Wicker Park 13-Story Apartment Tower Gets Construction Permit

A 13-story apartment tower in Wicker Park cleared a major hurdle last week when the city issued a construction permit for 1628 W. Division St., moving a proposal that has been stuck in bureaucratic and political limbo since 2019 closer to becoming reality.

Developer RDM Companies received the permit Thursday for a surface parking lot just off Division Street where it has long planned to build 121 apartments. The company also applied for a tower crane permit last month, which remains pending according to city records. Neighbors adjacent to the site received a “30-day excavation notice” letter from an LLC managed by RDM CEO Robert Mosky, signaling that ground could break soon.

Seven years. That’s how long this project has been grinding through the system.

RDM did not return multiple requests for comment on the development timeline. A spokesperson for the city’s planning department confirmed the project is “moving toward construction,” but offered nothing more specific.

The site sits less than a block from the Division Street Blue Line station at the Ashland and Division intersection, prime transit-oriented real estate that has drawn competing visions for what should eventually rise there. The building, while addressed on Division, is tucked between several existing structures and wouldn’t directly front the street.

The path here has been anything but straight.

In April 2019, then-1st Ward Ald. Proco Joe Moreno pushed a zoning change through City Council over the objections of neighborhood groups. Moreno was in his final months in office at the time. The approval came despite concerns from residents about building height, traffic congestion and other impacts on a dense neighborhood already straining under development pressure.

Moreno’s successor, Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st), came in looking to undo it. In 2020, La Spata introduced an ordinance to downzone the property, which would have capped any future development at a much smaller scale. That legislation never moved. Then, four years later, La Spata flipped his approach entirely and sponsored a “low affordability community” designation for the site, a mechanism aldermen sometimes use to give developers access to tax breaks in exchange for including affordable housing units in a project. RDM, for its part, still hasn’t broken ground. The parking lot is still a parking lot.

Not exactly a clean record for anyone involved.

With permits now moving, 1st Ward chief of staff Nicholas Zettel said he’s working with RDM to schedule a community meeting to discuss construction logistics and a timeline, which he expects to happen later this month. That meeting will matter to residents who’ve watched this corner sit dormant for years while the debate over what should be built there swallowed neighborhood association meeting after neighborhood association meeting.

The original proposal called for 16 stories. Plans were revised down to 13. Some neighbors are still lobbying the city to block the development in its current form, citing concerns about height and other issues that have followed this project since before Moreno’s zoning push.

Wicker Park has absorbed considerable development pressure over the past decade as transit-oriented development policies and rising property values reshaped the neighborhood’s character. The Division corridor, in particular, has been a flashpoint for debates about density, affordability and neighborhood identity that play out in aldermanic offices and planning committee rooms across the city. RDM’s project reflects those tensions directly.

The thing is, 121 apartments near a Blue Line stop is exactly the kind of density that city planners and transit advocates say Chicago needs more of, not less. Whether the building’s affordable units, if any are ultimately required through the low affordability designation, meaningfully offset the project’s impact on the surrounding blocks is a fight that hasn’t been resolved just because a crane permit application showed up in city records.

Reporting by Block Club Chicago first surfaced the permit activity and the excavation notices sent to neighbors.

The community meeting La Spata’s office is planning will be the first real public forum on construction specifics. Whether neighbors who’ve been fighting the project for years show up looking for information or looking for one more shot to stop it entirely will say a lot about where things stand on Division Street this spring.