Chicago is currently the most competitive rental market in the country. RentCafe’s 2026 peak-season Rental Competitiveness Index puts about 17 renters in line for every vacant apartment in the city, with units filling in 27 days, the fastest of any large US market.
Newly built units make up just 0.27 percent of local stock. That thin pipeline is the core of the squeeze, and high mortgage rates add to it by keeping renters who’d otherwise be buying in place longer.
Against that backdrop, four megaprojects are in motion in Chicago right now, each large enough to function as its own neighborhood, and together worth nearly forty billion dollars.
For commercial construction, that’s a multi-year pipeline. For a rental market already this tight, it’s some of the only meaningful new supply on the way, once it’s built.
One Central
The largest of the four by investment, One Central is a proposed $20 billion project on roughly 32 acres of air rights above rail lines near Soldier Field and McCormick Place, with a cluster of planned high-rises, a hotel, and a transit hub connecting Metra, CTA, and Amtrak.
It’s also the most uncertain of the four. Landmark Development has a memorandum of understanding with Metra covering construction over the Metra Electric tracks, but the project still has no permits and no funding commitment.
A 2025 state feasibility study pushed the developer to halve its public subsidy request, to $2.75 billion, and Governor Pritzker has pushed back rather than endorsing it. The Bears’ stated intent to leave neighboring Soldier Field adds another open question for a site built around that stadium.
The 78
Related Midwest’s $8 billion project sits on 62 acres of former railroad land along the South Branch of the Chicago River, just south of the Loop.
It calls for up to 13 million square feet of new commercial, residential, and institutional space, including a 20 percent affordable housing commitment across as many as 10,000 units. Planned infrastructure includes a new Red Line stop at 15th Street and a half-mile Riverwalk extension.
In March 2026, the Chicago Fire broke ground on McDonald’s Park, a privately funded, $750 million, 22,000-seat stadium inside the development that’s expected to open in 2028, a sign this is well past the master-plan stage.
The 1901 Project
At $7 billion, the 1901 Project is a 55-acre redevelopment of the parking lots around the United Center on the Near West Side, led by the Bulls’ and Blackhawks’ owners, the Reinsdorf and Wirtz families.
City Council approved it in 2025, and construction broke ground in June 2026 on the first phase: a 6,000-seat music hall, a 233-room hotel, and retail space, targeted for spring 2028. The full build-out, roughly 9,500 homes, is planned to run through about 2040.
Lincoln Yards, Now Foundry Park
Originally a single $6 billion plan for more than 50 acres of industrial riverfront between Lincoln Park and Bucktown, Lincoln Yards has since split.
Developer JDL and Kayne Anderson now control the northern 31 acres, rebranded as Foundry Park, a $3 billion plan with more than 3,700 homes at full buildout. The project broke ground in October 2026.
Phase one includes roughly 700 residential units, a hotel of about 180 rooms, and four buildings ranging from eight to thirty-eight stories, set around new public green space.
What This Means for the Rental Market
The 78 and One Central both sit on the Near South Side, near South Loop. In a market this starved for new supply, The 78 alone, now under active construction, is one of the few projects positioned to add real relief at scale.
It also gives contractors a long runway of related work: infrastructure, transit-adjacent construction, and the affordable housing build-out its 20 percent commitment requires. If One Central’s funding questions get resolved, that corridor sees a second wave of supply on top of it.
The 1901 Project does the same for the Near West Side, with roughly 9,500 planned homes eventually landing in a submarket adjacent to, but distinct from, West Loop’s rental market.
Foundry Park plays a similar role for the North Side, though on a smaller footprint now that the original Lincoln Yards site has split between developers.
These four sites are the clearest signal available of where Chicago’s next decade of commercial construction work will concentrate. On the rental side, South Loop deserves the closest attention, because it sits closest to two of the four projects.
The RentCafe index measures competitiveness across the whole city. At the neighborhood level, the Dibze Downtown Chicago Rental Index shows South Loop as downtown’s deepest submarket by inventory, with 229 active one-bedroom listings, a 21 percent price-cut rate, and a median rent of $2,655, below the $2,824 downtown-wide median.
That’s the most breathing room any downtown submarket has in a market this tight, and exactly why South Loop is positioned to absorb a wave of megaproject supply without the price spikes this level of competition would otherwise produce.
By Zaineb Ben Bella, Chicago Market Expert at Dibze
About the author: Zaineb Ben Bella is a Chicago Market Expert at Dibze, a licensed Illinois brokerage. She has lived in Lakeshore East for 12 years and works with renters and buyers across all nine of downtown Chicago’s neighborhoods.
