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OLIVER UNZONED MEDIA


Chicago’s LaSalle Street Bet: Office Conversions as Downtown Strategy
If NYC is rewriting rules citywide, Chicago is running a different experiment: fix downtown by changing what downtown is for. The Loop’s office-heavy identity is being rebalanced, and LaSalle Street is ground zero. Chicago’s LaSalle Street initiative has been framed publicly as a vision and an implementation pipeline—explicitly acknowledging that downtown needs more residents, more mixed-use, and a better public realm. Why conversions are the new downtown development Office
Jan 121 min read


City of Yes Changed NYC’s Investment Map — Quietly, Permanently
New York City didn’t “announce a boom.” It rewrote the rulebook that determines what is even possible to build, where, and how fast. That’s why zoning text amendments matter more than ribbon cuttings: they quietly change the math for thousands of parcels at once. And in NYC, that quiet rewrite has a name — City of Yes . City of Yes isn’t one project, one neighborhood, or one developer. It’s a citywide zoning reset that adjusts baseline feasibility: unit counts, allowed uses
Jan 122 min read


Citywide Zoning Text Amendments: “Gentle Density” at Scale (and Why It’s the New Power Tool)
The biggest housing reshuffles in America aren’t always announced with a flashy “rezoning map.” Increasingly, they arrive as something more technical—and more consequential: citywide zoning text amendments. These are rulebook rewrites that change what’s legal everywhere at once , turning “maybe, with a variance” into “yes, by-right” for small-to-mid intensity housing types. That’s what “gentle density at scale” really means. Not a handful of tower sites. Not a few corridor up
Jan 123 min read
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