Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Which ones? Assuming you cut off the "midrise" category at 16 stories or so, the only West Loop midrise with a noticeable tower and podium is Hoxton Hotel, which is kind of a lame Morris Adjmi ripoff anyway. Most of the other West Loop proposals are pretty genuine midrises that go up with little or no side/front setbacks.
Admittedly a lot of the midrise residential buildings from the last boom (on Washington, Madison etc) do have ground-floor parking and blank walls, so I'm not excusing shitty design. Any building can have shitty design regardless of how many stories it has. But it does seem like the a lot of the new proposals since 2010 in West Loop have gotten much, much better - I'm guessing in part because of the TOD ordinance that eliminated parking minimums, plus the shift from condos to rentals/office/hotel which have less of an intrinsic need for parking.
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There are tons of nasty ass midrises in the West Loop with a few more coming. The heinous Hayden West Loop is about to deliver a quarter block of blank precast (with fake brick dont worry!) ground floor walls.
So again, the point is that it's not about what size building you are allowing, it is about the details you allow or require people to build. A law saying "no exposed parking above grade" would go much much further than a height limit in the West Loop in stopping this problem.