When she’s picking up the lifeless bodies of birds that have crashed into glassy downtown buildings, Elaine Carlson meets workers, tourists and neighborhood residents — many of whom have the same burning question.
“How can this happen?” they ask Carlson, a volunteer with Chicago Bird Collision Monitors.
“It puts me in the awkward position of having to apologize for the city I love,” Carlson said at a City Council committee hearing Wednesday. “We can do better. We know how to solve this, and for some reason, we just haven’t.”
In Chicago, which drew international attention in 2023 when nearly 1,000 migrating birds died crashing into a single glassy lakefront building on a single day, bird advocates are mounting yet another campaign for an ordinance requiring buildings to incorporate safety measures, such as glass etched with small marks.
The push for such an ordinance goes back almost 10 years. In the latest dustup, conservation groups were disappointed by the city’s long-awaited 2024 sustainable development policy, which included new incentives for developers to add bird-safety measures to some buildings, but no actual requirements.
Requirements are essential, Chicago Bird Collision Monitors Director Annette Prince said at the hearing of the committee on environmental protection and energy.
“While it is good to have 10%, 20% or 50% of new construction projects using bird safety (measures), that leaves 90%, 80% or 50% of new buildings as potential bird killers,” Prince said. “Would we say fire safety measures are good enough for 50% of the buildings of the city — that that’s a good start? Would we fix half the potholes in the roads and let the others cost accidents, injuries and damage?”
The Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago, which represents 240 large office buildings in the city, countered that in the post-pandemic environment, downtown buildings are facing high vacancy rates.
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The vacancy rate is nearly 29% in the central Loop, according to BOMA’s director of government and external affairs, Amy Masters.
Meanwhile, Masters said, buildings have been selling “for pennies on the dollar.” A building at 311 South Wacker Drive sold for $45 million, she said, compared with $302 million in 2014.
A recent report from the Ornithology Center at Muhlenberg College found that bird-safe glass adds only about 0.4% to the cost of a building, but the Chicago Department of Planning and Development’s Bradley Roback said the department has heard “anecdotally” from developers and designers that bird-safe glass can, in some cases, double the unit cost of glass.
“Even a 5% to 10% increase in window costs adds up quickly for large buildings with thousands of windows,” Masters said.
“This is also just (being) done at a really horrible time when buildings are struggling even to pay their basic bills,” she said.
The McCormick Place Lakeside Center — the building that was the site of 1,000 bird deaths in a day in 2023 — applied bird-safety film to its windows last year, with excellent results. Bird deaths fell 90%, according to retired Field Museum bird division collections manager Dave Willard, who had been monitoring the site regularly since 1982.
That project cost $1.2 million, but installing protective glass during initial construction is less expensive.
Mark Toth, a partner at the Chicago company Skyline, which designs bird-friendly glass, said at the hearing that Skyline is working on a project for Northwestern University with a $6 million glass budget. The cost to put bird-protection markings on the glass is about $75,000, or 1.2% to 1.3% of the total glass budget.
Google’s roughly $250 million to $280 million renovation of its new Chicago headquarters includes about $500,000 for bird-safe glass, he said.
“We should have a bird-friendly ordinance that goes further and we’re going to work toward that,” North Side Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, the committee chair, said at the end of the hearing.
The next step is for Hadden to bring recommendations to the committee and City Council. An ordinance would have to be approved by the zoning committee and the full City Council.
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