For more than a century, LaSalle Street has been a place where money grew. Today, something even more remarkable is growing. Lettuce. As well as arugula, basil, pea shoots, broccoli greens and more. Microgreens are so fresh they can go from harvest to your lunch in about an hour (farm to desk). And they're not coming on a truck from California. They're growing 18 floors above the streets of downtown Chicago.
Welcome to FARMZER0 at 30 N. LaSalle, founded by Russell Steinberg. It's one of those ideas that makes you stop and ask, "Why hasn't anyone done this before?" In a city with thousands of square feet of underused office space, FARMZER0 looked at empty floors and didn't see vacancy. They saw farmland.
Instead of cubicles, rows of vibrant greens and instead of another empty floor waiting for a tenant, a living ecosystem produces healthy food every single day.
From Office Building to Food Building
For decades, downtown office towers have been engines of commerce. FARMZER0 asks a wonderfully unexpected question: What if they also became engines of nutrition?
The concept is refreshingly simple. Grow food where people already live, work, eat and gather. Reduce food miles and less waste = increase food security. It’s all about delivering produce that's fresher because it never had to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get there.
An Amenity You Can Actually Eat
Every office building is searching for the next great amenity - fitness centers, lounges, the classic default golf simulator or coffee bar. FARMZER0 introduces something entirely different. Imagine living in a building where your salad is grown upstairs and office workers pick up greens harvested that morning. Imagine restaurants sourcing herbs from the same neighborhood where they're serving dinner and healthcare providers prescribe better nutrition with produce grown a few blocks away.
This isn't simply urban farming. It's infrastructure for healthier cities.
The Farm That Wants to Be Everywhere…And Support Everything
Most startups dream of becoming bigger. FARMZER0 dreams of becoming everywhere. The vision isn't one giant farm, it’s hundreds of smaller ones, inside office towers, mixed-use developments, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, hotels, convention centers and retail spaces. Every vacant floor becomes an opportunity. Every neighborhood becomes a little more self-sufficient. Every building becomes part of a healthier ecosystem.
Reimagining the Purpose of Downtown
There's another story quietly unfolding here. As cities rethink what office buildings should become, FARMZER0 offers one of the most imaginative answers yet. Not every empty floor needs to be another office. Some might become farms or food education classrooms or community food hubs. Some might simply reconnect people with where their food comes from.
It's adaptive reuse in its freshest form.
The Future Doesn't Always Look Like Science Fiction
The future looks like basil or smells like fresh greens when the elevator doors open. It's lunch. It’s food awareness, nutrition and health.
The first FARMZER0 at 30 N. LaSalle is proving something much larger than vertical farming. It's demonstrating that our cities already contain many of the spaces needed to solve tomorrow's challenges. We simply have to imagine them differently.
On LaSalle Street, the future isn't being built. It's being grown.
