500 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago
The 24-story tower will keep ground-floor retail while vacant offices become housing and a new rooftop level changes the building's original profile.
Watchlist Blog
500 North Michigan starts its second life as housing
Work has begun to turn a 1968 SOM office tower into 320 apartments, one of the Mag Mile's clearest responses to downtown office vacancy.
July 29, 2026
500 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago
Updated 2026
The conversion retains the modern tower and its retail base while rebuilding vacant upper floors for housing and adding a new rooftop amenity level.
The next chapter at 500 North Michigan Avenue will be residential. Construction began July 29 on a conversion of the 24-story office tower into 320 apartments while retail continues at street level.
The project puts adaptive reuse at the scale of a downtown high-rise. It keeps the 1968 SOM structure in service, but changes nearly every system and interior assumption that once made it an office building.
Read the tower and conversion record in 500 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago.
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The most important material in this conversion may be the office tower that does not enter the waste stream.
What Has Started
Skender is beginning full interior demolition of vacant office floors, elevator modernization, new building systems, and residential buildout. GREC Architects designed the conversion for Commonwealth Development Partners.
Apartments will occupy floors three through 23. A new 25th floor will add indoor and outdoor amenity space above the original roofline.
A Different Kind Of Downtown Preservation
The project does not depend on ornamental restoration. Its preservation value lies in continuing to use a 400,000-square-foot modern structure rather than replacing it.
That approach retains embodied material and a familiar Mag Mile massing, even as the interior program and roof change substantially.
What To Watch Next
Late 2027 is the stated completion target. Construction progress, leasing, retail continuity, and the relationship between this luxury project and the city's wider conversion policy need follow-up.
The larger test is whether downtown residential reuse becomes a durable mixed-income strategy or remains a series of high-end exceptions.