In the middle part of the decade, an unmistakable shift was underway in the local housing markets of many Chicago neighborhoods. Spurred on by what was an increasingly hot real estate market, developers were transforming what had long been rental buildings into condominiums at a furious clip.

Citywide data isn't immediately available, but the numbers the real estate intelligence firm Appraisal Research Counselors collected about the greater downtown area, from Old Town to the South Loop and including the West Loop, provide a snapshot of the trend. In 2004, 652 existing rentals in that area went condo, according to Appraisal vice president Gail Lissner. The next year 3,965 units in the same area were converted. It was the peak year for such projects, at least in the residential neighborhoods clustered around the Loop; over the following two years in the area, another 718 rentals were converted.

Rogers Park, a diverse and dense neighborhood on Chicago's Far North Side, also saw many buildings go from rental to condo. Although difficult to imagine now, there was a manic quality to the pace of conversions just a few years back. Brian White, the executive director of the Lakeside Community Development Corporation, an organization that works on affordable housing issues in Rogers Park, recalled that it was difficult to walk down a block in the neighborhood five years ago without seeing construction workers converting a building. When Lakeside released a "Community Housing Audit" in October 2006 to document the craze's impact on Rogers Park, developers were transforming 42 multi-unit rental buildings -- representing 918 residences -- into condominiums. The conversions, the report found, were putting the neighborhood out of reach for many families, especially those with low-incomes.

Today, with unemployment high and existing condo inventory glutted, there does not appear to be many -- if any -- condo conversion projects under way. Many developers, having overshot on building for-sale condos, are rediscovering their interest in rental, in fact. White didn't know of any recent conversion projects, and Appraisal's Lissner said no units in the greater downtown area had been converted in the last three years (developers are stil trying to sell units they built out in 2005, she said).

This reality makes the parts of the renters' right ordinance dealing with condo conversions that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley introduced into City Council on September 8 largely academic for now, literally years too late for the renters who were displaced.

The bill (PDF) increases the amount of time a property owner must give a renter whose unit is going condo, from four to nine months, and requires owners to pay a one-time relocation fee of $1,500 or one month's rent in assistance, whichever is higher, during a conversion.

Kathy Clark, the president of the Chicago-based Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing, said "it would have been wonderful" to have such language set in city code while the conversion boom was going gangbusters. During the bubble's peak, her organization regularly received calls from tenants getting evicted from their units without cause and with no notification during the conversion process. Other times, renters didn't get the right of first refusal for their unit, a stipulation that remains on the books. Clark served on the city's Condo Conversion Taskforce, whose deliberations between November 2007 and May 2009 and final report formed the basis for Daley's September 8 proposals.

White, who did not sit on the taskforce but nonetheless attended many of their meetings, praised the group for reaching a consensus (its members include housing advocates, developers, attorneys, aldermen, and city staff). He said that condo regulations are a patchwork of federal, state, and city rules and hard data about them can be difficult to find. But White also wished the new proposed stipulations had been in place sooner. "It was like the Wild West," he said of the peak conversion years. The aftermath hasn't always been pretty.

It wasn't just that the conversions resulted in unfair evictions of renters, though that certainly produced its share of heartache, hassle, lost time, and wasted money for renters. The conversion craze took a big bite out of the city's rental stock; the Lakeside audit calculated that Rogers Park lost more than 17 percent of its rentals between 2003 and October 2006, when the document was released. (Even the Daley administration acknowledged in its press release that condo development "sometimes displaced existing tenants who couldn’t afford to buy and depleted the City’s existing rental housing stock faster than it could be replaced.") Many buildings were redeveloped poorly given the lax regulations developers easily sliced through or ignored.

Other parts of the proposed new rules could have a more immediate impact. The language calls on the city to create a "Condominium Registration Program" for new and converted condos that will require developers to show buyers of a condo detailed information about the unit (and also requires developers to show they have provided existing tenants notice of a conversion).

For new and converted condos, the proposed rules require that developers give buyers a standardized and easy-to-understand summary of the physical condition of the building prior to purchase as well. Such requirements could help condo buyers avoid walking into a troubled building that needs extensive repairs, forcing unit owners to levy hefty special assessments to pay for them.

There are a lot of condo buildings around Chicago that are struggling -- some have hundreds of vacant units, others have been pummeled by foreclosures. White, from Lakeside, said going forward condos need to be part of an affordable housing strategy; such units are often the most affordable in any given neighborhood. "We have to figure out how to get condos right," he told Progress Illinois.

The new rules Daley proposed on September 8 appear to be one small step in that direction, even though it is clearly overdue. Of course, housing advocates are still waiting to see how the rules are implemented should the City Council put them into effect soon. Other well-intentioned bills passed by the body and signed into law have failed in the implementation phase. "We'll be watching this," promised Clark.