Who here is directly involved with urban development in their city?

[Steely Dan]

So, any developers, architects, planners, engineers, contractors, tradesmen, etc. here who are directly involved in creating new urban development in your city?

If so, tell us about what you do.



I myself work as a draftsman for an architecture firm that specializes in small and medium scale in-fill multi-family housing in the city of Chicago (and a handful of inner-ring burbs). Everything from new-build 2 & 3 flats up to 6 floor/50+ unit buildings. A decent amount of adaptive re-use stuff too, especially in the current climate of office to residential conversions.

It's totally fun to be a very small cog in the machinery that builds new urban housing in Chicago!


How about you?

[UrbanImpact]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

So, any developers, architects, planners, engineers, contractors, tradesmen, etc. here who are directly involved in creating new urban development in your city?

If so, tell us about what you do.



I myself work as a draftsman for an architecture firm that specializes in small and medium scale in-fill multi-family housing in the city of Chicago (and a handful of inner-ring burbs). Everything from new-build 2 & 3 flats up to 6 floor/50+ unit buildings. A decent amount of adaptive re-use stuff too, especially in the current climate of office to residential conversions.

It's totally fun to be a very small cog in the machinery that builds new urban housing in Chicago!


How about you?

Same here, but, small firm specializing in restaurants and retail (Chipotle & CVS). We do work only in Florida and mostly prototypical work.

I've heard some stories about Chicago, like how some local companies have a monopoly on certain items like emergency lights. Is it true?

Here's one of my Chipotles: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5QTqsk3T1D769wR1A

[Zeej]

Licensed architect (project manager) here for a mid-sized firm with offices in Montreal (head office) and Toronto.

Largely work on residential and institutional projects of various scales. Also some grocery stores. Frequently coordinate directly with municipalities, including but not limited to their heritage committees.

[lio45]

Starting to be more of a developer now. So far I've built infill SFHs in a 1950s neighborhood in FL that I'm kinda proud of, they integrate well architecturally (still have several vacant lots in the area, I'll put houses on those eventually) but I'm about to start building bigger buildings in my hometown (midsized Canadian city) given we have a housing crisis and a bunch of government programs and funds available to help develop. I have a partner who actually wants us to build what would be my hometown's signature tower on one of my downtown lots. Not yet sure I have the balls to take that risk, as it would be a pretty big project (getting used to real estate has turned me risk averse over the years; my main financial mistakes were the two times I invested to help friends try to launch high-tech startups). I have other downtown lots where smaller buildings (6-8 stories) could be built so I might start with that instead.

Ironically, in terms of net development, I've demolished more centenarian buildings for surface parking lots (in Canada) than I've built SFHs (in FL), especially when you look at the net total floor plate sq ft results, so I'm more of a de-developer than a developer so far

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by UrbanImpact

I've heard some stories about Chicago, like how some local companies have a monopoly on certain items like emergency lights. Is it true?

Like most idiosyncrasies of Chicago's zoning/building codes, it all goes back to the great fire of 1871, when most of the city's central area was completely leveled to the ground. To say this town is a little paranoid about fire would be a giant understatement. It somehow got into the city's DNA, and here we are still talking about its impacts 153 years after that fateful October day.

As such, Chicago has a lot of fire/life safety reqs more stringent than national codes. One area is emergency exit lighting/signage. It's not that there is an outright monopoly on it, but there are only a handful of companies that make Chicago code approved hardware for that stuff, so you gotta use one of them.

[JManc]

I was a CAD draftsman for various design firms from the late 90's to mid 2000's. I worked on the (then new) NBA stadium as well as mostly commercial projects. Moved on to management consulting when I finished my graduate degree around that time.

[pdxtex]

I am. I work in GIS at a power company. We use Autocad, Arcmap and a few other programs to map the company's distribution grid. That includes some pretty urban locations and out in the middle of nowhere too. Its kind of a drafting/GIS hybrid. We use Arcmap for much of the line work but the network model is completely dynamic so you can query it and study the electric flow. We map the power service for everything from underground vaults powering a huge airport to weed grow ops way out in the mountains. There is an entire database of customers with bad dogs too! Ive had other planning jobs but they've all been map and data related.

[mhays]

I'm a freelance consultant working for general contractors mostly.

My work is similar to my job at a local contractor for many years: Proposal writing/editing/management to help clients win work, other writing such as semi-technical blogs, and lots of research on market dynamics and specific projects.

In the process I try to understand a lot of sectors...multifamily, hotel, retail, office, biotech, manufacturing, education, healthcare, airport, seaport, transit, etc.

One of those research efforts brought me to SSP in the late 1990s. (Sorry about that!)

In the mid-90s I spent three years working for a non-profit trying to build a large park (Seattle Commons) on the edge of Downtown. We lost two levy votes and it never happened, but this helped spur South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle to their booms since that time.

[3rd&Brown]

Professionally, I am not involved in the industry (I'm an executive in Supply Chain).

But privately, for 10 years I was on the neighborhood zoning committee in one of Philly's fastest growing neighborhoods: Northern Liberties. In Philadelphia, nearly every proposal has to be reviewed and approved by the neighborhood board before it goes to the city for approval. We've since modified our code and that is not quite the case anymore, but I ran at a time when I thought our local board was stacked with NIMBYs (it was) and became part of a contingent of new young YIMBYs in the neighborhood who slowly changed the composition of the board to be much more development friendly.

