1418 North Lake Shore goes smoke-free

1418 N Lake Shore Dr, ChicagoIf you want to light up, don’t do it at 1418 North Lake Shore. Owners at the 28-unit Gold Coast high-rise recently banned cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and all other smokable stuff from its common areas and residences, making it the state’s first smoke-free condo building.

According to a press release about the ban, the resale value of a unit in a smoke-free building typically is higher than in a building that allows smoking. Bans can also lower the cost of living in a building by reducing cleaning and painting costs and lowering the risk of fire.

The ban also “complies with the Environmental Tobacco Smoke Control,” which is a pre-requisite for LEED certification. Whether that means 1418 is pursuing certification itself is anyone’s guess — the release doesn’t say, so this could be mere trivia for all I know — but it’ll be interesting to see if other high-rises follow suit to meet LEED requirements. And if so, will a few respond by promoting themselves as smoker-friendly havens?

Just two of the tower’s full-floor, three-bedroom condos are for sale:

  • Unit #3, listed by Pamela Sage of Baird & Warner, is priced at $1.44 million, with monthly assessments of $2,350 and 2008 taxes of $16,176, and has been on the market for a little over six weeks.
  • Unit #27, listed by Joan Lieb of Prudential Rubloff, has been on the market since May 2007, and has seen only one price change in that time, dropping from $2.49 million to $2.2 million last December. Assessments are $2,664 a month, and taxes are $20,977.

Two similar homes sold in the building for $1.37 million and $1.4 million earlier this year.


View Larger Map

(Visited 277 times, 1 visits today)