The 92-year-old Clark Adams Building, also known as the Bankers Building, on the Chicago Loop is set to become the largest co-living complex in the city. Local developer CityPads will complete an $80 million renovation to bring 505 residences, managed by Common, and an additional 159 apartments to the top 31 floors of the 41-story former office building. The renovation will be renamed the “Common Burnham,” named after the building’s original designers, the Burnham Brothers, who completed the project in 1927. This will be the fifth co-living space run by Common in Chicago, but the privilege of living in such a well-known building will be significantly more expensive than other locations, with rooms—not units—starting at $1,400 a month.
While the building is setting co-living unit records in Chicago and many other major cities, it still pales in comparison to some of the gargantuan co-living spaces planned in other parts of the country. New York will get its own 500-person co-living building in 2022 from the London-based firm The Collective, while San Jose could see an 800-person occupancy tower as soon as 2021.
The Loop area has become an attractive market for co-living spaces, in part because of the city’s high cost of living and downtown’s rising office vacancies. Only about half of the Clark-Adams Building office spaces are currently occupied, and other office buildings in the area have gone through residential transitions, according to the Chicago Tribune. “You’ll start to see a lot of these Central Loop buildings being converted to residential,” CityPads founder Andy Ahitow told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s an area that’s transitioning to a residential market. There are close to 20,000 people living in the Loop now, and it continues to grow.”
The Common Burnham will function much the same as other co-living spaces, with small single occupancy rooms and shared amenities like bathrooms, kitchens, and common spaces (aka, dorm-like). 105 West Adams Street is set to reopen its doors to tenants in early 2022.
