Tag Archives: downtown

Suburb without a traditional downtown to replace shopping mall with mixed-use development

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A Chicago area suburb with a dying shopping mall and no traditional downtown hopes to convert the mall into a thriving mixed-use space:

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Golf Mill Shopping Center opened in 1960 as an open-air mall. Later, it was enclosed, and the iconic Mill Run Playhouse was built on the grounds. The theater, before it closed in 1984, hosted acts such as Chicago native Shecky Greene and Frank Sinatra.

Today, the mall has more than 1 million square feet of leasable space in addition to a nine-story office tower. Target and JCPenney are two of its biggest anchors, alongside AMC Theatres, Ulta, Burlington and Ross…

Alpogianis and other city officials see the future of the 80-acre site as “live, work, play” — an increasingly popular phrase for mixed-use developments that have virtually everything a resident could need on site. The Golf Mill Shopping Center redevelopment — to be called Golf Mill Town Center — will aim to be one of Niles’ premier destinations in the absence of a traditional downtown.

The first phase of redevelopment will include an overhaul of the mall’s retail, along with new luxury apartments and restaurants, Alpogianis said.

He said the project will be 70% retail and entertainment and 30% residential and other uses — the latter of which includes the “very good” possibility of a hotel and office, depending on market conditions.

The shopping mall redevelopment described here is common these days: add housing, restaurants, and different retail options to what was a mall with declining activity and revenue. The goal is more of a 24 hour a day place where a combination of residential, commercial, and recreational activity makes it more like a lively neighborhood.

What struck me here was the idea that such a redevelopment could help address a different issue in the suburb: no traditional downtown. In the Chicago area, such a downtown would typically be located along a railroad line connecting suburbs to downtown. Niles is more of in-between two railroad lines and the community had a small population until a population explosion in the 1950s (over 400% growth).

While the shopping mall is often viewed as a postwar substitute for public space, could all of these mall redevelopments lead to new suburban downtowns? The mixed-use developments are often intended to be more walkable, at least to the new residents who live there, and provide social spaces. Whether this actually happens is another matter; will the redeveloped malls be connected to a larger walkable grid in suburbia? Will people still need to drive to the redevelopment? Once people are living on site, how many will regularly make use of the nearby amenities as opposed to driving elsewhere?

The shopping mall may come and go in many suburbs but the quest for something like a downtown may continue.

Baseball stadiums in relation to downtowns

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The Chicago White Sox have had recent talks about the possibility of a new stadium closer to Chicago’s downtown. This would move them closer to the Loop and downtown activity. How does this compare to other baseball teams?

According to this map, most stadiums are pretty close to downtown. Some are further away – Texas, Kansas City – while others are close to ten miles away but still in the city (both New York teams).

My suspicion – without looking hard at the data – it that this may not be true of all of the major sports leagues in the United States. Baseball stadiums are often close to downtown but this may not hold across other sports. At least a few NFL stadiums are in the suburbs.

Do cities believe baseball stadiums are economic engines? Do teams closer to downtowns draw more fans? Do team owners see locations closer to downtown as more desirable, particularly with the trend to make money on developing land around the stadium?

Casinos in the Chicago suburbs did little to improve downtowns

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The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board suggests casinos that opened several decades ago in multiple suburban downtowns did not help revive the areas:

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Remarkably, Aurora was on board, with city officials calling the new plan “one of the most significant developments in the history of Aurora,” which is exactly what they said when the riverboats came to downtown and were compared by the then-mayor to the coming of the railroads. Penn Entertainment also announced a similar plan for the casino in downtown Joliet, which it also owns.

Better, it said, for the casinos to be near the expressway for easier access. But what about the promises made to downtown Aurora and Joliet?…

Illinois casinos, it seems, have become like NFL franchises, supremely skilled at lobbying and dangling the promise of revenue to cash-strapped cities but on their own ever-changing terms.

Was the Hollywood Casino good for downtown Aurora? It’s debatable. The charming riverwalk got finished and area landscaping improved. The Paramount Theatre came back to life, but on its own merits. And on a recent Sunday night, those new restaurants in downtown Aurora were either closed or mostly empty. The action, it felt, had shifted elsewhere.

Numerous suburban downtowns have struggled for decades as activity moved outward to new neighborhoods and communities plus shopping malls and strip malls. Thus, when an opportunity presents itself, like a casino, many communities would be interested. A new attraction or business or development could help attract visitors, residents, and firms while bringing in new revenues.

Except building thriving downtowns in the suburbs is complicated. The suburban communities highlighted in this editorial are unique industrial suburbs outside of Chicago. Firms and jobs left. Suburban sprawl continued. The riverfront is still there. Other suburban downtowns thrived like Naperville or Arlington Heights, both of which are different kinds of suburbs.

While this is a tale about specific developments, it sounds like a generic development pattern: developer and/or company comes in with grand plans, community agrees to help make it happen, the developed property enriches the property owners, and if another location emerges where more money can be made, the development might move.

As the casino moves from downtown Aurora, what plans does the large suburb have to grow its downtown? What is the new attraction or set of steps to keep the downtown going?

