City Leaders Unveil ‘Once In A Lifetime’ Plan To Bind Wounds Of Bleeding LaSalle Street Corridor In what Mayor Lori Lightfoot said would be “the engine that pumps the blood to the rest of our body of Chicago,” city officials unveiled plans Monday to offer up incentives aimed at revitalizing one of the city’s most iconic and historic corridors. LaSalle Street, which has fallen on hard times since the pandemic began, now has almost 5M SF of vacant commercial space, more than any other part of the city’s downtown business district. In hopes of reversing the decline, city leaders said they will finish what Google began with its $105M purchase of the architecturally famed James R. Thompson Center between LaSalle and Lake streets in July, dangling tax-increment financing dollars and other incentives to transform historic but emptied office buildings along the street into 1,000 new apartments and condos, 300 of which would be affordable. 
On Monday, the city opened an invitation for proposals for LaSalle Street Reimagined, an effort to revitalize and repurpose dozens of historic and prewar structures built for a different era in which “a monoculture of office uses” was prioritized.“The corridor has the highest commercial and retail vacancy rates in any…  Read the full story here. | 
