A 25-Story Tower With an Aldi Is Breaking Ground in the West Loop — and a New Church Is Rising on Adams Street
By Socialhood News · Near West Side ·
Near West Side neighbors, the week of September 11th delivered two concrete signs — literally — that your neighborhood's construction boom is still running hot heading into fall. A landmark mixed-use residential tower celebrated its groundbreaking in the West Loop, and a foundation permit landed for a brand-new worship space just blocks away on West Adams Street. Together, they add another layer to what is shaping up as one of the most active building seasons the Near West Side has seen in years.
The bigger headline is Julep West Loop. On September 11th, Urbanize Chicago's Lukas Kugler reported that the project at 1016 W. Jackson Boulevard celebrated its groundbreaking — a 25-story residential tower that will deliver 380 units to the neighborhood alongside a ground-floor Aldi grocery store. For Near West Side residents who have watched Fulton Market's restaurant and office boom proceed at a dizzying pace, Julep represents something equally important: a serious commitment to housing, at scale, with an everyday retail anchor that serves the people who actually live here rather than the people passing through for dinner reservations.
The pairing of a 380-unit residential tower with a full grocery store at the base is exactly the kind of mixed-use formula that urban planners and residents alike have been calling for across Chicago's booming west-side corridors. Aldi's presence at 1016 W. Jackson is particularly noteworthy: it fills a practical gap for the thousands of residents in the surrounding blocks who currently have to travel further for affordable, accessible grocery shopping. As the West Loop's residential population has grown alongside its office and restaurant density, the demand for everyday services has increasingly outpaced supply — and an Aldi anchoring a new 25-story building is a direct, meaningful response to that imbalance.
At 25 stories, Julep West Loop will also be among the taller residential structures to rise in this part of the neighborhood. The Jackson Boulevard address puts it squarely within the Near West Side's residential core, south of the Fulton Market dining corridor and west of the Loop's office towers — a location that gives future residents walkable access to both. No completion timeline was included in the initial groundbreaking report, but with a foundation now in the ground, the project moves from proposal to physical reality.
Separately, on September 14th, Urbanize Chicago reported that a foundation permit has been issued for City Church Chicago's new worship space at 1700 W. Adams Street — a block that sits in the heart of the Near West Side's residential grid, between the Illinois Medical District to the west and the UIC campus to the south. Foundation permits are a meaningful milestone in Chicago's construction pipeline: they signal that a project has cleared its design and permitting hurdles and is ready to put steel and concrete in the ground. For a neighborhood that has seen so much commercial and residential development in recent years, the arrival of a new community institution at 1700 W. Adams adds a different kind of anchor — one oriented around congregation, gathering, and neighborhood identity rather than square footage and lease rates.
City Church Chicago's new building joins a Near West Side development slate that already includes The 1901 Project's ongoing campus transformation near the United Center, the adaptive reuse project at 167 N. Morgan in Fulton Market, and a growing pipeline of residential mid-rises filling in the blocks between the Medical District and the West Loop. What this week's news underscores is that the neighborhood's momentum is broad: it spans market-rate housing, community-serving retail, and institutional investment, all moving forward simultaneously.
For residents keeping score, the practical implications are straightforward. Julep West Loop at 1016 W. Jackson means 380 new neighbors and an Aldi coming to a block that will look very different in a few years. City Church Chicago at 1700 W. Adams means a new community gathering space taking shape on a residential stretch of the neighborhood. Both projects are real, permitted, and under way — not renderings, not proposals, not community meetings. Groundbreakers and foundation permits mean shovels are in the dirt.
Keep following Socialhood as both projects move from foundation to frame to finished — your Near West Side is building fast, and we'll be here for every milestone.
Sources:
1. https://chicago.urbanize.city/
2. https://chicago.urbanize.city/neighborhood/near-west-side