Making green rent gaps: Housing price impacts of the 606/Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago

Urban greening initiatives present a paradox: they often improve environmental quality and public amenities intensifying real estate speculation and displacement pressures. This study examines these dynamics through Chicago's 606 Trail (Bloomingdale Trail), a 2.7-mile elevated park opened in 2015. We conceptualize and empirically measure a policy–market temporal mismatch: the gap between rapid housing market responses to infrastructure investment signals and the timing of municipal housing preservation measures. Using residential property transactions from 2009 to 2024, we estimate hedonic price models with spatial econometric specifications across eight project phases and five distance buffers extending 1.5 miles from the trail. Results show that a statistically significant proximity premium emerged during the 2011–2013 recommitment-to-construction period, when the project returned to active development and full funding was secured, well before construction or opening, and persisted long after completion. In the immediate post-opening period, properties within 0.25 miles sold for 29% more than comparable properties 1–1.5 miles away. Although Chicago aldermen attempted a demolition-fee ordinance in 2017, the first enacted housing preservation measure — a demolition moratorium covering the trail area — was not adopted until 2020, nine years after the initial market response. We argue that such temporal mismatches reflect structural constraints on the speed of municipal protective action under prevailing urban governance arrangements, including informational asymmetries that allow markets to capitalize anticipated amenities immediately, institutional configurations in which constructing new protective arrangements takes longer than executing development transactions, and political economy dynamics in which pro-growth coalitions mobilize more rapidly than housing preservation coalitions.