Chicago`s outmoded zoning ordinance has fueled the spread of high-rise apartment towers along Lake Michigan-high-rises that are walling off the rest of the city and choking lakefront neighborhoods on their own success.
So say architects, city planners and community activists who have fought, and usually lost, a series of civic battles against new apartment towers along Lake Shore Drive.
The high-rise fighters admit there has been a slowdown in construction over the last year. Lakefront lots are getting hard to find, and new federal tax laws make it harder for developers to recruit investors. But rather than sound an ”all-clear,” advocates want city planners and politicians to get busy changing the zoning law so reforms will be in place before the next boom.
Indeed, reformers say the big problem is not so much developers as the city`s zoning ordinance, a ponderous book-length document that hasn`t been changed substantially since 1957. They point out that the 30-year-old law:
– Rewards developers with a 15 percent density bonus, translating into extra floors, if they build across the street from a large public open space such as Lincoln Park.
– Requires developers to stack their apartments into towers that cover only half their property, a rule that was supposed to produce open space at street level but instead produced ever-taller towers rising alongside slablike parking decks.
– Fails to give neighborhood residents an opportunity to monitor and adjust zoning on a regular basis, a failure that leads to frenzied last-minute efforts to stop developers by changing their zoning after they have bought a site.
– Fails to give city planners the right to ask for design amenities such as sophisticated landscaping or out-of-sight parking in return for permission to build bigger or higher.
”The law tips everything toward large-scale development,” said Jack Hartray, a Chicago architect and a longtime critic of zoning practices here.
Hartray and others say the unchecked march of high-rises has overwhelmed neighborhoods on the city`s northern lakefront, snuffing out much of their turn-of-the century charm. The big buildings bring too many cars, throw too many shadows on lakefront parks and generally present a cold, concrete shoulder to their inland neighbors, the critics contend.
To be sure, the new towers are not without defenders. ”It makes excellent sense to put your highest density along open spaces like the lakefront,” said Jared Shlaes, a veteran Chicago real estate consultant who has written extensively on the subject.
”Chicago needs to provide growth opportunities,” Shlaes said. ”That means attracting white-collar professionals, . . . and white-collar professionals want a view of the lake.”
Most opposition to new high-rises, Shlaes argues, comes from residents of existing high-rises who don`t want their views blocked.
”You can`t plan your city based on the parochial concerns of someone who doesn`t want a shadow cast on his swimming pool,” said Shlaes.
Leaders of the high-rise opposition admit their ranks include many who are themselves cliff-dwellers. But they insist that the damage inflicted on their neighborhoods goes beyond lost vistas.
”If you`re going to build a high-rise community, you can`t start with a 19th Century street plan like we have along the lake,” said Rodney Reeves, president of the Lincoln Park Conservation Council, a group that has fought many high-rise battles. ”There`s no way you can do that without tearing the neighborhood apart.”
The best sites for high-rises, Reeves said, are large inland tracts where streets can be upgraded to handle the traffic. He cited Presidential Towers on the Near West Side as an ideal location, since it is bracketed by high-capacity streets and far from the nearest low-rise residential district.
Reeves does not buy the argument that high-rise problems will fade away now that only a handful of vacant lots remain along North Lake Shore Drive. The problem is headed inland, Reeves said, as shown by the new concrete enclaves springing up along commercial streets like Clark and Halsted.
In many respects, Reeves said, what had been a lakefront high-rise problem has turned inland, becoming a wider problem of high density.
Forced to play within the rules of the 1957 ordinance, angry residents of lakefront neighborhoods have resorted to ”down-zoning” large sections of their wards. That is, they have prevailed on the city council to redraw zoning maps to reduce the size of buildings that can be built on a given lot.
Entire neighborhoods, like the Park West area between Fullerton and Diversey Parkways, have been down-zoned. Other hot neighborhoods, such as the Wrightwood district west of Clark Street, have placed down-zoning plans before the City Council.
Down-zoning has produced its own brand of politics in some wards, like Lincoln Park`s 43d, where aldermanic candidates compete to see who can take the hardest line against new skyscrapers.
”I want to make sure that no new high-rises get built,” is the flat position of Ald. Edwin Eisendrath (43d), who last year took over the council seat of another ardent down-zoner, Martin Oberman.
”It`s not that we`re against development,” Eisendrath said. ”We welcome townhouses. We welcome rehabbers. We welcome new single-family dwellings. But if you allow developers to turn the area into another Sandburg Village, the rest of our housing values go down.”
As might be expected, landowners and developers take a very different view of down-zoning.
”We have a lot of money invested in land on the basis of existing zoning,” said David W. ”Buzz” Ruttenberg, a developer of several midrise projects on the North Side. ”We would be financially prejudiced by down-zoning.”
Ruttenberg hopes to build a five-story shopping-office-apartment complex on land he owns on the northeast corner of Belden Avenue and Clark Street. The project might not be feasible, he said, if activists push through a plan to down-zone the property-now the site of a small shopping center-to a classification that would ban anything over three stories.
Other developers claim the worst part of the lakefront zoning wars is the uncertainty it creates, both for developers and for angry neighbors.
”Developers need certainty,” said Thomas Rosenberg, head of Capital Associates, ”but the current system makes confrontation inevitable.”
Rosenberg faced everything but certainty three years ago when neighborhood activists attempted to downzone his high-rise site at LaSalle and Eugenie Streets in Old Town.
He eventually was forced to chop several floors off his proposed apartment tower and to reduce the size of a surrounding townhouse complex. The 648-unit project, downsized from 1,300 units, will be ready for occupancy next spring.
Rosenberg said the zoning ordinance should be changed to allow for periodic review of density limits, perhaps every four years. Between review periods there could be no changes. That way, he said, developers are guaranteed a period during which they know exactly what can or cannot be built.
Another group that has called for changes in the zoning ordinance is Mayor Harold Washington`s Task Force on Neighborhood Land Use, a gathering of real estate experts and community leaders.
The task force spent a year studying the ”high-rise, high-density”
issue and concluded last February that high-rises ”are harming the character of many once-cohesive neighborhoods.”
The panel recommended several changes in the zoning ordinance aimed at stemming high-rise blight. These included an end to height bonuses for buildings that overlook a park and an end to the requirement that living units be consolidated on half the site. It even backed the practice of down-zoning
”where there is a clear need for immediate protection.”
Months ago the Department of Planning and the council`s Committee on Zoning promised a top-to-bottom review of the 1957 ordinance. So far, however, no public steps have been taken toward that end.
