How these megaprojects could reshape Chicago’s transit map
- Posted: December 17, 2018
- Community Building
A hub-and-spoke rail system has established and burnished the Loop and its adjacent neighborhoods as a global job center for more than a century. But now, billions of dollars of mixed-use megaprojects are proposed along the North and South branches of the Chicago River and on the city’s Near South Side—locations poorly served by the city’s rail lines.
The current plans are a byproduct of jobs and residents pouring into the central area of the city over the past decade, making Chicago one of the fastest-growing urban centers in the country. With limited major sites left to develop in the central core, the city’s most ambitious real estate players have concocted sprawling campuses on the collars of downtown.
But now the city is rethinking its industrial zones and has real development plans on the table for sites thanks to rising tenant demand for mixed-use campuses and developers rolling out their biggest ideas in pursuit of e-commerce giant Amazon’s second headquarters.
Three developers face big access problems for their sites: Sterling Bay wants to develop 12.8 million square feet of buildings for its Lincoln Yards project on 54 acres between Lincoln Park and Bucktown, on a site meagerly served by one walkable but dilapidated Metra station 3 miles from the center of the Loop; Related Midwest envisions 13 million square feet for its site, dubbed the 78, on 62 acres along the Chicago River between Roosevelt Road and Chinatown that have been vacant since the 1970s, with public transportation around it but no stops close by; and city-appointed developers are eyeing a massive redevelopment of the former Michael Reese Hospital site—now branded “The Burnham Lakefront”—that would need an entirely new street grid just south of McCormick Place.
It’s no guarantee that any of them will be able to land anchor tenants anytime soon, particularly so late in a historically long economic growth cycle. And it’s unlikely that there would be enough demand for all of them to develop at the same time.
But none of them can function properly without major infrastructure upgrades, says Chicago Planning Commissioner David Reifman. That’s why City Hall—salivating at the prospect of growing the city’s tax base to help it battle fiscal woes and facing an uncertain future after pro-development Mayor Rahm Emanuel exits in May—recently formed a Transportation & Mobility Task Force and is taking big steps to help the sites develop and “remove these weights on the economy,” Reifman said in a November meeting with Crain’s.
The city’s most controversial move to facilitate expansion is forming new tax-increment financing districts. Those would use property tax gains from the planned projects to reimburse developers for the money they put up to build new roads, bridges and transit components. City planning officials are trying to designate such districts for Lincoln Yards and the 78 before Emanuel’s departure.
In the North Branch Corridor, the city is acquiring rights to use abandoned freight rail tracks running through Goose Island to build a “transit way” rail line—a concept batted around by previous city planning officials—that could shuttle people between Lincoln Yards and the Fulton River District and eventually as far south as Ogilvie Transportation Center. Another linchpin improvement would be a new multimodal Metra station just south of the current Clybourn station.
Along the South Branch, the city is extending Wells Street to run through the heart of the 78 site and could use TIF money to reimburse Related Midwest for part of the estimated $300 million it would take to build a new CTA Red Line station near the site’s southeast corner. And a new TIF district could be in the works to jump-start the Reese site.
BIGGEST OBSTACLE
Lack of adequate transportation is the biggest obstacle facing each developer in selling companies on their vision, says CBRE Vice Chairman and veteran tenant representative Todd Lippman. It’s a tall order to convince a west suburban resident with a 40-minute Metra commute into the city to tack on a 15-minute rail or shuttle ride to Lincoln Yards. Or to ask a north suburban commuter to trek to the 78 or the Michael Reese site using existing transit options.
But the bigger challenge is to enhance city transit in a way that caters to changing commuter tastes. As developers have adjusted to millennial workers, so must city planners.
For example, available parking was a big perk tenants craved 30 years ago, Lippman says, but “now the big thing is having a staging area big enough for Ubers. Maybe five to 10 years from now it will be self-driving car parking. You’re preparing for something we know is going to be different, but we don’t know what it’s going to be.”
Part of the solution for future megasites could be shuttle buses like those that run from Union Station to the Fulton Market District or the East Loop. Bike-sharing could help bridge part of the gap, and the Chicago Department of Transportation is studying the prospect of allowing electric scooters in the city. A recent e-scooter analysis by DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development projected the deployment of e-scooters would make about 16 percent more jobs reachable within 30 minutes compared to the number of jobs accessible today using public transit and walking.
But mass transit solutions will be far more expensive. And generating consensus on how to pay for them will be a heavy lift even if the TIF districts—which many residents and some city officials have come to disdain as ostensible mayoral slush funds—materialize.