Why the Megaproject Dies

The joke is that one man gets to plan a whole town for himself. Chicago's version of the joke is that we keep handing one developer sixty acres and calling it a neighborhood. It's time for our cities to stop planning Billionaire Weenie Town: sixty-acre parcels that only large capital can touch. Cities ought to be platting small, traditional lots that a local builder or a family can buy.

Jonathan Konkol perfectly encapsulates this point in his 2020 piece for Plan Design Xplore, Why Not Incrementalism?:

"This way of building is, however, an anomaly in the history of human habitation. While Popes and Caesars had the power to reshape districts, almost all building in cities has been incremental and small scale in nature. Until the rise of corporate investment banking, only the church and the crown had the power to build this way... Most of our cities were developed on a grid system made up of modules of 50x100 foot lots. It's far easier for a small local developer to purchase one or two of these and put up a modest building... When lots of parcels are consolidated, only the big national builders, fueled by institutional capital, can compete."

Chicago has been running Jonathan's experiment in reverse for fifty-five years, and I can show you the scoreboard.

The 62 acres at Roosevelt and Clark have been vacant since Grand Central Station came down in 1971. South Works, 415 acres of lakefront, has sat empty since the mill closed in 1992. Block 37, in the middle of the Loop, sat cleared for twenty years. The Finkl steel site on the North Branch has been empty since 2012. Every one of them was assembled into a single parcel, entitled as a single planned development, tied to a single developer's financing, and handed its own public subsidy. And every time that one developer's balance sheet or thesis broke (a corruption case, a steel company walking away, a REIT collapse, an office market, a pandemic) the entire site stopped, because nobody else had standing to build on any part of it. The shocks were different every time. The structure was the constant.

Lincoln Yards is the one you can watch in real time. Sterling Bay bought the Finkl site in 2016 and won approval in April 2019 for a $6 billion, 14.5 million square foot plan with up to $1.3 billion in tax increment financing behind it. It completed exactly one building, a life sciences tower that sat empty. The lender took the northern half in 2025. The site is now split three ways by foreclosure sale, and on September 23 the City Council approved $201.6 million in public money for the roads, parks and bridge: roughly a fifth of the subsidy the original deal carried, seven years late.

Meanwhile, next door, the ordinary blocks of Lincoln Park did what ordinary blocks do. Between 2016 and this month they permitted 94 new buildings on individual lots, roughly $90 million of private construction, with at least one new home permitted every single year, 2020 included. The 53 acres beside them permitted one building. Same pandemic, same interest rates, same city. The shocks that killed the megaproject never reached the neighborhood.

This is the whole difference between one balance sheet and many. Plat the northern 31 acres of Lincoln Yards on Chicago's standard 25 by 125 foot lot and you get about 280 lots. At the surrounding blocks' mix that is roughly 500 homes; at three-flat density, more than 800; assemble the corners and the arterials for mid-rise, the way every pre-war Chicago neighborhood actually grew, and you are at two thousand or more. Foundry Park's approved plan is up to 3,737 units on the same land, and I am not going to pretend otherwise: a plat trades peak density for speed, resilience and local ownership. What it never does is sit empty. The plat starts producing homes in year one and never stops. The megaproject produced zero homes in fourteen years and is now scheduled to finish in 2036, twenty-four years after Finkl closed. We need the money to start rolling now, not in ten years.

Chicago already knows how to do this, as long as the land is cheap. The Large Lots program sold vacant city lots to the neighbors for a dollar. The Missing Middle initiative sells clusters of city lots to small developers for a dollar apiece, with construction subsidy, for two-flats and three-flats; its September round drew 34 applications for 30 lots in West Englewood and South Chicago, and the program had already put more than 300 homes across 106 buildings in motion. So the city sells small lots to small builders on the South Side and hands 53 acres to one developer on the North Side. Why does that knowledge stop at the river?

This post is arguing that our government ought to work toward providing and favoring small developers with more land opportunities, and to recognize that granular platting is the more reliable path to the long-term development, and the eventual redevelopment, of our land.

One more thing the permits show, and it is the reason for the next post. On Lincoln Park's own blocks, incrementalism mostly meant two-flats torn down for single-family houses. Small lots solve the problem of who gets to build. They do not decide what gets built. That is a decision a neighborhood has to make on purpose, and right now nobody asks it to.

Credit: The method here follows Jonathan Konkol's 2020 study of Portland's Lloyd Cinemas site; the Chicago application and the numbers are mine.