It's at 357 North Green Street and kind of some of the history on this back and forth before they've even started building it.

Yeah, so this site, first of all, it's the eastern edge of Fulton Market District, if you could picture it.

I think many people who have taken the train into Union Station have gone by this empty parcel in Fulton Market there many, many times.

And I think it's interesting to look at this because it tells the story really since the pandemic of what has happened here.

in the downtown office market in a lot of ways.

So just turn the clock back a second and we look at 2022, which is when Ani Group, this Canadian developer, proposed a 29- or 30-story building at the time at this site.

It was going to be offices.

What's the one deal that you think may have changed their mind and put them back in the office business? Because right down the street, the exact same thing is going on, right?

So what does this all mean, all of this development for rate field and its future?

Yeah.

So if you think about what's gotten us to this point, just in the past six months, we wrote back in March that Justin Ishbia, the owner-in-waiting, we call him of the White Sox, who has a chance to become the owner on his own volition starting in 2034, but could be as early as 2029.

He's been working on this idea of, I want to redevelop the Amtrak property that is at 14th Street across the river from the 78.

And to make that happen, he needs to help Amtrak create this new facility, which is on property that's right next to Rate Field.

And it just so happens that he also plans to take the Sox and build a new stadium on this new Amtrak site in the South Loop, which means that if you are in Bridgeport in the Rate Field area right now, you are potentially over the next, call it five to 10 years, getting a new maintenance facility and losing the Sox and a big economic engine.

So That's why we've seen a lot of pushback from Alderman Nicole Lee and the 11th Ward and other local officials and some residents near Raitt Field who are saying that's a raw deal.

I got to put out the obvious, even though I know it's not an option, because I know a lot of people are probably thinking, well, why can't the Bears go over there?

So tell me what is going on with Cook County homeowners.

Well, so this is the annual tax bill analysis that Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas' office put together.

Basically, once the bills are all ready to be sent out, they'll look at it and say, okay, how the numbers shift.

People might remember about a year ago, we wrote about what was happening in the city of Chicago because it was coming off of the city reassessment period.

Remember, this has done a know a three-year cycle so the cook county assessor assesses the city then the north and northwest suburbs then the south and west suburbs is a triennial cycle there so a year ago we wrote about how hey what was the impact from all these commercial properties downtown just getting hammered by the pandemic because it was the first time that was really showing up where office buildings and the like were worth fractions of what they were before and of course you know in the zero-sum game of our tax system If one group of property owners has their property tax and their assessed value of their properties go down, everyone else has to pick up the slack.

There's a certain amount of money you got to get to.

That's the cost of government, what local governments are collecting in schools and the like.

Yeah.

So tell me about what's in the works for NBC Tower.

Yeah, so this tower, like many office buildings downtown, has suffered a few leasing setbacks over the past couple of years.

There were some big tenants that moved out.

As you probably can imagine, NBC Tower over there in Streeterville, you know, even obviously just a block or two from Michigan Avenue going toward the lake, it's not...

the gravitational center of the downtown office market, shall we say.

This is not an area where traditional office users really are looking for space anymore.

So they were faced with this question, the longtime owner of NBC Tower, about, well, we have a lot of vacancy opening up.

So do you have a sense of timeline on this?

Tell me all about it.

Yeah, so just to get your bearings or for people that have been following this sort of from the outside, of course, the Chicago Fire FC broke ground earlier this year on this 22,000 seat privately funded stadium, $750 million at the 78, which of course has been a long vacant 62 acre site along the south branch of the Chicago River, south of Roosevelt Road.

And This stadium has been billed as, hey, this is a huge investment, transformative for downtown, just a significant development that could help catalyze growth of downtown.

And one of the outstanding questions for...

the whole thing when this was approved by the city council back in the fall was okay what about all the infrastructure that's needed to make this future stadium accessible make this fallow site more accessible and that's where public money comes into play and that's just been obviously not as much of the focus as, hey, here's a billionaire owner of a team putting a lot of private money into a stadium.

So that public piece has now finally come up.

It's $425 million worth of infrastructure that was needed to support the stadium.