Can a successful suburb have a thriving downtown and a stadium-driven mixed-use district?

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With the Chicago Bears considering building in Arlington Heights, one village trustee expressed concerns that a sizable project would compete with the suburb’s successful downtown:

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But, he said, “I’m going to tell you right now I’m not a fan of the site plan. And I hope this doesn’t blow up and ruin things for you in any way because I’m just one person sitting up here. But I have to be true to myself and true to my thoughts.”

Tinaglia, who founded his Tinaglia Architects firm in Arlington Heights in 1991, blasted the mixed-use transit-oriented development aspect of the Bears’ proposal, arguing the plans for restaurants, stores, offices, hotels, homes and more on 206 acres of the 326-acre property would detract from what is in downtown Arlington Heights.

“For a community that doesn’t have a downtown — that doesn’t have what Arlington Heights already has — that community would die to have this,” Tinaglia said. But he said he didn’t believe Arlington Heights’ current business owners could survive the competition from the kind of development being proposed.

Just how many entertainment centers can exist in the suburbs, let alone in one community?

Many suburbs would like to have a thriving downtown. Arlington Heights has one. It boosts the status of the community with its older buildings, current businesses bringing in residents and visitors, and possibly residents living downtown and also visiting local businesses and restaurants. Not all suburbs have downtowns; some never had them due to consisting of multiple suburban subdivisions joined together while others may have had a downtown that is now struggling or non-existent. The suburban downtown has had numerous challenges over the years – strip malls, shopping malls, driving and parking, big box stores, and more – so having a successful one is not something a suburb would lightly give up.

On the other hand, not every suburb has an opportunity to be home to a major sports stadium and all of the development around it. This is a new opportunity that could be worth a lot in terms of business activity and tax revenue, population growth, and status tied to being the home of an important football franchise.

It will be interesting to see if there is a compromise to be had here where both a downtown and a new mixed-use development coexist. Do they have to be in competition or can they serve different audiences?

Downtown activity in American and Canadian big cities before and after COVID-19

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A new report looks at recent activity in the downtowns of American and Canadian cities compared to that of several years ago:

Activity is down quite a bit in multiple major cities.

Officials in Cleveland do not think the national study, based on cell phone data, quite lines up with what they see in their city:

City officials and the Downtown Cleveland Alliance say the U.C. Berkeley study doesn’t provide an accurate accounting. The “downtown area” in the study doesn’t match what Cleveland locals would describe as their downtown, according to maps shared with cleveland.com.

Data that the DCA publishes each month is less grim, but also doesn’t point to a full recovery.

DCA’s recovery report said there were 4.01 million visits to downtown in May, a 71% recovery compared to May 2019. Visits improved to 4.14 million in June, a 77% recovery, according to the DCA.

There is the matter of measuring this well and the matter of interpreting and using the data for particular purposes. If the consensus of researchers is that downtown activity is down in many places, what policy, economic, and social implications would this have?

Are American cities in trouble or are we focusing too much on the business core of cities?

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Recent data suggests the biggest American cities are facing several issues, including population loss. I wonder if the bigger issue is too much focus on the business and downtown core:

They are all among the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the country. All of their populations were growing in 2011. And then, in 2021, they all shrank by a combined 900,000 people, according to an analysis of census data by the Brookings scholar William Frey. That’s an urban exodus nearly the size of two Wyomings.

The great metro shrinkage is part of a larger demographic story. Last year, the U.S. growth rate fell to a record low. The major drivers of population—migration and births—declined, while deaths soared in the pandemic. But America’s largest cities are getting the worst of this national trend. In the past three years, the net number of moves out of Manhattan has increased tenfold. In every urban county within the metros of New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, immigration declined by at least 50 percent from 2018 to 2021. In downtown Detroit and Long Island, deaths actually exceeded births last year.

The great metro shrinkage also appears to be part of a broader cultural story: The rise of remote work has snipped the tether between home and office, allowing many white-collar workers to move out of high-cost cities. Nearly 5 million Americans have moved since 2020 because of remote-work opportunities, according to Adam Ozimek, the chief economist for the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank in Washington, D.C…

So what might this period of urban struggle look like? Just check out what’s happening now. Mass-transit ridership has collapsed from its pre-pandemic highs in New York, Boston, the Bay Area, and Washington, D.C. Although restaurant bookings and travel have bounced back almost entirely, office occupancy remains 50 percent below its 2019 levels. In San Francisco, vacant office space has nearly quadrupled since the pandemic to 18.7 million square feet. In New York, Mayor Eric Adams has practically begged white-collar workers to return to Midtown, even as those workers patronize businesses in more residential parts of the city, closer to where they live. America’s downtown areas support millions of jobs that can’t be made remote—in retail, construction, health care, and beyond. But for millions of white-collar workers, something important has changed: They don’t work “in” cities anymore. They work on the internet. The city is just where they go for fun.

The overall numbers are what they are. Yet, the emphasis in this piece and in others I have read are about a downtown core that COVID-19 weakened. What if American cities no longer need a dense downtown core in the same way? With more work from home, less demand for downtown office space and more interest in downtown residential space, and the ways cars and mass transit allow workers to live in different places from their workplaces, how much focus should be placed on struggling cores?

