Quote:
Originally Posted by moorhosj
The 78 has zoning for 10,000 units, Lincoln Yards has 6,000, another 1,500 in the River District, and Riverline/Southbank has 3,700. If the demand continues, there seems to be some cushion.
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The developments you listed constitute about 3-4 years of current absorption downtown. The developers of those projects cannot and will not deliver their product that quickly. So yes, there's already plenty of entitled parcels, but just the demand for luxury housing downtown has already shown how quickly such sites can be mopped up in as little as 5-10 years.
I'm talking neighborhoods though, not downtown. The supply spigot on the NW has been completely turned off. It already shows, just look at Western Ave, site after entitled site is being developed. Anywhere you can build a building without dealing with a zoning change is being built. Again, that's great and all, but it comes nowhere close to mopping up demand the way building 2000+ TOD units along MKE ave did over the past 5 years.
I'm not saying there will ever be a day in our lifetimes where Chicago truly lacks the ability to find new sites for housing. That's absurd, we have far too much land. What I AM saying is that the ARO bump and a bunch of commies have basically taken zoning changes off the table for the time being. This means our market just shifted a lot closer to SF than the free market "build as much as you can sell as long as you donate to the alderman" that it has been since the days of trading posts along the Chicago river.