Just two months ago, we wrote about how
Autonomous Vehicles and Ride Sharing Will Reshape Our Buildings,
Our Cities, and Our Lives. We explained that "[w]hile
current developments require parking space to accommodate
commuters, the future might make these spaces obsolete."
Chicago is experiencing that on a grand scale with the loss of
surface parking lots, a staple of the city, especially in the
business center, the Loop, and the areas into which that business
center has expanded, River North, River West, West Loop, South
Loop, Gold Coast, etc. (Chicago loves to carve as many marketable
neighborhood names as possible into a small area).
As Ryan Ori of the Chicago Tribune reported,
developers in the city are gobbling up surface parking lots and
turning them into high rises. The simple fact of the matter is that
the surface parking lots, which are available publicly to anyone
willing to pay the hourly, daily or monthly fee, are not as
profitable as they once were.
