The paper trail on 950 West Willow Street tells a stranger story than a simple teardown. In October 2025, the home's owner at the time, Luka Pecic, went to Chicago's Committee on Zoning with a different plan entirely. Records from that committee show he wasn't asking to demolish anything. He was asking to reclassify the lot from RT-4 to RM-5, the zoning move that would let him renovate and legally operate more units inside the existing 1888 structure. The city granted an administrative adjustment that same month.
Then, in January 2026, the developer Landex bought the parcel. The plan for the site changed from renovation to demolition and new construction, and a permit for a new four-unit building followed. The demolition contractor, Brophy Excavation, had actually filed a first version of that demolition permit back in October 2025 under Pecic's ownership, then voided it, before refiling in March 2026 once Landex was in control.
The sequence shows how much a parcel's future can change with a single sale. Buyers evaluating older Lincoln Park properties can read the zoning and permit history attached to an address before making an offer, because the filings on record reflect one owner's plan at one moment in time.
The Number That Follows From That Story
Lincoln Park's single-family inventory fell 51.2 percent year over year through the middle of 2026, according to market analysis reported by local outlet Hoodline. Over the same window, the median single-family sale price in the neighborhood climbed 22.5 percent, to $2.5 million. Across Chicago's North Side more broadly, median home prices hit a record $500,000 in the second quarter of 2026 as inventory fell 22.8 percent year over year to just 1,125 listings, according to the same Hoodline reporting.
The instinct is to read those numbers as pure demand: everyone wants a house in Lincoln Park, so prices rise and shelves empty. That's true as far as it goes. What it misses is that the supply side isn't standing still waiting to be depleted. It's being actively rearranged, and in two directions that both end the same way.
Two Ways a Building Stops Being a Single-Family Home
Lincoln Park's housing stock has always leaned on the two-flat and three-flat, the brick multi-unit buildings that filled in the neighborhood a century ago. What happens to those buildings next depends on who is holding the deed.
| Mechanism | Who drives it | What changes | Effect on single-family stock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deconversion | An owner who already controls both units | A two-flat becomes one larger home | Adds a single-family listing |
| Teardown to multifamily | A developer acquiring the parcel | A single-family home or two-flat is demolished for new construction | Removes a single-family listing |
An owner-occupant who buys a two-flat and deconverts it isn't dealing with a homeowners association or a bulk sale. They already own the whole building. The path runs through the Department of Buildings, not a vote. It's slower for a different reason: research on Chicago deconversion projects puts the full timeline, from architectural planning through construction completion, at roughly twelve to twenty-four months, with permitting alone often taking close to a year even with the city's self-certification process. It's a project, not a transaction.
A developer buying a parcel to build multifamily moves faster and in the opposite direction. The Willow Street project is one example. It isn't isolated. The same reporting that covered Willow Street also tracked an 1898 home razed on Diversey, a 59-unit proposal on Clybourn, and a 24-unit approval from City Council on Clybourn in August. Each of those started as a lower-density building. Each is becoming a higher-density one.
The Slow Version Has Been Documented for Years
The deconversion trend isn't new, and it isn't limited to Lincoln Park. A 2021 analysis from DePaul University's Institute for Housing Studies, reported by Block Club Chicago, found that the community areas losing the most two- to four-unit buildings to single-family conversion were North Center, Lakeview, West Town, Logan Square, and Lincoln Park. Between 2012 and 2019, the same research found, Chicago lost more than 4,800 of these buildings citywide, and nearly half were converted into single-family homes rather than demolished outright.
North Center led the city on this measure specifically. A later count from South Side Weekly put North Center's deconversion permit applications at 43 over five years, more than any other community area in Chicago. The pattern holds across the whole cluster of neighborhoods that share Lincoln Park's building stock and its RT-4 zoning, the designation that covers most of Chicago's classic two-flat and three-flat blocks and permits buildings up to four stories.
That zoning detail matters for anyone comparing a two-flat to a move-in-ready house. RT-4 doesn't just allow deconversion. It also allows the kind of small multifamily new construction that shows up on Willow Street and Clybourn. The same zoning line that lets a family combine two units into one also lets a developer replace one lower-density building with a higher-density one. The lot doesn't care which direction the change runs.
Why the Direction Doesn't Matter to a Buyer
A buyer searching for a single-family home in Lincoln Park right now is competing against both trends at once, and both trends shrink the pool she's drawing from. When an owner deconverts a two-flat, that building leaves the multi-unit market and becomes a single-family listing eventually, but only after twelve to twenty-four months of construction, and only if the owner chooses to sell rather than live in it. When a developer tears down an older single-family home or two-flat for new multifamily construction, that lot leaves the single-family market permanently.
Neither mechanism is reversible on a timeline that helps someone house-hunting this year. A deconverted two-flat won't hit the market as a finished single-family listing for a year or two after the permit is pulled. A torn-down single-family lot won't come back as a single-family lot at all. The 51.2 percent inventory decline and the 22.5 percent price jump in Lincoln Park single-family sales aren't a temporary supply crunch waiting for more listings to appear. They're the visible result of a building stock being pulled in two directions that both end with fewer finished single-family homes for sale today.
What This Means for a Specific Search
If you're comparing an older single-family home against a two-flat in Lincoln Park, the zoning and permit history of each address is worth pulling before you write an offer, not after. Chicago's zoning committee records and Department of Buildings permit history are public. A parcel that has an administrative adjustment on file, the way Willow Street did, is worth asking Clare about directly, because a change of ownership can change what happens to a property next.
A two-flat with deconversion potential can be a genuine path into the neighborhood at a lower entry price than a finished single-family home, but the twelve-to-twenty-four-month runway and the structural work involved, from staircase relocation to load-bearing wall removal, are real costs that belong in the comparison, not an afterthought after closing.
And if you're weighing Lincoln Park against a neighboring community area with a similar building stock, the RT-4 zoning that produced this exact tension in Lincoln Park runs through much of the North Side. The same dynamic playing out on Willow Street and Clybourn is available to review in permit records for whatever blocks you're actually considering.
A Few Questions Worth Asking
Does a demolition permit always mean a single-family home is becoming multifamily? Not always, but it's worth checking. Some demolitions clear a lot for new single-family construction. The Willow Street pattern, along with the Clybourn approvals, shows multifamily replacement is common enough on Lincoln Park's RT-4 blocks that the permit type alone doesn't answer the question. The zoning classification tied to the permit does.
Is two-flat deconversion happening evenly across the North Side, or concentrated in a few areas? The DePaul research points to a concentrated pattern. North Center, Lakeview, West Town, Logan Square, and Lincoln Park account for the highest share of multi-unit buildings converted to single-family use, which tracks with these being the built-out, high-demand neighborhoods where buyers most want a single-family home and have the fewest existing options to choose from.
If I'm selling a two-flat or an aging single-family home in Lincoln Park, does it matter which buyer pool I'm marketing to? It changes almost everything about how the property should be presented. A building priced and staged for an owner-occupant family looking to deconvert reads differently than one priced for a developer evaluating teardown economics, and the difference shows up in everything from listing photography to which comparable sales actually apply.
If you're weighing a two-flat with deconversion potential against an aging single-family home in Lincoln Park, or you're on the seller's side trying to figure out which buyer pool your building should be marketed to, Clare Spartz can walk through what the zoning and permit history on a specific address actually tells you, and how to stage the property for the buyer most likely to pay for it.
