann, 2024, summarizing Canadian and Australian government studies). Both use a constant-elasticity curve, so very large plans level off instead of driving rent to zero. Median gross rent $1,440 (Census ACS 2020–24); typical 1-bedroom $1,745 (Apartment List, Oct 2026).

165,687 homes underproduced, Chicago metro, 2022 (Up for Growth, 2024). 115,282 home deficit, 2024 (Zillow via Mann Report). 224,445 affordable homes missing for extremely low-income renters (Housing Action Illinois & NLIHC via The Real Deal). City only (normal mode, the default): no study estimates Chicago's own shortage, so the simulation takes the city's share of the metro figure, 32.7%, because the city holds 1,282,248 of the metro's 3,924,020 homes (Census ACS 2024 via Census Reporter): 54,141 missing today, growing 2,862 a year, a goal of 97,078 by 2041. 41% of Chicago is zoned for single-family homes or two-flats only (Metropolitan Planning Council, 2023).

Chicago requires 10–20% affordable homes in projects of 10+ units that need a zoning change, city land or city money (City of Chicago). Since 2021 those units are priced for households at 60% of area median income on average. The simulation applies the dial to new buildings of 10+ homes using a middle estimate (a model assumption): no requirement means about 20% more of those buildings get built, 10% about 10% more, 30% about 5% fewer. The evidence brackets it. Terner Center modeling for Los Angeles simulates every parcel with a developer pro forma and finds about 38% more homes with no requirement than under LA's current rule (398,800 vs. 289,000 over 10 years), though its affordable units are for households at 30% of median income, a deeper discount than Chicago's. Studies of what actually happened mostly find little or no drop in total building: California cities (Bento et al., 2009), the Bay Area and Boston's suburbs (Schuetz, Meltzer & Been; Boston's drop was not conclusive), Los Angeles and Orange counties (Regus, Slovin & Mukhija, 2010) and Baltimore–Washington (Hamilton, 2021); one California study found 5–8% fewer homes (Means & Stringham). Portland's apartment permits fell sharply after its 2017 rule (Up for Growth, 2019), but that isn't a controlled study. None of these measure Chicago. ARO in-lieu fees pay into the city's Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund, half for building and preserving affordable homes and half for rent help through the Low Income Housing Trust Fund (City of Chicago); the simulation doesn't model that money.

Downtown has 141.9M sq ft of office space and 27.2% vacancy (Cushman & Wakefield, Q2 2026). Chicago's 2026 conversions turn about 4M sq ft into 3,900+ homes (Sun-Times op-ed), about 1,026 sq ft per home. Nearly 27% of office stock has conversion potential (CommercialCafe via WBEZ), about 38M sq ft; developers disagree on whether that's too high or too low, and conversions cost about as much as building new. The simulation's levels convert 10%, 25% or half of that convertible space by 2041: about 3,700, 9,300 or 18,700 homes. Today's ~4M sq ft pipeline is about 10% of it, so even the top level means repeating that effort five times.

Per 100 new apartments: 161 local jobs and $2.2M local revenue the first year, then 44 jobs and $503K a year (2015 dollars) (NAHB, 2015).

Downzoning: from 1990 to 2010, downzoned North Side and downtown areas grew housing 1.8% vs 9.6% elsewhere (Freemark & Kisiel, 2025). Parking: garage parking adds about $1,700 a year, 17% of rent (Gabbe & Pierce, 2017). Rent control: covered San Francisco tenants were nearly 20% more likely to stay, landlords cut rental supply 15%, citywide rents rose 5.1% (Diamond, McQuade & Qian); St. Paul permits fell from 2,000+ a year to about 1,200 in 2022–23 after its 2021 cap (Minneapolis Fed, 2026). Transfer tax: LA apartment permits fell 18% in Measure ULA's first year (UCLA Lewis Center via The Real Deal). The simulation subtracts what each policy would cost from the ~3,900 homes a year Chicago builds anyway, so your total can go below zero.

Median wages are BLS May 2025 for the Chicago metro, via WageDex. Wages grow 3.2% a year (BLS Employment Cost Index, June 2026). The people are made up; their jobs and pay are real.