Was it that the scope of the project changed and that triggered this idea to port money from one TIF district to another? Or was this part of the plan all along to pull from another TIF?

Talk to me about the available space just in terms of data points right now.

So, OK, so if you are looking for office space overall, you're looking at the vacancy rate downtown.

There was some data from Collier's we had last year.

that showed that the vacancy rate overall for downtown was about 24.5%.

But when you look at and say, let's just look at trophy office space.

So we're thinking, you know, glass and steel office towers downtown built in the last couple of decades.

The vacancy rates more like 11% or 11 and a half.

I assume there's city council hurdles and whatnot to jump through.

Tell me what's going on.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, obviously there's a lot of excitement around the debut of this thing coming up, but, you know, part of the story of the development has just been delays and the cost overruns, as you mentioned.

So, you know, we're going back 10 years now, when the beginnings of what was going to be this great new anchor presidential library on the South Side, uh, were kind of coming to the, into the, the discussion, and then there was a long legal battle, of course, over getting it built at a park.

And then the price tag that was originally at, you know, somewhere in the $300 million range just kinda kept going up.

And I think people looking at this from afar go, "Wow, that's getting more expensive" and now it's $850 million is the final number that you're hearing is, about the, the total all-in cost of, of building this thing and, um, outfitting it with a, a, a bunch of really cool stuff that people are excited to see.

But what we're finding and what I started to hear just in the last few weeks was a number of contractors, subcontractors specifically, that worked on the project reaching out saying, "Hey, there's more to this story here when you talk about all the extra costs associated with, uh, the construction, which is that I'm out three or four or five or six" or whatever these different cases, "millions of dollars of unpaid bills for work that we completed, and we're really struggling.

Yeah.

So what about the financial terms of this sponsorship deal?

So we don't know specifically.

We know that this deal runs through 2040, so long-term commitment.

Of course no surprise when you have something of this kind.

McDonald's is the single, new single largest corporate partner for the Fire.

Just for some context, so if you think about some of the other Major League Soccer stadiums that have been built or are in the process of being built, Inter Miami down in Florida, that, that's a new stadium that's top of the list.

Close, something close to about $20 million is what I have been told from, from sources that, uh, are tied in with this stuff.

Yeah

So there's another California company that is nearing a deal for a Fulton Market office building, right?

Yeah.

And another case where I would say interesting if this is one of more like it to come, because the property is 1201 West Lake Street, kind of a lower profile office building that was really early in the Fulton Market office development trend.

You know, this was McCaffrey Interest built this one.

It was completed in 2019.

It was a really bold move.

They built this thing on spec.

So tell me about that and just what you'll be watching about that and just as it launches in the in the months ahead.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's been a focal point for him, especially recently with debates with Kagey.

He talked about leveraging the assessor's office to promote economic development.

You know, it's simple when you think about if the tax pie is larger and we have more investment and more development, that makes it less of a burden for everyone.

So even if there is a bit of a redistribution of commercial, residential, whatever, people don't feel the pinch anywhere as much if the city is growing and the county is growing and you have more money coming in.

And the thesis is that, well, we have to make sure the assessor's office isn't getting in the way of that development.

So, you know, he talks a lot about, you know, hey, if a developer comes in and they want to build and they come to me and they we should be able to build a very clear model for them about this is within a good range, a reasonable range of where your assessed value should be based on this level of investment and what we're seeing in the market.

Tell me about that while I have you here.

It seems like there's so many threads to pull here, but set the table for me to start.

There's a bunch of really interesting wrinkles to this, right? This is like this convergence of interesting stories when you think about the 78, you know, this massive development site on the southern edge of downtown along Roosevelt Road that we just wrote recently was, you know, the site of the future Chicago Fire FC Stadium.

And kind of right in that same vein, there's this new conversation around, hey, what's going on with that site across the river, which... really hasn't been thought of, at least in a very public way, as a real estate play.

It's a big Amtrak rail yard.

But as Amtrak has actually made clear, they are trying to replace it.

And here comes Justin Ishbia, who is the owner-in-waiting, as we describe, of the White Sox.

