Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Block Club To Hear Proposal For Long-Vacant Lot

NE corner of Lawrence & Dover (via Google)
Dover Street Neighbors Association will be meeting Monday, February 11 at St. John's Church (next to the lot in question at Dover & Lawrence) to discuss a proposal for development on the neighboring lot. Meeting time is yet to be determined. The owner is requesting a temporary up-zone on the lot so they can build a single-family home with two apartments in the basement. A quick check of one of our favorite sites, Historic Aerials, shows that apparently some sort of structure was in this lot in 1962 but was demolished before 1972 and has remained vacant since.

4 comments:

  1. The lot is zoned RS-3, like much of the rest of Sheridan Park, which basically means single-family homes and duplexes are the only things that can be built by right. That makes virtually the entire neighborhood--all the six-flats, for example--non-conforming. That seems weird. Clearly one could build a six-flat in Sheridan Park without changing the neighborhood's character, so why hasn't it been zoned accordingly?

    It's great to see this lot get put to use, though something denser would be nice. But there are several others like Magnolia and Montrose, the gap on the west side of the 4600 block of Malden, etc. With more appropriate zoning, we might not have to wait 40 years for those to fill in as well.

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  2. Err, I take it back--most of Sheridan Park, with some notable exceptions including the old Hull House, is RT-4. It's the Hull House's For Sale sign that had me confused. You can see the real zoning situation here:

    http://secondcityzoning.org

    I'd still be happier with RM5.5, especially east of Dover.

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  3. As a neighborhood we need to take advantage of the current upswing in the real estate cycle to develop the vacant lots and underutilized properties in Uptown.

    We lost out on some good developments in the tail end of the last upswing in 2007. The properties that had been planned for the KFC lot at Broadway/Buena and where the new Walgreens sits at Sheridan/Irving would have been fine additions to the ward.

    It's not as if we don't have an abundance of Walgreens and CVS's on the north side already.

    Between the Maryville property and the relatively small number of vacant lots in Uptown we have the chance to add thousands of lovely new residents to our ward.

    Vive le Development! I'm unsure of the French word for "development". Probably something annoying and wearing a beret.

    Perhaps one of my moral and intellectual betters over at the Organization of the Northeast(ONE) can look it up for me. Considering how their flailing around picketing new potential developments they likely have the time.



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  4. I agree with Irish Pirate. I get angry every time I walk past the Walgreens at the Sheridan redline stop. What a perfectly great opportunity for TOD development wasted away on a suburban structure. At a minimum, that lot should have been a midrise with a Walgreens on the first floor.

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