A largely vacant six-story building in River North sold on July 14 for about $4.1 million to a buyer whose plan is 70 apartments — one of nine office-to-residential conversions the buyer says it has going in Chicago. That sale is one deal, reported by the Chicago Sun-Times. The city’s own permit file shows what it is part of: we screened permits issued since 2015 for descriptions that convert office space to homes — the screen and its limits are in the method note — and found 78 of them, at 76 addresses — 35 of the 78, 45 percent, issued since the start of 2024. Counting each address once, the unit counts stated on those permits add up to at least 2,002 permitted homes in former office space — approved plans, not finished apartments; the difference is spelled out below.
Chicago building permits, 2015 – late July 2026, classified · published August 1, 2026The July deal, and the pipeline it joins
The Sun-Times reported the sale of the Leahy Building at 226 W. Ontario St. — six stories, 48,000 square feet, largely vacant except for the Sound Bar nightclub in its basement — to Concord Capital for about $4.1 million, a private sale that closed July 14. The firm plans a $20 million project: 70 apartments, 10 of them in a new two-story addition on the roof, with construction hoped to start in October and finish in spring 2028. The same story sketches the wave around it: Concord says it has nine office-to-residential conversions going in Chicago, including one finishing next door at 223 W. Erie St.; the former Salesforce office building in River North welcomed its first residents as apartments in May; and CBRE’s private-capital team says it has closed six office-to-residential deals in the past year. One constraint came up repeatedly: many office buildings have floors too wide for apartments, because bedrooms and living rooms need windows and the middle of a wide floor has none.
A sale is not a permit. As of our August 1 retrieval, the Leahy Building does not appear in the file’s conversion rows — if the plan proceeds, its permits would show up later. That is the thing to hold while reading the numbers below: the file records projects with an issued permit, and issuance can run behind the deals.
What the permit file shows
From 2015 through 2023 the city issued between 2 and 10 of these permits a year. Then 12 in 2024, 13 in 2025 — the most of any year in the file — and 10 by late July 2026. The unit counts stated on the permits since the start of 2024 add up to at least 1,048 homes — more than half the 2,002 total across all eleven and a half years. The two largest unit counts in the whole file are the two most recent big permits: 252 dwelling units at 65 E. Wacker Pl., permitted September 2025, and 175 units — plus a 32-room hotel — in a 17-story office building at 19 S. LaSalle St., permitted June 2026. LaSalle Street has done this before: a 2017 permit converted 29 S. LaSalle to 211 apartments. The biggest by reported cost is older — the $150 million rebuilding of the landmark office and retail building at 435 N. Michigan Ave. into 162 condominiums (an “adaptive reuse,” in the permit’s words), permitted in 2018.
The wave is not only downtown. 35 of the 78 permits fall in the four central community areas — the Loop, the Near North Side, the Near West Side and the Near South Side — which means 43 do not. The scale splits with the geography: among permits that state a unit count, the median inside those four central areas is 35 homes per permit; outside them it is 5 — typically a floor of offices above a storefront becoming a handful of apartments.
What offices become when they do not become homes
This is the second conversion current we have measured running through Chicago’s office stock. Our data-center analysis found permits converting downtown office floors into server space — including a seven-story office tower’s conversion permitted this July. By these two permit counts, the approved plans for Chicago’s office space point in two directions at once: apartments, and server space.
That analysis: Data Centers Face Pauses and Bans Elsewhere. Chicago’s Permit File Shows $492 Million in Reported Construction Since 2015.
How we counted
- Source Chicago building permits (dataset ydr8-5enu), permits issued January 1, 2015 through late July 2026, retrieved August 1, 2026. 1,017 candidate rows matched a broad text screen; each was then classified.
- What counts A permit counts only when its description has a conversion verb, office space named as the thing being converted, and homes as the result. Descriptions where the office is the destination (a school becoming offices), where units shrink (consolidations and de-conversions), office-suite reshuffles, and anything ambiguous were excluded, counted separately, and never added in. A text screen can miss a conversion worded in a way we did not search for, so the counts are floors.
- Units are a floor Unit counts are parsed from the permit descriptions where stated, and deduplicated by street address keeping the largest count per address, since phased projects file repeatedly. Permits that state no count contribute zero, so every unit total here is a floor, not a census.
- A permit is not a building Permits record intent the city signed off on. Projects stall, phase and change. Nothing here says how many of these homes are finished or occupied.
- The news hook Details of the Leahy Building sale — price, unit count, timeline, the buyer’s nine projects, CBRE’s six deals — are from the July 21 Chicago Sun-Times report, read in full; we verified none of them independently and repeat no detail from outlets we could not read in full.
Computed by KCM Desk from the city permit file, retrieved August 1, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.