The Northern Illinois Transit Authority, the umbrella agency created to oversee the CTA, Metra and Pace, holds sweeping new powers to buy and develop land near transit that its predecessor, the Regional Transportation Authority, never had — authority experts say goes beyond virtually any other transit agency in the country, according to a Chicago Sun-Times report.
When lawmakers passed the NITA Act nearly a year ago, most attention went to the agency’s control over fares, construction projects and rail and bus service. Tucked inside the thousand-page-plus law, however, was a grant of power over transit-oriented development, the practice of building on underused land near transit to boost ridership and make those areas more desirable places to walk, live, work and shop.
For years, transit agencies in other major American cities have had such powers. Washington’s Metro has built 10,800 new homes near its stations in the last five years, Los Angeles Metro is working to build 10,000 homes on agency-owned land in the next five years, and Bay Area Rapid Transit has built more than 4,200 homes near transit. The NITA Act catches Chicago up to its peers, but goes further by granting power to buy and develop land for reasons unrelated to transit, said Yonah Freemark, an expert on transit-oriented development at the Urban Institute.
“There are some provisions that give NITA substantial power for undertaking transit-oriented development projects itself that virtually no other transit agency across the country has,” Freemark said. “This could be a potentially massive change.”
Under the law, NITA can undertake public-private partnerships called joint developments, take on debt, offer incentives for developers, and condemn land so long as it has a municipality’s approval. Agency officials say they are committed to using the new authority, but acknowledge the challenges: the agency must still create its own development office, and high loan and construction costs make any project difficult to pencil in the current environment.
NITA’s division manager for local planning, Heather Mullins, said the agency has identified roughly 3,000 underused parcels owned by transit agencies, 91 of them ripe for development — mostly in the suburbs — enough land near transit to build about 8,500 homes. Under the law, NITA must inventory all underused transit-owned parcels and publish the list by June 2027. The agency is hiring a manager for a development department that will have about 10 employees.
The potential benefits are significant for a region trying to revive transit ridership and its tax base. Households near transit can save up to $10,000 a year in transportation costs, according to the Metropolitan Planning Council, and transit-oriented development increases access to jobs, especially for low-income families, while raising home values and retail sales near stations.
The city of Chicago has been encouraging development near transit since 2013, when the City Council removed some parking minimums for new buildings near train stations, and bolstered it again in 2021 with an equitable transit-oriented development policy designed to prevent displacement of low-income residents. More than 100 such projects are underway on city-owned land, according to a report from the nonprofit Elevated Chicago, whose leader Juan Sebastian Arias called NITA’s powers a huge opportunity to partner with municipalities that have their own vacant land near stations.
For commercial real estate players, the prospect of NITA-led joint development opens a new class of deals around stations across the six-county region, particularly suburban parcels that have sat idle for decades. Development advocates caution that the agency will need years to stand up capacity, and that early projects will set the template for how the authority balances housing goals with revenue needs.
Either way, the legislation marks one of the most consequential changes to regional development policy in a generation, potentially reshaping land use around hundreds of stations in Chicago and its suburbs.
