Walk down Milwaukee Avenue. What do you see? Protected bike lanes on one side, “For Lease” signs on the other. A new shop going up next to a decades-old establishment.
Bucktown and Wicker Park are changing.
Now imagine a seven-story building going up right in the middle of it all. Developer Bill Senne’s Senco Properties filed for a zoning change request in January with the City Council to build a 60-unit mixed-use development at 1704 N. Milwaukee with two floors of parking and roughly 11,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, which would replace an existing one-story strip mall. That request is now pending before the council.
Community meetings have been lively. Some neighbors are concerned about the building’s height and potential traffic impacts on Wabansia Avenue. Others think the parking is too generous. The project site sits within walking distance of two Blue Line stations.
The real question isn’t how many parking spaces there will be. It’s who will be able to afford to stay in Wicker Park and Bucktown in 2026.
Emily Talen, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies urban design and social equity, makes a sharp argument in her book “Design for Diversity”: Gentrification usually doesn’t come from bad intentions. It comes from bad design. Which buildings get built, who finds space on the ground floor, what rent levels get baked into the structure. The sum of these choices quietly transforms a neighborhood.
Talen’s core argument? Diversity can’t be sustained through good intentions alone. It has to be built into physical form.
Bucktown and Wicker Park are not blank slates. According to data reported in 2015 by Inman Real Estate News, the neighborhoods are among Chicago’s most dramatically gentrified over the previous 30 years. And a 2024 update of a University of Illinois Chicago Voorhees Center report on the Gentrification Index found that the gap between Chicago’s highest- and lowest-scoring neighborhoods is growing wider.
In this context, 1704 Milwaukee is a small building with an outsize symbolic weight.
Looking at the project’s specifics, the picture becomes clearer. The originally proposed 105 parking spaces were reduced to 67, according to Urbanize Chicago
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in January. Of those, 12 are reserved for building residents, and 55 are planned as paid public parking.Twelve of the 60 units are set aside as affordable. That is the minimum required under Chicago’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO). According to the city’s official ARO page, the ordinance aims to use private investment to create affordable housing in market-rate developments. But the 20% threshold applies only to downtown and heavily gentrifying areas. Depending on which category the neighborhood falls into, this project may clear the bar with just 12 units out of 60.
The ground floor includes roughly 11,000 square feet of retail. According to a Block Club Chicago report in September, Senne told community meeting attendees that CorePower and Garfield’s had expressed interest in returning after construction. But what will their rents look like in the new building? Can smaller independent businesses compete? Those questions don’t yet have answers.
So what can actually be done? Three concrete steps are worth considering.
First, the affordable housing rate is negotiable. A community benefits agreement could push the on-site percentage above the ARO minimum if neighbors organize and press the alderman before the zoning vote. Chicago has tested this mechanism before: As documented by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, a four-year organizing campaign in Woodlawn resulted in a 2020 City Council ordinance requiring at least 30% of new apartments on city-owned lots near the Obama Presidential Center to be set aside as affordable for low-income households. Bucktown and Wicker Park are not Woodlawn. But the mechanism is the same.
Second, ground-floor lease terms should be transparent. A 10-year rent guarantee or a written commitment to tenant diversity would be one of the most tangible things a developer could agree to right now. This is not hypothetical: A newly proposed mixed-use development in Logan Square announced that its ground-floor commercial space would be rented at a reduced rate specifically for local businesses, the news organization Chicago YIMBY reported in April.
A local butcher and a CorePower studio should be able to coexist in the same building. But that won’t happen on its own. It has to be negotiated.
Third, the parking debate should be redirected. The question shouldn’t be: More or less? It should be: Who does this space serve?
Chicago’s 2013 Transit-Oriented Development Ordinance allows up to a 100% reduction in parking minimums for parcels near CTA rail stations. According to the Metropolitan Planning Council’s documentation of the ordinance, its stated purpose is to make it convenient and affordable to live without a car. Milwaukee Avenue has been one of the corridors where developments have most actively used this policy along the Blue Line, according to a Streetsblog Chicago analysis. The proposed development at 1704 Milwaukee sits on that corridor. The ordinance is already in effect.
The project is still on paper, awaiting a zoning vote in the City Council. The window is still open.
Talen observes in her book that historically, socially mixed neighborhoods emerged from economic necessity. Workers and owners had to live near factories. That necessity is gone. But we haven’t replaced it with anything deliberate. The market fills the void.
Deciding who we are building Wicker Park and Bucktown for is a design decision. And it can still be made.
Yunus Emre Tozal is a civil engineer in Chicago and a graduate student at Catholic Theological Union.
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