Neighborhoods · North Side
Why people love it
A university anchoring the corner, which means a rental population that renews itself every September whatever the market does.
What's drawing people
The Fullerton stop puts you on the Red, Brown and Purple Lines at once, which almost nowhere else in the city does.
The value
Vacancy risk close to zero. You trade upside for reliability, and for some owners that is the right trade.
What people say about DePaul
DePaul is the part of Lincoln Park where the tenant demand does not depend on the economy. It depends on enrollment, and enrollment does not fall by 20% in a bad quarter.
The neighborhood wraps the university's Lincoln Park campus, roughly Fullerton to Armitage between Halsted and Racine. The housing is a mix of greystones, frame two-flats and three-flats, and newer condo infill, much of it carved into rental units decades ago and never converted back.
The Fullerton station is the practical draw. It serves the Red, Brown and Purple Lines from one platform, which is a combination almost no other stop in the city offers, and it is why tenants here tolerate paying Lincoln Park rents for older units.
For an owner, the appeal is boring and real: the units fill. September demand is structural rather than cyclical, leases turn over on a predictable calendar, and you are rarely showing a unit in February. The trade is that student tenants are harder on a building than the alternative, so your maintenance reserve should be larger than the spreadsheet suggests.
On price, DePaul trades with the rest of Lincoln Park, where the two-to-four unit median ran about $1,370,000 in 2025 and the overall home value index was $690,301 as of June 2026, up 8.3%.
What I tell people looking here: do not buy this expecting appreciation to carry you. Lincoln Park two-flats have appreciated about 51% since 2013, which is real but is the slowest on the North Side. Buy it if you want an asset that rents itself in a soft year, and be honest that you are paying for that.
Last updated August 2026.
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