Rogers Park Werner Brothers Building Gets City Approval

The Chicago Plan Commission voted Thursday to approve redevelopment of the Werner Brothers Storage Building in Rogers Park, clearing the project’s first official hurdle with the city.

The plan calls for 80 affordable apartments at 7613 N. Paulina St., a site one block from the Red Line’s Howard station. It’s a two-part development: restore the historic Werner Brothers structure and build a new eight-story mixed-use building on an adjacent lot. Developers would knock down an existing one-story building to make room for the new construction.

The Werner itself isn’t getting gutted. The historic two-story lobby stays intact. The rest of the building converts to residential units, ranging from studios to three-bedrooms, priced for households earning between 30% and 80% of area median income. That income spread is why the development team is pitching it as both affordable and workforce housing.

The project is being led by Housing For All, Visionary Ventures, and JTE Real Estate.

Ald. Maria Hadden, who represents the 49th Ward, didn’t mince words about why the project matters. Rogers Park doesn’t have a lot of room to grow without demolishing what’s already standing.

“In this area, we don’t have many opportunities to build new increased density without destroying what we have,” Hadden said. “Finding those opportunities and making an impact where we can to include more affordable housing, especially family-size units, that was a big thing.”

Therese Thompson, vice president at architecture firm Cordogan, Clark and Associates, laid out the preservation work for the commission. The Werner’s brick and terra cotta facade will be cleaned and tuck pointed. Two sections of heavily damaged terra cotta will be replaced. Thompson told commissioners the building’s common room won’t be programmed by management. Residents decide that after they move in.

The Werner Brothers building dates to the 1920s. George S. Kingsley designed it. The terra cotta facade is intricate enough that Preservation Chicago’s watch list included it, a designation that brought additional scrutiny to what developers could and couldn’t do with the exterior. The restoration commitment is central to the entire project’s case before city planners.

The new eight-story building will carry more than 5,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. That’s not an afterthought. The Howard corridor has seen stubborn vacancy near the station, and the development team told commissioners Thursday that the commercial footprint is meant to push some economic activity back into the stretch. The site has strong transit access, including CTA and Pace bus lines plus the Red, Purple, and Yellow line trains, which the team stressed in its presentation.

Shared amenities across both buildings will include a fitness center and bike room, in addition to the resident-controlled common space.

Thursday’s vote is the first gate, not the last. City Council still needs to sign off before construction can start. The full regulatory road in 2026 requires that second approval, and the timeline for breaking ground depends on how quickly that moves.

The Chicago Sun-Times first reported the Plan Commission’s approval of the project.

For Hadden, the vote is about more than one building on one block. It’s about what Rogers Park can absorb without losing what it already is. Eighty units won’t solve a citywide housing shortage. But they’re 80 units that didn’t exist before Thursday, and they’re family-size, not just studios stacked on top of each other to hit a number.

The Werner Brothers building has been sitting in Rogers Park since the 1920s. It’s survived a lot. Whether it survives this next phase as well as promised depends on what happens after the City Council takes its turn.