We should be preserving the vintage commercial corridors that everyone seems to favor for entertainment, dining and shopping, and encouraging denser and more granular development in the adjacent areas, so that there's a greater localized population to feed into each commercial corridor anchoring a neighborhood.
Part of the reason the western River North development is exciting, beyond the chipping away of schlock, is that that half of the neighborhood still has a considerable amount of vintage building stock to build between. When new construction is built denser and between vintage building stock, we get a much nicer neighborhood than we would otherwise. The perspective someone posted of 720 N LaSalle looking east down Superior is a particularly great example of the nice urban neighborhoods we should be encouraging – compare this with eastern River North, where dense beige blocks surround you.
To some degree, taking the vintage building stock off the table for redevelopment also hastens the pace at which developers will begin to take on the more granular redevelopment opportunities, as seen in this combo-block parking garage and one-story Chase:
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8966...8i6656!6m1!1e1