Chicago Gets Nine Bids to Convert LaSalle Financial Corridor

Chicago has received nine proposals encompassing $1.2B in projects to convert seven aging office buildings in the city’s LaSalle Street financial corridor to housing, with 30% of the units reserved for affordable housing.

According to the city’s planning department, the proposals range from apartment conversions to a grocery store, a hotel and an e-gaming sports venue.

Chicago developer Urban Resolve intends to convert a six-story former Cboe Global Markets headquarters at 400 S. LaSalle St. into student housing and an e-sports gaming venue.

Scholastic e-sports companies LeagueSpot and Phoenix Sports Partners are partners in the proposed $104M project, which would include a food court, student mental health center and fitness center.

Prime Group and partner Capri Capital Partners put in a $180M bid to convert the former BMO Tower at 111 Monroe Street—which the venture recently acquired—into 349 apartments, including 105 affordable units, as well as a hotel on the lower seven floors of the 23-story tower.

Minneapolis-based Maven Development Group wants to invest $167 million converting the 41-story tower at 105 W. Adams Street, known as the Clark-Adams Building  into 423 apartments. The proposal does not include the lower 10 floors, home to a Club Quarters Hotel and Elephant & Castle Pub.

The bids were in response to the city’s LaSalle Street Reimagined Initiative, which put out an RFP for adaptive reuse projects for the LaSalle Street corridor, which stretches from Washington Street to Jackson Boulevard in the Loop business district. The deadline for bids was Dec. 31.

When she announced the request for proposals last fall, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the city was prepared to make “financial resources and other incentives” available to support projects resulting from the initiative. Lightfoot set a goal of 1,000 new apartments for the initiative, of which 300 would be designated as affordable.

In addition to the conversion of what it called “underutilized” office space to residential units, Chicago solicited proposals to repurpose vacant storefronts and other interior spaces in the LaSalle corridor.

LaSalle Street is the historic heart of Chicago’s central business district. Lined with high-rises between Wacker Drive and Jackson Boulevard, the corridor has been a center of commercial economic activity for decades, especially for financial institutions, brokerage companies, legal firms, and other entities.

More recently, LaSalle has experienced significant office and retail vacancy rates exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing market trends that has shifted most new office investment to the West Loop, leaving millions of square feet of underutilized office space along the corridor.

Major financial players, including Bank of America and BMO Financial, have relocated from LaSalle Street to trophy towers along the Chicago River.