The city of Chicago is celebrating the adoption of an extensive overhaul of its building code that has been decades in the making. The new code means some big changes ahead for the city. For ULI Chicago’s Building Reuse Initiative, it also represents a significant step forward in its work to clear a path for more building reuse throughout the city.

The April approval of a code modernization ordinance is the first comprehensive revision to significant portions of the Chicago Building Code in nearly 70 years. “This building code was absolutely necessary. So, the change is exciting,” says Judith Frydland, commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Buildings. The new code will be published and available this fall, with implementation that will be phased in between December 1, 2019, and July 31, 2020.

ULI first teamed up with the National Trust for Historic Preservation several years ago to create the Partnership for Building Reuse to make it easier to reuse existing buildings. Chicago is one of five cities participating in this initiative along with Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The Partnership for Building Reuse launched in Chicago in early 2015 with a primary objective to remove obstacles and make it easier to reuse existing, often older buildings.

“Our key recommendation was that the Chicago Building Code needed to be updated and we had specific ideas of how to do that,” says Swasti Shah, director of community engagement for ULI Chicago. Notably, the partnership encouraged Chicago to adopt more flexible requirements for rehab work to encourage the reuse of smaller, older buildings in neighborhoods that often struggle to attract private investment.

The new Chicago Building Rehabilitation Code, based on the International Existing Building Code, will provide tailored requirements for different scopes of work in existing buildings, replacing the “one-size-fits-all” approach of the current rehab code with a more flexible framework of requirements that is designed to work for a wide range of projects. For complex projects, the new rehabilitation code will offer a point-based system to evaluate various approaches to ensuring that a project will provide adequate life-safety protection for occupants. It will also provide greater clarity on alternatives available to historically significant buildings.

Read the complete Urban Land Article