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Originally Posted by the urban politician
Regarding Ed Debevic's and the Gino's project, it will be pretty neat to see 2 skyscrapers going up right across the street from eachother. Talk about an instant canyon!
I wonder what it was like to walk around the Loop in the late 19th century and just see so much transformation so fast. Despite how much things are booming of late, I don't think anything we are witnessing now would compare to that.
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I don't know, this boom is becoming a lot more interesting than the last one. It's not about the glamour projects, it's about the rapid transformation on the small scale. There are entire parts of town that I would hardly recognize 5 years ago already. There are 3 or 4 big four or five floor buildings under construction on formerly vacant lots along the Kennedy. There are skyscrapers going up at Fullerton and California. Not just a one off or something, but multiple mid rises under construction along Milwaukee Ave from Fullerton in to downtown.
The breadth of this boom is becoming overwhelming and rates are still going to stay relatively low for what looks like years at this point. Obviously things are starting to get a bit frothy, but there is also a real demographic need here given the unique size and position of the Millennial age group. I'm already just as interested in the crop of skyscrapers (which have a generally higher quality than the last boom of beige boxes) in this boom as the last despite the smaller size and impact of the previous crop. There are a lot of buildings going up in locations that were almost unheard of before. That is very interesting and I think much more like the growth patterns that we only saw once before: when the city was first constructed. We are not confined to the North Side and very core of downtown anymore. There are vast tracts of land to gobble up immediately proximate to the CBD and the market is dealing with that supply at a much quicker rate over a much larger area than before. Like I said, when you have multiple skyscrapers proposed and under construction in freaking Logan Square, you know something is up. What would you have thought of that if someone said that would happen even 7 years ago? They'd be laughed at.