These are judgment calls, labeled everywhere they're used:

• Rezoning raises Chicago's measured 2013–2025 rebuild rate by half (the rates and the reasoning are under "How the simulation decides what gets built"); lot size = 2× building footprint.
• Homes today's zoning already allows on a lot don't count toward your plan. Downtown districts are converted at 900 sq ft of allowed floor area per home; planned developments and other special districts are treated as allowing none, so nothing is subtracted there.
• Rent effect: the range runs from 0.19% to 2% lower rent per 1% more homes; the headline rent figure uses the cautious end.
• Short-term rental limits return 10% (precinct bans) or 50% (primary-residence rule) of entire-home listings.
• Coach houses: pilot pace doubled when every ward allows them by right.
• Half of city-owned vacant lots get a 2-flat; 10% of "other vacant" homes return under an empty-homes tax.
• Project boosts: single stair +25%, prerogative reform +15%, faster permits +10% (and homes arrive about 7 months sooner: 20% of a roughly three-year approval and build), no parking minimums +10%, small lots +20%.
• Social housing at Montgomery County's target pace; office conversions as 10%, 25% or half of the space with conversion potential, done by 2041.
• Shops only redevelop on commercial corridors or within ¼ mile of the L, and only on addressed lots with no landmark name (keeps parks and museums out).
• Affordable homes count the affordable requirement on new buildings of 10+ homes, 30% of social-housing homes, and 20% of megaproject homes (the share Foundry Park, the 1901 Project and Bronzeville Lakefront commit to). Other levers are counted as market-rate.
• Affordable requirement: a middle estimate between Terner's Los Angeles model and studies of real cities: None ×1.2, 10% ×1.1, 20% ×1.0, 30% ×0.95 on projects of 10+ homes.
• Normal mode spreads the metro shortage and its growth in proportion to homes (32.7% in Chicago). Hard mode asks the city to close the whole regional shortage, as if the suburbs only kept building at today's pace.
• Megaprojects: half of the remaining planned homes get built by 2041 once the city funds the infrastructure. On the map, each project's buildings are traced from its own published site plan, with the plan's heights: The 78 (Plan Commission master plan, 2025; no heights were published, so they are set to hold the 10,000 homes the zoning allows), Foundry Park (planned-development site plan, 2026), the 1901 Project (subarea height limits and phases; buildings placed within each subarea), Bronzeville Lakefront (illustrative site plan and phase massing), North Union (site plan with each building's stories; the two finished towers on Wells stand from the start) and Cabrini-Green (CHA's massing diagrams, homes per building). The map builds each plan out in full by 2041, in its phase order, so you can see the whole project; the home count is more cautious and assumes half of the remaining homes are finished by then. The Fire stadium and the 1901 music hall appear from 2028. Empty lots inside those areas leave the zoning model while the policy is on, so the same land isn't counted twice; at Cabrini-Green the vacant rowhouses are drawn as replaced, and at North Union the one- to three-story buildings west of Wells.
• Policy ranks ("Big" 15,000+ homes, "Medium" 4,000+) are based on your current map, so they shift as you change the map.
• Neighborhood types come from the city's building data: the downtown core is the Loop, Near North, Near West and Near South Sides; single-family areas are where at least 70% of residential buildings hold one home; the rest are mixed. A policy set to one type only applies there; for supply-cutting policies the lost "built anyway" homes are scaled by that type's share of buildings built recently.
• Build timing ramps up: about 6% of a plan's 15-year homes arrive in the first two years (approvals and design), 68% in years 3–10 and 26% after.
• Empty land: lots that are vacant today can be built on when you rezone them, with no homes to replace. That's 25,282 privately owned vacant parcels with no building on them (Cook County Assessor, 2025), each taken as one standard 25×125 ft lot, plus 8,976 lots where a home or small shop stood in 2013 but nothing stands today. An empty lot is 1.5× as likely to get built as an occupied one, since it earns nothing and there's nothing to tear down. City-owned lots stay with the city-lots policy, and the vacant-lot policy only counts parcels the zoning hasn't already built on.
• Land assembly: bigger buildings need bigger sites, so a mid-rise project buys up the lots next door on the same block face (no skipping across a side street or a gap) until it has about 5,000 sq ft of land (two city lots), a high-rise about 7,500 (three) and a tower about 15,000 (six). Lots that are vacant today count. If the neighbors can't be bought (newer buildings, already taller, or zoned lower), or the site is too narrow (under about 30 ft for a mid-rise, 40 ft for a high-rise or 65 ft for a tower), it builds the biggest level its land allows. New buildings sit square to the street on the old footprints and only grow back toward the alley, never into a street. Each lot's chance of redeveloping stays the same; projects just come in fewer, bigger pieces.
• Building size: each new building's floor area is its homes × 1,026 sq ft (the same per-home figure used for office conversions, which includes halls and walls). Drawn heights vary from project to project (6-flat 3–4 stories, mid-rise 5–6, high-rise 9–12, tower 25–36), and a building only spreads wider once it reaches its zoning height. Towers sit on a 4-story podium.
• Tower level: about 30 stories and 40 homes per standard lot (DX-12-style floor area at about 900 sq ft per home), only within ¼ mile of the 26 busiest L stations (2025 weekday entries of 4,000+, CTA; airports left out), and capped at 97,500 apartments over 15 years, about 6,500 a year on average: the 2021 forecast for downtown, which would be its best year since at least 1999 (Integra Realty via Connect CRE).
• Supertall level: about 60 stories and 80 homes per standard lot, only at the busiest L stations inside the downtown core (the Loop and the Near North, Near West and Near South Sides) or where you zone a core neighborhood for it. It's modeled on DX-16, the densest downtown district, which allows floor area 16 times the lot and has no maximum on bonus floor area bought through the Neighborhood Opportunity Bonus (Chicago Zoning Ordinance §17-4-1003); the simulation assumes about 23 times the lot at about 900 sq ft per home. It shares the tower cap, so taller buildings mean fewer sites for the same downtown demand, not more homes than downtown can fill. Sites need about 20,000 sq ft and an 80 ft frontage.
• Vacant-lot gap financing: 15% of the ~31,000 privately owned vacant parcels (Cook County Assessor, 2025, class 100) get a 2-flat by 2041 at up to $150,000 of subsidy per home (Missing Middle's cap, Hoodline), and rezoned projects in soft markets are 50% more likely.
• Transit riders: one commuter per new home within ½ mile of the L or Metra, 37.9% of them by train or bus (ETOD 2020, from 2012–16 census data), two rides a workday for 250 days, valued at about $1.15 a ride, CTA's average fare collected per ride in 2026 ($394M proposed minus the ~$30M given up by dropping the fare increase, over 317M rides; the $2.50 base fare is higher because passes, transfers and reduced fares lower the average).
• Policies that cut supply cost this share of the homes Chicago builds anyway: downzoning 25%, parking minimums 10%, moratoriums 15%, rent control 30%, transfer tax 5%. They also cut rezoned projects: parking minimums 15%, moratoriums 20% (and 25% later), rent control 40% on buildings of 3+ homes, transfer tax 18% on buildings of 20+.
• Local taxes use NAHB's 2015-dollar estimate, compared with the city's 2027 budget gap; it counts revenue to every local government, not just City Hall, and leaves out what new residents cost to serve.

