Residential Project at Chicago’s $4B Lakeshore East Development Creates 250 Jobs

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Writer

Chicago—Lakeshore East, Magellan Development Group’s $4 billion mixed-use project presently sprouting up in Chicago, is playing a key role in the revival of the city’s jobs market. Development of the 28-acre neighborhood is responsible for the creation of more than 1,000 new jobs, and the Coast, the 499-unit apartment high-rise that recently broke ground, is the source of at least 250 of those new positions—so far.

McHugh Construction Co. is the general contractor for Coast and the originator of the 250 direct construction jobs required for bringing the 45-story tower to fruition. But those on-site workers comprise just a portion of the employees that are part of the construction process. “How many more indirect jobs attributable to manufacturing all of the building materials, including the glass, flooring, electrical system, plumbing components and all the other pieces that make up a skyscraper like Coast is not a number that’s easy to pin down,” Joel M. Carlins, co-CEO of Magellan, declared in a prepared statement.

The availability of construction jobs—or any jobs for that matter—in Chicago took a nosedive along with the rest of the country as the housing market imploded, the credit crunch took hold and the recession hit. Employment growth in the Windy City dropped to a low of -5.2 percent in 2009, according to a report by multifamily advisory and research firm Hendricks & Partners Inc. And while conditions have since gone on an upswing—metropolitan Chicago had experienced a year-over-year gain of 0.4 percent in overall employment by the close of June—job opportunities are still sorely lacking.

Once again, Magellan’s Coast will come to the rescue. “You add the domino effect of all the scores of people involved in the manufacturing, sales and distribution of  the furniture, kitchen appliances and accessories going into those 499 residences and I have to think that runs in to the hundreds of ‘collateral’ jobs,” Carlins noted. And there will be even more. Upon completion of the project in 2013, additional jobs will become available with the opening of the apartment skyscraper’s 18,000 square feet of retail space and 272-car parking facility.