Of course, last summer, the Sox described that they have this potential structure, this agreement in which Justin Ishbia could replace Purchased the team from Jerry Reinsdorf at some point in the next decade.

And then as they were having a smaller presence really in the Lincoln Yards development, tell me about that involvement here and what that would look like and what that would mean as far as you know so far.

Yeah.

And that's exactly, if you look at stadium development across the country over the past decade, decade plus or so, it's a new era of stadium development where you don't have stadiums built that are surrounded by a sea of parking lots and car dependent.

It is all about public transportation access.

It's about all kinds of development.

These are real estate developments that just happen to be anchored by stadiums.

The gold standard a lot of people point to now is in Cobb County, Georgia, where nine years ago it opened, the Atlanta Braves opened Truist Park.

And it's at this whole thing called Battery Atlanta, which is the stadium.

And yet they become, especially right now in Chicago, it's such a huge part of the conversation of what the skyline is going to look like.

Talk to me about how that is the case.

Yeah, especially for something that was actually proposed and written about in bits and pieces back in April.

And it didn't really catch on in terms of what the actual impact could be of this because it really doesn't have anything to do with the size or scale of this particular proposal so just to kind of set the stage here right so that back in april there was a developer named domus real estate group based here in chicago that proposed a 29-story 347 unit apartment building at the address is 215 north racine in in fulton market uh sort of a mid-block very small site that's got a parking lot and a little residential building there today And when you look at the renderings and you see 29 stories and the unit count, it doesn't strike you really as a, whoa, that's totally out of place because there's a bunch of stuff around Fulton Market that's like that today and it's been proposed and approved and it's the scale of the neighborhoods changed.

But where this project really stands out has to do with this nuance of the zoning code.

And, you know, don't fall asleep when I say this.

But, you know, basically, if you go back to when the city under the Emanuel administration sort of reset the rules for Fulton Market and say, hey, let's add, let's make this part of downtown zoning eligibility so we can build some new things here, taking these old industrial buildings and make it a cool neighborhood.

Google was, of course, moving to the neighborhood and they said, all right, well, what should the rules be? What's the scale we should have? What should the uses be? And they ultimately, in 2017, adopted this set of rules that said, okay, we're going to use this DX zoning now that's downtown mixed-use district.

But it seems like developers have had to work under one set of zoning constraints, and this would either open up kind of a free-for-all to change the whole neighborhood to this other zoning, or it would kind of make the neighborhood and potentially others kind of this patchwork of like spot zoning.

What are some of the stories that you worked on this year that really stand out to you when you look back at 2025?

You know, a little bit of a carryover, I guess, from 2024, but really was, again, a big threat, as Rachel mentioned, was office distress and the loop emerging from the pandemic.

In 2025, we saw a number of prominent office properties get sold at these crazy bargain bin prices that were, in many cases, hard to believe.

And I guess the more you saw, the less... hard they were to believe that they were happening.

This was just the new market from so many buyers that were saying, well, we think this is the bottom.

It's now the time to buy.

A lot of these buyers in many cases were not your institutional big real estate player buyers that are going to buy it, fix it, sell it, that model of, hey, we're going to reinvest in these properties and breathe new life into them.

So I think there's some big question marks there.

So tell me what's going on in Glenview.

So this is a bit of an echo, I guess, from that office to industrial trend that we wrote about that you and I've talked about during the pandemic and maybe as the pandemic was waning a bit.

Yeah.

Where, you know, you have this pretty pervasive issue across the Chicago suburbs of what do we do with these white elephant office buildings that are kind of outdated and are on big plots of land and they're not getting used.

And in some cases, they look like they might not get used for a long time with new remote work patterns.

And at the same time, you had this rampant demand for warehouses and places to store and distribute goods.

So many companies were boosting their supply chains.

And what kind of timeline is being envisioned here for this, for turning this around?

It was just really a matter of how much.

Yeah, that's right.

There's been several months of delay.

These bills should have been shown up in July, and they didn't.

And there was a whole tech snafu, effectively, to quickly summarize a much more complicated issue of why these bills are just coming out now, mid-November with a mid-December due date.

