Crain's Chicago Business

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The revenue from Chicago’s parking meters could soon be flowing into new private pockets. Chicago Parking Meters LLC, a consortium including majority owner Morgan Stanley, Allianz Capital Partners and the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Abu Dhabi, has reached a deal to transfer ownership of the 75-year concession contract to New York-based Stonepeak Partners. The transfer would ensure the hundreds of millions in annual revenue generated by the parking system continues to benefit private investors for the foreseeable future, but the agreement is subject to City Council approval, which could provide leverage to force changes to the lease terms. The private agreement was reached only after Mayor Brandon Johnson walked away from a chance to buy out the remaining 57 years of the lease after deciding the deal carried too much risk and the costs were too high. Johnson submitted an initial bid of around $3 billion to begin negotiations, but backed out after the city determined it would require issuing 40-year bonds with little certainty the annual revenue would be sustained as advancing technology changes how people move through the city’s streets. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dch2fA2J

The owner of the former John Hancock Center is closing in on a deal to bring a luxury hotel to the skyscraper, a move that would kick off a new chapter for one of the city’s most famous buildings and bolster the Magnificent Mile’s post-pandemic recovery. Chicago-based real estate firm Hearn is negotiating with Marriott International to open a 350-room Edition hotel in the 100-story tower, according to sources familiar with the matter. If the deal is finalized, the hotel would occupy close to 400,000 square feet of mostly empty office space that Hearn has tried to market to medical users in recent years. The project would be a boon not only for Hearn’s push to fill the building amid weak demand for workspace, but also for North Michigan Avenue as the famed thoroughfare finds its post-pandemic footing. Across the street from the former Hancock, known today at 875 N. Michigan Ave., lender MetLife is planning a $170 million makeover of the Water Tower Place vertical mall. The owner of the retail building at 830 N. Michigan recently inked the Mag Mile’s largest lease in a decade, making a dent in the Mag Mile’s elevated 28% vacancy rate. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dxZcNb-E

The standard price to visit the Obama Presidential Center when it debuts next month will be $30. Across the Columbia Basin in the Jackson Park Lagoon, the Griffin Museum of Science & Industry has been thinking about how to deep-six a general admission fee that is almost as pricey. The museum was free of charge for everyone until 1991, when attendance was more than double what it is now. CEO Chevy Humphrey wants to offer that deal again, perhaps in time for the institution’s 100th anniversary in 2033. General admission tickets ($25.95 for adults) account for one-fifth of annual revenue, so getting to that free-admission goal will be quite a challenge. A big donor or two would help. Lassoing them is a pursuit Humphrey and museum trustees say she’s good at. During her first year on the job, in 2021, Humphrey was struck by how many people mentioned being able to “just walk in” to the museum when they were younger. “And that’s something that’s stayed with me,” she says. Humphrey, 61, is a Houston native who ran the Arizona Science Center. With exhibits like “Marvel’s Spider-Man: Beyond Amazing,” she is trying to broaden the Chicago museum’s appeal. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dPrJmVP9

Hoping to keep the Chicago Bears in the city, Mayor Brandon Johnson has floated giving Chicago more control of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, a complicated plan likely to receive significant pushback in Springfield. The discussion is part of the mayor’s broader effort to convince members of the General Assembly to stall or shoot down a megaprojects bill that would help the Bears move to Arlington Heights and creates new tiers of tax subsidies meant to spur development in Chicago. The mayor’s plan would give the city the reins of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, or ISFA, to control how future money is allocated while potentially expanding the agency’s authority to finance other tourism-related infrastructure projects. Johnson would not detail his conversations with state lawmakers or share specifics of his proposal, but told Crain’s the city should have “the ability to be able to control our destiny at a time in which more and more development is happening in Chicago.” Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gNywm3tH

A Chicago real estate firm has notched the priciest local apartment deal so far this year with its acquisition of a massive rental complex near O’Hare International Airport. Chicago-based R.I.G. Capital paid $167 million to acquire the 1,115-unit Pavilion Apartments at 5441 N. East River Road on Chicago’s Far Northwest Side from seller Brookfield Asset Management. While the property is within city limits, it competes with apartments in the suburban O’Hare submarket. The deal marks the most paid for an apartment complex in Chicago since the $175 million sale of a Streeterville tower in November. The highest price paid for a suburban Chicago apartment complex is $148 million for a property in downtown Evanston in late 2024. The Pavilion apartments are 96% occupied. They aren’t what’s considered “naturally affordable” housing, meaning the rents aren’t subsidized but fall below market-rate pricing. The complex’s average monthly rent was $1,573, or $1.98 per square foot, when it went up for sale in 2023. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gmZT8sFm

