Developer Jeff Michael faced a tough crowd Tuesday night at a 1st Ward meeting.
Michael’s Horizon Realty Group is seeking to build an 18-story, 180-unit apartment building at 1621 Chicago Ave.
He’s been pushing various plans for the site since 2017, and his last design died in a City Council committee in 2020.
With half a decade to organize, opponents of the project were in no mood to accept the new plan, although it is in some respects scaled down from the proposal the Council rejected.
The new proposal calls for including 18 on-site affordable units in the development — 13 as required by the city’s inclusionary housing ordinance — and five additional units as a public benefit.
Ald. Clare Kelly (1st) falsely claimed during the meeting that all 18 units were required under the city ordinance, until a city staffer explained that the ordinance offers developers who provide 10% affordable units on site a bonus of four additional market-rate units for each affordable unit.
So, with a base unit count of 128 units, and 10% — or 13 of those designated as affordable — the project qualifies to include 134 or 52 additional market rate units with no additional affordable housing obligation under the code.
Martha Rudy, a staffer with Habitat for Humanity in Chicago, falsely claimed that the calculation of what counts as an affordable unit under the law is based on the median income in Evanston, so that adding new market-rate units at the site would make the “affordable” units less...
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