Daniel Kay Hertz

Last month, I wrote about how the 2019 Chicago building code combined with a series of parking reforms to create a new multifamily infill typology: the III-5, or five-story buildings newly eligible to be built using "Type III" construction.

Every six months or so it seems that there is a round of discourse on the discourse sites (Twitter/X is how I am exposed to it most of the time) about why Chicago isn't...better, or something.

Last fall, I wrote a piece I had been rolling around in my head for quite some time, about the rise and fall and rise of moderate-density apartment buildings in Chicago.

The pantheon of Chicago architecture tends to cluster at either end of the density spectrum.

There's a saying about bureaucracies that you should never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence.

Against Advice | The Point Magazine One of the paradoxes of advice seems to be that those most likely to be asked for it are least likely to have taken anyone else’s: their projects of “becoming” are the most particularized of all.

A Housing Production Fund building In a previous post, I wrote about how it's worth separating the way we fund affordable housing into two buckets: Capital subsidy, which helps the government or a mission-oriented third party buy or build a building; and…

From "Affordable Housing Finance 101" by Hanneke Van Deursen Moderate versus deep affordability While we (advocates, elected officials, public agency staff, and media) often speak in a binary shorthand in which all housing is either "market rate" or "affo…

For at least a year, in certain very particular corners of LinkedIn, Substack, X, and Bluesky (along with the Crain's and Tribune editorial pages), affordable housing construction costs have been a hot topic in Chicago.