But the expectation has been for months now that these bills were going to go up.

And exactly to your point, the question was how much.

And are there areas that might feel that more than others?

There's just kind of a lot of question marks about it.

Yeah, well, a lot of people are familiar with the Salt Shed now.

Many people have driven by it over the years when it was just the Morton Salt Warehouse along the Kennedy Expressway, sort of sandwiched there between the highway and the Chicago River, kind of near Goose Island.

2022 was when a group of developers, including Blue Star Properties and R2, turned that warehouse into this cool music venue called the Salt Shed.

It's got about...

I think it's like 3,300 or so capacity for indoor concerts and shows.

And about 5,500, I think, is the maximum on their outdoor portion of the venue along the river.

So if this were to move forward, what kind of hurdles might they be facing to develop it?

There's a lot of pieces here.

There are a lot of pieces here.

This just shows you how difficult it can be to turn a big building into something else in downtown Chicago.

And it has really nothing to do, or very little to do in this case, with red tape or the kind of stuff that you would think of, oh, it's just tough to deal with the city.

Nothing to do with it.

So the property here, it's 105 West Adams.

It's known as the Bankers Building or the Clark Adams Building more recently.

The landmark status is about the physical structure, the actual property of the building and would pertain to all of it.

So this is a big step and it's a big milestone, but there's still a lot more to go to get there.

Yeah, so just the quick history lesson for those who didn't follow the 2019 controversy, pushback, whatever you want to call it, when Related Midwest was pushing for the rezoning and TIF money.

This was the waning days of Rahm Emanuel's administration, where they struck a deal, a redevelopment agreement, that said, okay, we, the developer, we are going to front the money for these specific infrastructure projects, A, B, C, D, and E, roads to get through and around The site, there were some big line items like realigning the metro tracks that run through the 78, a new CTA red line station, shoring up the seawall, basically.

There was all kinds of things totaling about $550 million, at least in phase one, that the developers said, we're going to front the money for that.

And then based on property taxes that are generated over time at the 78, that money will be used to pay us back.

It's public infrastructure, public money, but... their developer takes the risk.

That was the structure of this.

Cause it brings the socks into the conversation.

So tell me about what is going on at this site that, oh my gosh, I've lost track of how many times you and I have talked about this one parcel of land here on the podcast.

Yeah, well, there's so much interest in this, obviously, and it's had so many twists and turns going back to 2019 and before that, really, when Sterling Bay was trying to get Lincoln Yards going, and they obviously didn't.

Some people might have seen earlier in the summer, there was this emergence of some details of a plan from a joint venture of JDL Development out of Chicago here and Kane Anderson Real Estate out of Florida.

They were under contract to buy the northern portion of the Lincoln Yard site, if you could picture that long, vacant site between Lincoln Park and Bucktown along the north branch of the Chicago River.

And they had sort of shared some high-level details of what they envisioned there, mostly residential community, far less dense than what Sterling Bay had proposed for Lincoln Yards.

And they had kind of said, well, we're just sharing those details with city planning officials, and there was a lot more to come in terms of imagery and specifics, and it was still a little bit of a work in progress.

So the city, after they have what's called an intake meeting, where the developer for a big development like this will say, here's our vision, here's some details.

And I can't help but think back to when this project was first emerging, what the vision was then versus all the twists and turns that it has taken to be what it is now.

Talk me through, what's the latest from them?

Well, boy, there's a lot.

You're right.

I mean, it's been a busy few years for Sterling Bay.

Certainly, like it has been for a lot of real estate firms, developers that We're so heavily invested in the office world, just dealing with the headaches that are playing out in slow motion when it comes to leases burning off and elevated interest rates, depressing property values.

And so that's making it very obviously difficult for anyone with maturing debt to pay off loans.

Sterling Bay was flying pretty high before the pandemic.

that I think not only Sterling Bay, but so many developers, it'll be fascinating to see after this challenging time, what the story will be about them.

And so for Related Midwest, what is the vision for that whole area, not just the stadium, but for around it?

