A vacant corner lot at the northwest corner of Irving Park Road and North Richmond Street is set to become a brand-new three-flat, after the City of Chicago issued a building permit on August 10 for a three-story, frame-construction residential building at 2934 West Irving Park Road. The site had been home to a two-story frame residence built in 1916 until it was torn down, and the parcel has sat empty since.
The permit, which took 103 days to process after the application was submitted on April 29, carries a reported construction cost of $500,000, according to Chicago YIMBY. Corett Builders Corporation is both the developer and general contractor on the project, with Michael Cox & Associates serving as architect of record. The building will contain three dwelling units, have no basement, and include a six-foot privacy fence enclosing the backyard along with an open rear stairway connecting decks on the two upper floors.
From Single-Family Home to Rezoned Three-Flat
Getting to this point required more than a routine building permit. As Urbanize Chicago reported, the 2,925-square-foot corner parcel needed a Type 1 Zoning Map Amendment to shift from B3-1 commercial shopping zoning to B2-3 neighborhood mixed-use zoning. That change allowed a 1.33 Floor Area Ratio and cleared the way for a 3,900-square-foot, 33-foot-tall residential building with no ground-floor commercial space required — a legal mechanism that let a purely residential three-flat rise on what had been a commercial-zoned lot.
Once complete, the building is expected to offer three-bedroom units renting between $2,500 and $3,000 per month, per the same outlet's earlier reporting, alongside six bicycle parking spaces. Zoning narrative and site plan documents filed with the city also show that all three open parking spaces on the rear concrete slab off the alley are designed to include electric vehicle charging stations, and that slab is set up to hold three cars total.
A Torn-Down House and a Ward With Its Own Process
The path to today's permit began in mid-2024. Corett Builders bought the property for $185,000 in December 2023, and the company received a permit to raze the home and detached garage in July of the following year. Demolition contractor Sitepro Services Inc. filed a notice of intent with the Chicago Department of Public Health that same month to clear the 1916 dwelling and its detached garage between July 29 and August 26, 2024, with the demolition itself reported at a cost of $18,000. The demolition permit for the address was formally issued on July 29, 2024.
The property sits within Chicago's 33rd Ward, represented by Alderman Rossana Rodríguez-Sánchez, whose office requires zoning change applicants to complete a Community Driven Zoning and Development intake process before any City Council review, according to the 33rd Ward Aldermanic Office. Whether that process generated any community pushback on this particular rezoning is not addressed in available records.
Echoes of a Bigger Density Fight Across the Street
West Irving Park Road has not been a stranger to density debates. In August 2023, a proposed seven-story, 45-unit affordable housing building directly across the street at 2907 West Irving Park Road drew local pushback over its scale and available parking, as The Real Deal reported at the time. The three-flat now permitted at 2934 West Irving Park is a far smaller project by comparison, but it lands in the same stretch of corridor where questions about scale have surfaced before.
Corett Builders and architect Michael Cox previously worked together on a four-story, 21-unit residential building at 3710 North Ashland Avenue in Lake View, completed in 2024 after the pair secured city zoning approval. City of Chicago building permit records list Emmett O'Hara of Corett Builders Corp as the property owner and Corine A. O'Hara as the project's official permit expeditor.
Fitting a Regional Housing Pattern
The three-flat format is not an outlier for the area. According to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning's Community Data Snapshots, two-to-four unit residential buildings make up more than 36% of the housing stock in surrounding North Side community areas, making small multi-family infill projects like this one a foundational part of the local housing mix.
The project also aligns with citywide policy aimed at that kind of infill. Chicago's 2022 Connected Communities Ordinance encourages multi-unit housing near frequent bus corridors, and Irving Park Road's CTA Route 80 buses — which run eastbound and westbound and connect with the Brown Line, Blue Line, and Union Pacific Northwest Metra trains — fit that description, according to Chicago Cityscape. Rezonings to B2-3, like the one granted for this parcel, remain necessary for developers seeking to build multi-family units on small commercial lots even under that policy push.
The new building sits within one block of that Route 80 bus service, and CTA Route 93 offers north-south service three blocks east at North California Avenue. There is no rail access within convenient walking distance of the site itself. With the permit now issued, the vacant corner lot is positioned to become one more entry in Irving Park's slow accumulation of small, transit-adjacent rental buildings.
