Loop Revival Unfolds As Chicago's Center Of Gravity Spreads Out

The Loop has a reimagined look as it emerges from the worst effects of the pandemic, and the city's concentration of activity looks different, too. 

As conversions and new projects shift the focus of downtown Chicago from an office district to a mixed-use neighborhood, development throughout the city’s many neighborhoods is creating fresh pockets of density, activity and investment. 

The result is a transformation in how the city functions — more like a network than a centralized hub of activity, panelists said at both Bisnow’s Chicago Architecture and Design Summit and its Construction and Development Summit, each held at The Drake Hotel on April 14.

“What's happening now, in some ways, is a rebirth. It's a reinvestment. It's a recalibration,” said Charles Smith, principal at CannonDesign. 

“It's coming up like a phoenix,” he added. “There's money out there that's betting on the Loop, and there's a good reason for it.”

Major investment has flowed into downtown over the past few years.

The city is helping back a glut of office-to-residential conversions in the central business district that will help the Loop begin to diversify its real estate uses. The city’s LaSalle Street Corridor initiative is partially backing six of these conversions through tax increment financing. 

When completed, the corridor conversions are expected to boost the downtown housing stock by about 1,800 units and remove hundreds of thousands of square feet of older office space from the city’s supply.

“Chicago is at the forefront of repositioning old, obsolete office buildings,” said Jeff Cohen, deputy commissioner for the city’s Bureau of Economic Development. “Taking the existing stock, repurposing it, leveraging it with incentives, I think, is a really great way to take obsolete office buildings or any other kind of property that's looking to become active.”

Google is also getting closer to completing its long-awaited move into the renovated Thompson Center in the Loop. In March, CBRE was tapped to handle the building's office leasing for some of the space in its headquarters and Savills to handle retail leasing.

The tech giant anticipates interior construction to last through 2027 and plans to move about 2,000 employees into the headquarters later in the year.

The flow of the city has traditionally centered on people traveling back and forth into downtown from their respective neighborhoods, said Paul Schlapobersky, principal at SCB. He said following the pandemic, there has been a broader shift nationally in where activity is concentrated throughout cities. 

“If you look at the layout of the subway lines … they're predicated on you always coming back to the source of where that star exploded,” Schlapobersky said. “I do think, in the post-pandemic world, there has been a shift.” 

Schlapobersky said cities are pivoting from a single, dominant downtown toward a more multinodal model, with economic activity spreading across strong neighborhood hubs. That shift allows people to live, work and spend time closer to home rather than relying on one central business district.

In Chicago, he said that means leaning further into its neighborhoods as drivers of growth, building on existing local corridors rather than depending solely on the Loop to anchor activity.

“I believe that the transformation that is necessary is the enabling of the creation of nodes so that that movement pattern is not just the downtown and back out, but that you start to get a constellation pattern,” Schlapobersky said. 

Smith said neighborhoods are successful when they're multifaceted. The pandemic had a major impact on neighborhoods as people stopped leaving them to go to the workplace. 

“Now, most neighborhoods, you go out and the coffee shops are full and people are working,” Smith said. 

Schlapobersky said transit is the key to tying it all together, enabling movement between the Loop and neighborhood hubs in a way that is often easier than driving and parking. 

That connectivity supports both downtown’s recovery and the shift toward a more neighborhood-driven model.

“In a big city, there can be a tendency towards trying to lead a localized existence within the metropolitan area because it becomes so onerous to move around,” Schlapobersky said. “People have been awakened to the idea that they can lead a village existence and they don't have to shut out downtown.”