Chicago's giant master plans add up to about 31,600 planned homes that aren't built yet: The 78, Bronzeville Lakefront, the 1901 Project, Cabrini-Green, Foundry Park and the rest of North Union (purple dots on the map). That's roughly eight years of the ~3,900 homes the city permits each year, or about a third of the city's 2041 goal (a tenth in hard mode). Most are stuck on infrastructure or financing, not zoning, so "Get the megaprojects built" is a money decision, not a zoning one. Some planned housing has been lost to other uses: the Tribune printing site's 5,900 planned homes became the Bally's casino (Multi-Housing News), and a 13,575-home plan for the old U.S. Steel South Works site was cancelled; it's slated to become a quantum computing campus (Wikipedia; WTTW).

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Building footprints, stories and unit counts: City of Chicago (released February 2013; the city's portal copy was last updated in 2015), garages and sheds removed, brought up to date with Cook County's 2022 building footprints (aerial survey with LiDAR heights): 14,563 buildings that were torn down or replaced by 2022, or whose lot is vacant today (Cook County Assessor vacant land, 2025, or the city's land inventory), are removed; 18,694 buildings that appear in the 2022 data but not the 2013 data are added with their measured height (they can't be rebuilt in the simulation, and the homes inside them aren't counted because the county data has no unit counts); and about 42,000 buildings with no recorded stories get them from LiDAR (roof height less 4 ft, ÷ 13 ft a floor). These fixes lower totals a bit in busy neighborhoods: some lots the 2013 data treated as one-story shops are really three-story buildings, and some lots were already rebuilt. Street centerlines: City of Chicago. 77 community areas. 124 L stations inside the city from the CTA station list; 74 Metra stations from Cook County GIS. Buildings marked illegal to build today hold more homes than their zoning district's minimum lot area per home allows on their lot. Lot sizes and apartment counts come from the Cook County Assessor (matched to about 4 in 5 multi-home buildings; a check found 21% of the earlier estimated flags were actually legal and 13% of unflagged buildings actually illegal); the rest use an estimate of twice the building's footprint. Height, floor-area, setback and parking limits aren't checked, so more buildings break today's code than the map shows.

Construction costs and interest rates (see the end of a simulation), school and transit capacity, traffic, and displacement beyond the homes directly replaced. On traffic: households far from transit and jobs drive more, so homes added far from jobs and the L bring more car trips than homes near them; the Impact tab shows how many of your new homes are in that group (Ewing & Cervero).