Good news. Another block of affordable housing in Oak Lawn has been demolished.
In its place will be denser housing with smaller apartments that open out into a multi-story parking garage. One of the nice things about these identical Soviet-style apartment blocks is the car fumes that blow directly into the units from the interior garages. The per unit price of these imaginatively uniform apartments is expected to be three to four times the cost of the apartments they replace.
Traffic? No problem. During construction, streets are being randomly blocked. Maple Avenue is down to one lane in each direction today (May 16). Throckmorton Street is covered in dirt and Brown Street is torn up. Sidewalks are closed surrounding the construction site. Once the apartments open and fill, no provision for the additional cars has been made on surrounding streets — Throckmorton, Brown, Fairmount and Reagan.