So the team and related are going to be revealing a lot more pictures and details.

And in a couple of weeks on June 16th, it's going to be a public meeting in the third ward hosted by Alderman Dowell, where they're going to show exactly what this vision is.

But to describe it, you know, if you can picture Roosevelt Road and looking south over the 78, it's just a big swath of land that has nothing there.

So the idea is that there's going to be a way to get into the site from Roosevelt Road, which then leads to a big plaza, which the team and related have described as sort of similar to the Gallagher Way Plaza outside of Wrigley Field, if you know that.

Similar in size, similar nature, bars, restaurants, related plans to develop some residential pieces there, apartments.

And then that will lead you into the stadium, which will then sort of drop down because Roosevelt's a little elevated, of course, from where the land is.

yeah and what kind of uh red tape needs to happen with the city to get there

But tell me the latest.

Yeah, so, you know, I think for people who have been following this story closely, they've seen little breadcrumbs and signals from the Bears that things aren't going well or have not been going well for some time in their push for a new downtown stadium that is getting... you know, state lawmakers to agree that they would allow taxpayer dollars to help fund a new stadium on the lot south of Soldier Field.

And so we've been seeing more momentum instead back toward The plan that the Bears rolled out back in 2022, which is to develop this stadium-anchored campus on the former Arlington International Racecourse site that, of course, the Bears own and have sort of kept that iron in the fire the whole time as they've also been pursuing this downtown option.

So in recent weeks, there's just been more signs that the Bears are saying, well, OK, our focus is now on downtown and Arlington Heights.

And now the pivot has become clear that it is the Bears going down the Arlington Heights path and very much pausing their effort in the city, which is all but stalled at this point.

So it's at this point a focus on a number of things in Arlington Heights, one of which is continuing to work with the village on, you know, some economic impact and traffic studies that the bears have submitted and that the village is now reviewing on, Hey, what would this campus look like? Uh, what infrastructure needs, um, would go into it.

And, uh, an iterative process, as the Village has said, to try to come up with a kind of sharp plan that both the Village and the Bears would like.

And in terms of the fan experience, do you have a sense of like what that transition might be like for the Bears? If all this works out and the Bears move to Arlington Heights, do you anticipate any kind of pushback or general public support or what might that be?

How is low demand not an issue for warehouse owners? Tell me about that.

Yeah, well, it's kind of a weird shift we've made now in the industrial real estate front where we went from the pandemic where there was this overwhelming amount of demand.

Everyone's buying everything online, so companies need to as fast as possible ramp up their supply chains, find space to store and distribute goods that are being bought online.

And you had these record years of demand as everyone was trying to, you know, get as much, you know, real developers couldn't build the warehouse space fast enough.

And you did have still a boom in, you know, warehouse development, spec development, of course, no one really needed to have a tenant in advance.

They would be there when likely before they were even done building it.

And now we've gone to, in part, thanks to, you know, the rise of interest rates and maybe just lingering uncertainty about the future of the sort of macro economy, this slowdown in demand.

That's exactly what I wanted to ask you next about economic headwinds that are kind of barreling down on every sector right now.

And so what will it mean for that site with Banko's EK having this bigger role now?

So to simplify it, for Lincoln Yards, there were always two PDs, planned developments.

So a zoning plan for the northern part of Lincoln Yards and a zoning plan for the south because it was two different partnerships that Sterling Bay had, one with J.P. Morgan on the southern portion, one with a group called Lone Star Funds on the northern portion.

The northern portion is what was surrendered to Banko ZK, and now Sterling Bay and J.P. Morgan still control the southern portion.

Now, again, two PDs, two different zoning plans, but there is one RDA, redevelopment agreement.

This is the document that was really so controversial back in 2019 when people were saying, hey, why are we offering TIF money, public subsidies to, this developer for Lincoln Yards.

The RDA was the agreement between Sterling Bay and the city that said, Sterling Bay, you are going to finance the infrastructure improvements that are going to make this whole site along the river between Lincoln Park and Bucktown accessible.

There's so many moving parts here and you followed it for so long, but what will you be most interested to kind of watch for next?