CHICAGO—Golub & Company and its partner, Boston-based GID, just broke ground on a 45-story mixed-use apartment building in the downtown's Streeterville neighborhood and company officials say the city's multifamily market can easily accommodate the additional 490 units.
“We feel that we know the submarket really well,” Michael Newman, Golub's chief executive officer, tells GlobeSt.com. “We've been there for decades and decades.”
The new $180 million development is located at 545 North McClurg Court near the Chicago-based Golub's most recently-developed luxury building, Streeter Place Apartments. The silver-blue tower will feature a contemporary glass and metal exterior wall and two large-scale amenity decks on the ninth floor and rooftop. Newman expects the first tenants will begin occupying units in about 22 months.
The city's multifamily market has been quite active, with other developers putting up thousands of downtown units this year with even more to come in 2015. But Newman considers the competition a positive for the neighborhood. “It keeps attracting more people to the area.” Furthermore, the market has seen “record absorption in the first and second quarters of this year.”
And even if the raw number of apartment units under development might seem like a lot to some, Newman points out that since there are so few new condos or single-family homes, those sectors soak up far less of the housing demand than in the past. Furthermore, many of the new downtown apartments will be studios or one-bedrooms, fewer than is typical for condos and homes, lessening the danger of oversupply. “We're building a lot, but historically we're building fewer bedrooms.”
“The job growth in the city is fantastic,” Newman says, further boosting investors' confidence in the new tower. In fact, according to the latest report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Illinois added more than 19,000 jobs last month, the most of any state except Texas, with many of the new jobs in the financial and business services sectors and concentrated in the Chicago metro area.
"Companies relocating from the Chicago suburbs to downtown are boosting employment in the city, while long com
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
