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Originally Posted by the urban politician
^ That's largely due to population decline in large swaths of town, particularly a decline in the demographic that has heavily ridden the bus.
That doesn't take away from the fact that access to transit as well as close proximity to large numbers of high-paying jobs has been one of the driving factors behind Chicago's "unlock the suburban wealth and bring it to the core" boom. It's just its own animal--but I'm pretty sure that if it weren't for how transit shaped the region, Chicago's central area highrise boom would never have been so dramatic.
At least for now, foreign capital has not been a significant driver of residential highrise construction in Chicago.
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Chicago has an incredible transit legacy (for North America) and we've just been coasting on the strength of that.
But, I think there's just unique cultural factors at play. We invented the skyscraper (arguably) and since the earliest days of the city, there's been a deep pool of developers, architects, and contractors who specialize in the construction of tall buildings. That knowledge has now diffused around the world, but we have an unusually deep bench (again, for North America) and a population that is just conditioned to expect more highrise growth downtown or along the lakefront. Time and again, political leaders have stood up to allow the growth of highrises to continue, which is why we aren't like Washington, Boston or San Francisco (which also have strong transit legacies). The growth of highrises is essentially self-sustaining, unlike other cities where every highrise is a battle and/or negotiation. Also, we have a huge mass of residents who either live in highrises or, if not, consider it absolutely normal to live in a highrise. This group of residents crosses class lines, so highrises aren't de facto seen as the provenance of the rich. Nobody is complaining about "speculators sitting on empty highrise units" or "foreign oligarchs laundering money". Hell, Edgewater is the perfect example of this... Sheridan Road is packed with highrises filled with middle-class residents... it may have been glitzy at one point, but now it's just a comfortable, lived-in highrise neighborhood.
It seems Toronto has now achieved a similar status, so congrats to them.