Articles About Development

One of the biggest albums of the year is “The Suburbs” by the Canadian group, Arcade Fire, which exposes the dark side of urban sprawl.  The band, fronted by the husband and wife duo of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne have created a concept album as emblematic of our generation as The Wall was for […]

Because Chicago is home to approximately 80 wind companies, including corporate headquarters and turbine factories, the city is seen as a hub for the wind industry.   With plenty of farmland suited to wind turbines, Illinois has a law mandating that the state gets at least 18 percent of its electricity from wind by 2025.  Unfortunately, […]

With the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act now the law of the land, commercial real estate executives are waiting to see what impact the legislation will have on their business.   Consensus is that the new healthcare law changes crucial demand drivers for real estate by introducing alternative models to deliver medical services.  The potential […]

Celebrity architect Helmut Jahn has created a vision for redeveloping Chicago’s Navy Pier, which celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2016.  Writing in the Chicago Tribune about Jahn’s plan, architecture critic Blair Kamin says “Yes, it’s over the top and, in all likelihood, ridiculously expensive.  But it’s full of creative sparks — precisely what was missing […]

Noted Chicago architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous maxim “Less is more” should apply to ambitious plans for revamping Chicago’s Navy Pier, the city’s top tourist destination.  Writing in the Chicago Tribune, architectural critic Blair Kamin says “The good news about the latest vision for the pier is that it discards the excesses of […]

A financing vehicle that has been used in Europe since it was invented in Prussia in 1769 is finding its way to American shores as a replacement for commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS).  The vehicle is known as covered bonds, which is a securitized debt instrument backed by a pool of top-quality assets, primarily mortgages. What […]

A total of $1.4 trillion worth of commercial real estate loans are coming due between now and 2014, with the majority on small- and medium-sized buildings that are either under water or very nearly there.  Writing for the Huffington Post, Daphne Wysham says that “crisis breeds opportunity. It turns out that buildings are responsible for […]

Eight Chicago taverns – all built more than a century ago by the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company and which bear the brewer’s signature globe logo – may be given landmark status by the City Council.  The former brewery-tied houses were built in the Queen Anne or Baroque styles and “convey important aspects of the ethnic, […]

The way America has been built in the last half century has assured that a majority of the population is dependent on the car to get to work, to school, to shop or virtually any place.  This is the opinion of Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, who are city planners and co-authors of “The Smart […]

Google is expanding its horizons by partnering with Good Energies, a New York-based investment firm that specializes in renewable energy, to create a $5 billion, 350-mile-long transmission grid to support offshore wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard. Each of the two firms has agreed to take 37.5 percent of the equity portion of the project […]