Want to understand the end of the condo life cycle? Look to Chicago.
, complete with offices, shopping, restaurants, a park, and the “River Road,” a winding inner atrium lit from skylights. It’s a landmark of Brutalist design, a monument to ’80s thinking about cities, and a fixture of the Chicago Architecture Boat Tour.The building also tells a story Goldberg could not have anticipated: the rise and fall of the Chicago condo.
Making condos is easy. Unmaking condos is hard. When River City became a “deconversion” target in 2016, Chicago required 75 percent of owners to vote for a sale. Once that happened, everyone else was compelled to sell at the agreed-upon rate. Chicago-based developer Marc Realty made three offers over two years for River City. After owners agreed to sell for $100 million, Marc canceled the sale and dropped the offer by $10 million.
While states like Florida, California, and Hawaii saw tons of new condo construction in the decades after the concept was established in the 1960s, Chicago saw a different kind of boom: older buildings becoming condos. Fearing rent control, facing declining profits, or saddled with obsolete prewar commercial space, landlords in Chicago raced to sell off their units in the 1970s.
When boards fail to drum up support for a deconversion, Friedman said, values can fall quickly once a bulk owner enters the picture or maintenance problems become apparent. In one dilapidated building in the Oak Park suburb of Chicago, owners rallied for a sale with 78 percent of the vote.
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