Honore, Peerless Buy Clybourn Corridor Shopping Center

A pair of developers planning a new apartment tower in Chicago’s Clybourn Corridor are expanding their presence in the neighborhood, scooping up a nearby shopping center to secure air rights for the project.

Honore Properties and Peerless Development paid $19.5 million for the Kingsbury Center shopping plaza at 1415–1435 North Kingsbury Street, the firms and brokerage Greenstone Partners told CoStar News. The deal gives the developers control of roughly 54,000 square feet of retail space — and, more importantly, the unused development rights tied to the 2.3-acre site.

The acquisition comes about a month after Chicago-based Honore and Elmhurst-based Peerless unveiled plans for a 28-story, 340-unit apartment tower at 1415 North Dayton Street, directly east of the retail center.

Honore’s George Shenouda told the publication that they approached the seller, Los Angeles-based Westwood Financial, just for the air rights needed to support the project, but Westwood opted to sell the entire property, providing “an opportunity to aggregate property in that area of Lincoln Park.”

About 80,000 square feet of development rights from the Kingsbury Center parcel would be transferred to the Dayton Street site if the apartment tower secures city approvals. The proposal is scheduled to go before the Chicago Plan Commission on March 19, a key step toward securing the zoning change required to replace a century-old four-story building on the site.

The shopping center itself is only lightly built compared to what zoning allows. The publication reported that the roughly 54,000-square-foot retail property occupies a fraction of the site’s estimated 500,000 square feet of allowable density, leaving room for a potential future vertical redevelopment.

In the meantime, the plaza remains fully leased to trampoline park operator Sky Zone and pet retailer PetSmart. Sky Zone backfilled a more than 35,000-square-foot space in 2023 after Buy Buy Baby closed ahead of parent company Bed Bath & Beyond’s bankruptcy filing, according to the outlet.

The new owners also locked in PetSmart with a five-year lease extension, helping stabilize the property’s income stream.

Greenstone Partners brokers Danny Spitz and AJ Patel represented the seller. Spitz said interest in the center was strong, but Honore and Peerless had an edge because of their desire to control the air rights tied to their nearby tower plan.

The developers’ are also active elsewhere in the neighborhood. Honore and Peerless are already finishing the conversion of a nearby loft office building at 811 West Evergreen Avenue into 49 apartments.— Eric Weilbacher