Chicago Fire FC’s future South Loop home will be named McDonald’s Park, tying one of the world’s most recognizable brands to the Major League Soccer franchise seeking to raise its profile. The Fire and the Chicago-based fast-food giant today announced a wide-ranging deal headlined by McDonald’s lending its name to the $750 million soccer stadium under construction at The 78, along the Chicago River south of Roosevelt Road. It’s McDonald’s first-ever naming-rights partnership for a major U.S. pro sports stadium and an impactful commercial endorsement for the Fire well ahead of the 22,000-seat venue’s planned 2028 debut. McDonald’s becomes the club’s largest single corporate partner, solidifying a massive new revenue source previously unavailable to the Fire as tenants at Soldier Field and in suburban Bridgeview. In addition to prominently showcasing its golden arches around the future Fire venue, McDonald’s will open a flagship, nearly 20,000-square-foot restaurant accessible from both inside and outside the stadium and “immersive fan and culinary experiences” at the park, the team said. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/g3WD8ewM

A local real estate firm paid $13.1 million for a demolished former Walgreens office complex in Deerfield, which it plans to redevelop with a mixed-use project bringing retail, restaurants and other uses to the north suburb. A venture of Buffalo Grove-based Shorewood Development Group bought the vacant 37.5-acre site at 1411-1435 Lake Cook Road last month. The deal came several months after the seller, real estate investment trust Orion Properties, razed a 575,000-square-foot office property on the site that previously housed workspace for Walgreens near its Deerfield headquarters. Shorewood’s purchase sets up its vision to restore foot traffic to the parcel along the Edens Spur Tollway with a range of new uses that make it a local destination, said Shorewood President Louis Schriber. The developer specified retail, medical and apartment uses as its intention for the site, Illinois property records show. The site is one of many once-thriving office parks across the suburbs desperate for revival after the COVID-19 pandemic hammered demand for workspace. Sprawling, outmoded office campuses that shaped suburban development for decades are now considered functionally obsolete, making them prime candidates to be transformed with more coveted uses such as apartments, warehouses or data centers. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gecpM4Rd

Tonika Johnson is taking a whole-block approach to reversing Chicago’s long-held inequities in housing, concentrating her resources on buying vacant lots, repairing people’s homes and bringing murals and sculpture all to a single block in Englewood. “Because of the devaluation of everything around here, you have to invest in all of the block if you want to stabilize it,” Johnson said on a recent walk along the 6500 block of South Aberdeen Street. “It has to be all of it, not part of it.” Like many blocks on Chicago’s South and West Sides, this block of Aberdeen is gap-toothed. Of about 42 lots, only 19 have buildings on them. House lots left vacant after demolitions decades ago hold property values down, which make it difficult for existing homeowners to find the funds for home repairs, which in turn devalues those houses more. Johnson’s effort, called UnBlocked Englewood, is an attempt to break the cycle of decline and restore value in the homes that has been draining out of them since the 20th century’s days of redlining and contract buying. About $1 million has been invested on the block in the past three years, according to Amber Hendley, part of the UnBlocked Englewood team, and as much as $1 million more may be spent. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gBkB2P8f

The owners of the United Center are closer to obtaining a $55 million property tax break for a massive development project surrounding the arena, but questions over minority contracting and a dispute with a hospitality union threaten to thwart or delay final approval of the subsidy. An ordinance granting a joint-venture of the Reinsdorf and Wirtz families that co-own the United Center a Class 7(b) property tax incentive was approved in the City Council’s Economic Development Committee in a unanimous voice vote Monday following over an hour of debate, but only after the chair said he will not call it for a vote in the City Council until outstanding questions are answered. The hangups could push construction of the development — dubbed the 1901 Project — further into the summer, denying its backers valuable warm-weather months for construction before Chicago’s winter kicks in. With zoning approval for the project approved in February 2025, construction could have begun months ago, but the owners sought the property tax abatement, claiming the development wasn’t feasible unless it was granted. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gjzFwNwc