How much would it cost to move the last 2-3 stops on that Metra Electric branch into that area, perhaps cut-and-cover it under S. Lake Shore Drive south of 79th so that the entire South Works site was within 1/2 mile of a station, then run it express north of 71st with stops only at 55th and 18th Street until the Loop. They could start with runs every 30 minutes with an eye toward increasing it to as often as every 10 minutes as population grew. Two stops - 83rd and 87th - would move about 1/2 mile east, but if it curved back to near the existing 93rd terminal, there would only be two stations negatively affected while dramatically increasing access to the Loop and Hyde Park for the South Works site. The trip is currently about 33 minutes to VanBuren from 87th. If you got that trip time to 25 minutes and it was available every 20-30 minutes for 19 hours per day, you'd have a viable place. Make sure that area is safe, and relatively inexpensive new construction sited on the lakefront with reliable, consistent access to Hyde Park and downtown would really create a good value proposition. Add a Skyway exit at 94th/Harbor Drive and you'd also have excellent expressway access (even if it is a tollway). That would easily support Edgewater densities with similar amenities and similar access to the greater Loop area. I know that that piece of S Lake Shore drive is brand new so it would be kind of a waste to tear it up now, but it's also still lightly-used, so the inconvenience and related costs of cut-and-covering it now would be less than doing that later. You could also not cut-and-cover it and just lay tracks, but in the long run, for future dense development in South Works, cut-and-covering it in the center of that roadway would be best. There'd be about a mile of cut-and-cover so doing that would probably not cost much more than what is being spent on the 95th Red Line station rebuild. Almost certainly could be done for less than half a billion. That's a big investment, but if it really opened up development of South Works, it would likely pay off in the long run.
If in 40 years we had 30,000 new housing units (for a target density of 60,000 people per square mile), and, say, 5 million square feet of commercial space in that area that would be on the order of 30 million square feet of new construction. If property taxes were around $2 per square foot, that's an extra $60 million in new annual property taxes for an area that currently generates close to zero. And there'd also be new sales tax revenue and fees revenue, and there would definitely be spill-over value enhancement to the west and north, further adding value. We'd probably be looking at $100 million in new tax revenue in that area per year, meaning that if it took 40 years to get to that level, it'd still be close to $2 billion in new tax revenue in 2016 dollars from making those investments over a 50 year time span.
Hyde Park, Kenmore and Douglas would also be big winners because they'd be midway between the Loop and a new jobs center, further enhancing the South Lakefront overall. It would benefit everything east of 94 within city limits. If it worked, you might even get Amtrak to add a flag stop at 95th. The last three stations on the ME-South Chicago branch have about 700 AM daily boardings (
about 100 of whom walk to the stations), with over 500 of those riders at 93rd, which would keep its current location. So fewer than about 100 riders per day would be inconvenienced by moving two ME stations 1/2 mile east to the South Works site - only about 122 of whom are walkers, and there would be, in the long run, probably the addition of thousands of new riders.
On UP North, there are nearly 3,400 daily riders on the UP-North line. I would think the two South Works stations could achieve that target and probably exceed it. If the two moved ones eventually reached a total of 4,000 daily riders, and 93rd increased from ~550 to 1,700, that stretch of ME would be serving nearly 5,000 new daily riders, plus the increased frequency would likely bump up ridership on the other stations it served. I think it wouldn't irrational to think that there would be 10,000 additional daily riders on that branch by the time South Works was built out if those changes were made, about $20 million per year in additional ticket sales (round-trip) for Metra. If that were operated under the CTA flag, ticket sales dollars might be lower, but it could become the actual "Gray Line".