Planned Development summaries make it easy to know what's allowed

Chicago has more than 1,500 Planned Developments on the books — each one a bespoke zoning agreement governing height limits, permitted uses, parking requirements, and dozens of other standards for a specific site. Finding out what's in any given PD meant hunting down the ordinance PDF from the City of Chicago, sometimes hundreds of pages long, and reading through boilerplate to find the numbers that matter.

We've changed that. Chicago Cityscape now shows key provisions from Planned Development ordinances and surface them wherever you're researching properties.

What is shown

For each PD we've processed, we compile information about:

• Maximum building height and floor area ratio (FAR)
• Maximum lot coverage and required setbacks
• Parking and open space requirements
• Permitted and prohibited uses
• Site area, effective date, and amendment history (for changes made after March 2026)
• Affordable housing and ARO requirements
• Special conditions — including bonus payment amounts tied to additional FAR or height, like in the Neighborhood Opportunity Bonus

You can see this in a sample Place Report, for PD 50, which is the Illinois Masonic Hospital in Lakeview.

Three ways to find this information

Property Report. When you look up an address inside a Planned Development, the PD summary appears in the Zoning Assessment under a “key provisions” expandable section.

Place Report. Each PD generates its own Place Report, which will show the summary in the “More info” section.

Places Explorer. We added a filter specifically for PDs with summaries, so you can browse all of them in one place and open the Place Report for any PD that interests you.

These automated summaries provide a quick overview, not a legal interpretation. Always verify the numbers in the original document before relying on them for a project decision. Each summary links directly to the official City of Chicago PDF.