Bellwether Residences Opens 117 Apartments in Chicago's First Loop Office-to-Housing Conversion

The first tenants have moved into the Bellwether Residences at 79 W. Monroe St., a 117-unit apartment building carved out of a century-old Loop office tower and the first completed project under Chicago's LaSalle Street Reimagined initiative.

Mayor Brandon Johnson rang a bell outside the building Wednesday to mark the opening, standing with 34th Ward Ald. Bill Conway in the lobby of what was once the Rector Building, a 1905 high-rise designed by architect Jarvis Hunt. The building is the oldest surviving commercial high-rise Hunt designed and was named a Chicago landmark last year.

"As we work to create more affordable housing across Chicago, I'm certainly thrilled that the first-ever office-to-housing conversion project is happening right here in Downtown Chicago," Johnson said at the ceremony.

The conversion cost $64 million, with $28 million coming from tax-increment financing approved through the city's LaSalle Street Reimagined program. Of the 117 units spread across seven floors, 41 are designated affordable. Most of the building is studios and one-bedrooms, with seven two-bedroom units. Market-rate rents start at $1,664 for a studio, $2,384 for a one-bedroom and $4,887 for a two-bedroom, according to the building's leasing site. As of Wednesday, 25 residents had moved into 25 units, and the city was processing 41 applications for the affordable apartments.

The building includes a tenant lounge, a fitness center, an outdoor terrace, bike storage and a dog run.

LaSalle Street Reimagined began in 2022 under then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot as a response to vacancies left by the pandemic, when downtown office towers emptied out and never fully refilled. The program offers developers TIF money and other incentives to turn vacant office space along the LaSalle Street corridor into housing. Johnson's administration has kept the initiative running, formally advancing it in 2024. City officials say it is on track to produce more than 1,700 apartments across six buildings, with 30 percent of those units reserved as affordable, and to convert more than 2 million square feet of office space at a combined value exceeding $900 million.

"COVID fundamentally changed downtowns across this country and around the world," Conway said at the ceremony. "The old model of a central business district dominated by offices five days a week simply doesn't work the way it once did. To keep downtown Chicago vibrant, we transformed it into a true mixed-use neighborhood, a place where people work, but they also live, eat, shop and raise families."

Johnson and Conway held a groundbreaking event on one of the Bellwether's residential floors last spring, before construction wrapped this summer.

The timing lines up with other changes to the Loop's office core. The Thompson Center, the former state office building a few blocks away, is under renovation and set to reopen in 2027 as a corporate office for Google, which bought the building in 2022. The term "Google effect" describes the expectation that thousands of tech workers moving downtown will pull more housing conversions and street-level retail into the area around LaSalle Street.

That effect appears to be spreading beyond the six TIF-backed LaSalle Street projects. Department of Housing Commissioner Lissette Castañeda said 24 additional residential conversions are underway downtown outside the LaSalle Street Reimagined program.

Five more buildings remain in the pipeline under the initiative, each at a different stage of construction or planning, as the city works toward its goal of 1,700 total units near the corridor. The Bellwether is the only one of the six currently renting apartments, with its leasing office signing up new tenants and 41 affordable-unit applications still being processed.