The city of Chicago is comprised of close to 500,000 buildings. Filled with many historic and influential structures, Chicago is a mecca for architectural historians and enthusiasts. In April, the city adopted a new series of building codes which will allow for better building reuse and preservation solutions. 

Beth Mattson-Teig of Urban Land explains: "The new Chicago Building Rehabilitation Code, based on the International Existing Building Code, will provide tailored requirements for different scopes of work in existing buildings, replacing the 'one-size-fits-all' approach of the current rehab code with a more flexible framework of requirements that are designed to work for a wide range of projects. For complex projects, the new rehabilitation code will offer a point-based system to evaluate various approaches to ensuring that a project will provide adequate life-safety protection for occupants. It will also provide greater clarity on alternatives available to historically significant buildings."

With much of Chicago's infrastructure built before 1945, the need to restore and repair these buildings were difficult to implement and costly because of an outdated city building code initiated in 1983. Mattson-Teig explains that building codes for any city are difficult to change and without cooperation from city government: "Changing building code specific to building reuse and rehab was an easy piece to carve out and put on the back burner for later." However, with this new partnership, protecting the city's infrastructure and stock of older buildings can be further investigated.