We were also active participants in getting the city to modify many archaic zoning requirements, like outlawing front load garages, eliminating parking requirements for SFH, etc. It was a slog at the time but I'm very proud of the work we accomplished as a group of 10 people in a neighborhood that probably accounts for about 3% of the city's area.

[Six Corners]

I'm an urban planner. Most of my career has been in transportation planning. The most direct impact I had on my community was when I was working in the MPO/COG system in Chicago (in addition to the MPO there are subregional COGs within greater Chicago that assist the MPO with implementing plan goals locally as well as act as liaisons). There are a number of bike facilities, pedestrian facilities, trails, road resurfacings, and interconnected traffic signals in the western burbs I had a hand in bringing to fruition.

For the past few years I've been a transportation planning consultant for a couple smaller planning/engineering firms based in St. Louis. As with the pace of planning, a lot of the cooler stuff I've been a part of as a consultant hasn't reached implementation yet. The lone exception I can point to is a greenway extension in a larger St. Louis suburb, connecting it to the downtown area. Otherwise I've spearheaded recommendations for various multimodal planning efforts sprinkled throughout Missouri, downstate Illinois, and one in South Carolina.

[wwmiv]

Delete.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

So, any developers, architects, planners, engineers, contractors, tradesmen, etc. here who are directly involved in creating new urban development in your city?

If so, tell us about what you do.



I myself work as a draftsman for an architecture firm that specializes in small and medium scale in-fill multi-family housing in the city of Chicago (and a handful of inner-ring burbs). Everything from new-build 2 & 3 flats up to 6 floor/50+ unit buildings. A decent amount of adaptive re-use stuff too, especially in the current climate of office to residential conversions.

It's totally fun to be a very small cog in the machinery that builds new urban housing in Chicago!


How about you?

I have crossed over from consultant and I am in the industry now - but in the legal/compliance department of a large construction firm that has urban projects under construction locally all the way to downtown LA.

[Steely Dan]

Very cool to hear everyone's situation.


The thing I love best about my current gig is that, though the work isn't particularly sexy, we do a ton of in-fill stuff in the beleaguered south and west side neighborhoods of Chicago that really took it hard on the chin during the urban dark ages.

Take this project currently working it's way through the process:



It's a block of 19th century mansions that went through the ringer: first by losing over half of the original structures on the street, then it had salt thrown on the wound with that terrible 9 story senior apartment building so unceremoniously dumped upon it back in the 80s. Now a developer wants to fill the 4 remaining vacant lots with a quad of 8-flats.

A total of 32 new units of market-rate family-size missing-middle housing (all 3 & 4 bed units) on a chunk of land that's been vacant for decades. And the best part, the gap-tooth streetscape starts to look like an actual Chicago city neighborhood again!

It's so freaking rewarding to be part of the "medical" team figuratively healing Chicago's many self-inflicted built-environment wounds.

Now we just need about 30,000 more of these!

[Chisouthside]

worked as a GIS analyst while in grad school, did some solar power site selection in some eastern states. and then later on cell phone tower infrastructure mapping/spatial analysis in chicago and milwaukee. I've moved on since to a different field.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

It's a block of 19th century mansions that went through the ringer: first by losing over half of the original structures on the street, then it had salt thrown on the wound with that terrible 9 story senior apartment building so unceremoniously dumped upon it back in the 80s. Now a developer wants to fill the 4 remaining vacant lots with a quad of 8-flats.

A total of 32 new units of market-rate family-size missing-middle housing (all 3 & 4 bed units) on a chunk of land that's been vacant for decades. And the best part, the gap-tooth streetscape starts to look like an actual Chicago city neighborhood again!

Very cool! restoring the urban fabric that got demo'd
I was going to ask if those were 8 unit buildings.
8-flats with 3-4 bedrooms each. Family sized units! What's the square footage per unit?
Any idea on the price ranges or is that TBD?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Wigs

Family sized units! What's the square footage per unit?
Any idea on the price ranges or is that TBD?

3-bed simplexes: ~1500 GSF
4-bed duplex-downs: ~2800 GSF (1/2 of that in the basement)

As for price, these will be rentals. I'm not sure what they'll seek on rent, but I'd guess maybe $2,600 for the 3-beds, and maybe $3,400 for the 4 beds? But that's just a guess, I don't really get involved in those numbers, I just draw the construction documents.

[Cirrus]

Yeah. I represent Arlington, VA on regional transportation boards, developing cross-jurisdictional plans for the Washington, DC region and Northern Virginia.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

3-bed simplexes: ~1500 GSF
4-bed duplex-downs: ~2800 GSF (1/2 of that in the basement)

As for price, these will be rentals. I'm not sure what they'll seek on rent, but I'd guess maybe $2,600 for the 3-beds, and maybe $3,400 for the 4 beds? But that's just a guess, I don't really get involved in those numbers, I just draw the construction documents.

Thanks for the info, Steely!
We should be building stuff like this in Canada.

[plinko]

I own part of an architecture firm and am a practicing architect in Santa Barbara.

We do just about everything from high end estates (definitely NOT urban), to adaptive re-use and multi-family buildings (very much urban though the sweet spot here is about 20-30 units). We also do resort hotels and restaurants.

I also personally specialize in hazardous and industrial occupancies and both design and consult in that realm.

Right now I'm designing a private high school on an urban site, three apartment buildings, and a factory that grows of all things...bumblebees.

[plinko]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Take this project currently working it's way through the process:

This is wonderful and exactly what so many cities need. Sadly most of mine are driven by parking (though that is changing) so you end up with a podium.