Abundant Housing Illinois

Link to full article in Crane's Chicago Business

In his day job, Nick Serra works to redevelop and preserve some of Chicago’s favorite housing stock: two- to four-unit multifamily buildings. Serra is the founder of Grace Street Renovation Lab, which acquires underutilized brick buildings, particularly when there are opportunities to add units to the building.

Often referred to as “two flats,” “three flats,” and “four flats,” these buildings provide a large chunk of Chicago’s housing stock across all neighborhoods, and are frequently available at relatively affordable prices. As part of Chicago’s architectural vernacular, they’re aesthetically iconic, representing what many residents have in mind when they reference “neighborhood character”.

While Serra’s work on these types of buildings aligns with many Chicagoans’ stated housing goals, these types of small-scale multifamily projects face significant barriers. One of the largest is parking requirements. With its current requirements around building parking on new housing, Chicago is introducing costly, unnecessary challenges for new modestly-sized apartments.

Fortunately, this problem has begun to receive increasing attention. Most prominently, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Cut the Tape initiative calls for the elimination of parking requirements in Chicago.

This is a strong idea. In order to support Chicago’s iconic two, three, and four-flats, Chicago should reform or altogether eliminate minimum parking requirements. Such a reform aligns with Chicago’s architectural character and history, and would both maintain and help resupply Chicago’s stock of 2-4 unit multifamily buildings.

Lately, this type of housing has risked becoming an endangered species, both via conversions to single-family homes and outright demolition. Recent legislation has aimed to limit and disincentivize such “deconversions”, in an effort to protect our existing multi-family housing stock, and allow Chicagoans to continue benefiting from an abundance of these multifamily buildings.

However, legislation incentivizing the rehabilitation or creation of two-four flats has largely been absent. Eliminating parking requirements is one important place to start. Chicago’s parking requirements create barriers to the production or rehabilitation of 2-4 unit homes in four key ways.

First, parking requirements limit the amount of housing that can be built, even when the zoning technically allows for more units. At its core, parking creates a problem of geometry — cars simply take up a lot of space. For example, Serra recently worked on a project in Humboldt Park where the zoning would have allowed seven units by right. However, because the parcel could only fit five parking spaces, only five units of housing were built — unnecessarily limiting new housing supply.