Church rectory converted to nine homes
A permit was just issued to turn St. Matthias’s rectory in Chicago into nine residential units, which is a tidy example of small‑scale adaptive reuse that can add housing without erasing historic buildings (x.com). That’s useful if you’re curious about converting underused structures: the project shows a path from religious‑use vacancy to multiple rental or ownership units through permitting and design (x.com).
A church rectory in Chicago just cleared one of the last practical hurdles before becoming housing: the city issued a permit to convert the St. Matthias rectory at 2310 West Ainslie Street into 9 dwelling units, with a new sprinkler system, a 5-car parking slab, and a trash enclosure. That sounds small until you picture the building type. A rectory is the house where priests lived next to a church, so one underused structure can become several apartments without tearing down the whole block and starting from zero. This site has been debated for years because the first public version in September 2022 paired the rectory conversion with a new 8-unit building next door, for 17 apartments total. That plan ran into neighborhood opposition and was rejected by Alderman Andre Vasquez in November 2022. The developer came back in 2023 with a different trade. Instead of an 8-unit apartment building on the open land, the revised plan kept the rectory and added 5 townhouses, while the rectory itself was redesigned for 12 apartments. Chicago City Council approved that revised development in June 2023, which meant the politics and zoning were largely settled. The permit now in hand is different from that vote: it is the document that lets actual construction move forward under the building code. The interesting wrinkle is the unit count. Public coverage of the 2023 approval described 12 apartments in the rectory, but the permit record now describes a change of occupancy to 9 dwelling units, which suggests the built version was revised again between entitlement and permit. That kind of change is normal in real estate because zoning approval is the sketch and permit drawings are the final measurements. Bedrooms move, stair layouts tighten, fire-safety requirements bite, and a plan that worked on paper as 12 units can come back from code review as 9. The St. Matthias case also shows why adaptive reuse keeps coming up in Chicago housing fights. In February 2023, one fallback option discussed for the site was demolishing the rectory and replacing it with 5 single-family homes, which would have produced fewer homes and erased the older building. By October 2024, the 40th Ward office said feedback on a related zoning change at 2310 West Ainslie was “overwhelmingly positive,” with neighbors specifically citing demand for more homes and support for reusing the rectory. That is a very different political ending from the one the project hit in 2022. So the real story here is not a giant tower or a splashy megaproject. It is one 1916 rectory, one Chicago permit, and 9 homes created by changing the use of a building that was already standing, which is often how housing supply grows in neighborhoods that say they want more homes but not a blank-slate redevelopment.
