A vacant lot near Douglass Park in North Lawndale is finally set to see new construction, after Chicago officials issued a permit for a three-story, three-unit residential building at 1137 South Richmond Street. The project calls for a detached two-space garage along with one surface parking spot, on a site that has sat empty for well over a decade.
GT Alternatives LLC submitted the permit application on August 5, and the city issued the permit 85 days later with a reported construction cost of $400,000, according to Chicago YIMBY. Peter Sterniuk is listed as the architect of record for the project, which sits on the 1100 block of South Richmond Street, one block north of Douglass Park.
The lot's recent history traces back to 2012, when the city ordered the demolition of a neglected two-story greystone that had stood on the site since 1895. A 2011 street view image cited by the outlet showed the old home with a boarded-up front door and several broken windows before it came down. Vacant lots flank the parcel on both sides, and as of the report, no permits were pending to build on either of them.
A Neighborhood Building Boom
The Richmond Street project is landing amid a dramatic surge in small-scale residential construction across North Lawndale. The neighborhood logged 27 new-construction permits for two-to-four-flat buildings covering 82 units in just the first seven months of 2026, according to the Chicago Cityscape Knowledge Base. That compares to just nine permits issued across all of 2017 through 2025 combined.
As of October 22, North Lawndale and Morgan Park stood as the only neighborhoods tracked under the city's Missing Middle framework with issued new-construction permits, together accounting for 33 permits on 32 lots, per the same Cityscape resource. The knowledge base does caution that permits surfaced through its Missing Middle clusters filter are not independently verified as having been pulled specifically by initiative participants.
A Similar Project Down the Street
The Richmond Street permit follows a comparable project not far away. The city issued a permit on May 1 for another three-story, three-unit building at 1124 South California Avenue, also in North Lawndale, with a reported cost of $450,000, Chicago YIMBY reported in an earlier story. That permit had been pending in the Chicago Data Portal since February 10, a stretch of 58 business days — shorter than the 85-day timeline for the Richmond Street project.
Peter Sterniuk also served as architect of record on the California Avenue building, which was designed with rear porches on its two upper levels connected by a stairway, plus three surface parking spaces placed along the alley behind the lot. The Richmond Street design instead pairs its detached two-space garage with a single surface spot.
Getting Around the New Address
Future residents of the Richmond Street building will have several transit options nearby. CTA Route 12 buses stop along West Roosevelt Road half a block to the south, while Route 94 buses run along California Avenue two blocks to the east, putting the site within a two-block walk of bus service. Routes 49 and X49 are available less than a mile east at South Western Avenue, connecting riders north toward Blue Line trains and south toward Green Line and Metra BNSF service.