This could be a larger existential issue about American cities. In the 1990s, a group of scholars in Los Angeles wrote about a new Los Angeles School of urbanism built around the unique features of the LA region. This includes a decreased emphasis on a downtown core and more sprawl and fragmentation across the region. In contrast, Chicago and New York and many other American cities stand as the established alternative: an important business core in response to which all other city activity is oriented.

So is the problem really cities are in big trouble or that the model of an ultra-dense center with all that comes with it is breaking a bit? This could be a huge change for certain places – particularly parts of Manhattan, downtown San Francisco – but there would also be opportunities throughout cities if development and business and residential activity could be more spread out. Indeed, the picture attached to the story says a lot about this:

This picture is taken from the vantage point of a sizable property just south of Chicago’s Loop. Why is it not developed? If the core did not have to be as dense, could this significant property be better woven into the fabric of the city?

More broadly, observers can think about complete cities and complete regions in addition to changes or issues facing the downtown. If activity is moving elsewhere, what does this mean and how might it improve life elsewhere?

What suburbs want when they say they want a second downtown

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After reading several recent stories about suburbs desiring or planning a second downtown, I wanted to summarize what exactly they mean by a “second downtown.” Here are a few of the patterns at work:

1. Downtown in this case tends to imply a sort of walkable, cozy, family-oriented place full of small businesses and eateries. There is an atmosphere invoked here that is the opposite of shopping malls surrounded by parking lots or mile after mile of strip malls. Still, since this is the second downtown and likely to be located some distance away from an original and/or historic downtown, this new downtown will not look like the old downtown.

2. This second downtown location is intended to be a center of commerce, and, perhaps more importantly, a second major center of revenue for the community. This goes beyond just property taxes as the suburb often desires sales tax revenue.

3. Simply creating a second downtown and all that implies is not easy. A typical formula is a sort of walkable outdoor shopping area where someone could park in one location and then walk among stores and other interesting places. A fuller vision might include mixed uses where new enterprises and new residences help create a kind of neighborhood synergy. A second downtown is often very intentionally planned though not easy to pull off.

4. The location of an intentional second downtown is less likely to be in the middle of a suburb – the suburb can often grow around an original downtown – and more likely to be located at the intersection of several major roads. This may be good for access and trying to divert heavy flows of traffic but it may not be conducive to promoting walkability and a more permeable membrane with nearby residential areas.

Perhaps the planned second downtown in a suburb can work but it is not an easy space to develop.

Strategies for renovating old downtown office buildings to compete with new towers

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Pressure on office and residential space in Chicago’s Loop is coming from multiple angles, including the need for older buildings to adapt to modern office requirements:

Kamin said he expects more office buildings to find a second life as hotels or residential towers. “I don’t think there’s a successful path for some of these functionally obsolete buildings as offices,” Kamin said…

The high cost just to acquire a property presents relatively few opportunities for major overhauls, said developer Craig Golden of Blue Star Properties…

The venture took out a nearly $100 million construction loan in 2016, and converted the 20-story building into modern offices, branded as The National — a reference to the property’s 1907 opening as the home of Commercial National Bank.

The developers added the type of distinguishing feature that has helped properties thrive in recent years, creating the sprawling Revival Food Hall on the ground floor. The food hall brings in lunch crowds from throughout downtown, adding to the building’s vibrancy. Office tenants include co-working firm WeWork and the headquarters of Paper Source.

I have heard that it is often cheaper for companies to build a new big box store than to reuse and/or renovate one built by another company. Thus, problems with vacancies when companies close locations. Could the same be true for downtown office buildings – the cost of renovation is too high? I find this a little hard to believe given the difficult process that can ensue in order to construct a sizable building in a major city.

Similarly, the strategy of adding enticing dining options echoes what is happening with shopping malls expanding beyond retail to dining, residences, hotels, and a variety of entertainment establishments. The goal is to both promote multiple uses but also cross-traffic between organizations and business as people need to work, eat, enjoy life, and sleep.

Perhaps we will know there is really a problem when multiple older structures are torn down to make way for new buildings.

Not so fast: turning suburbs into cities

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One way to revive America’s cities may be to adapt to increasing densities in Americans suburbs:

But this analysis also misses something important. These trends don’t just represent people’s moving decisions — they also represent changes in the places themselves. If enough people move to a low-density area, it becomes a high-density area.

People are pouring into Dallas and San Diego. So unless those cities continue to sprawl ever farther out across the countryside, the new arrivals will increase density. People will want to live close to their jobs instead of enduring hour-long commutes. Apartment blocks will spring up where once-empty fields or single-family homes stood. Today’s fast-growing suburb is tomorrow’s urban area.

In other words, the great urban revival might not be ending, it might just be relocating. Instead of piling into existing cores, Americans might simply be creating new ones across the country. And if each of these new cities creates the productivity advantages enjoyed by places like San Francisco and New York City, this could be a good thing for the economy.

This is an intriguing concept: some suburbs, because of their popularity, willingness to build taller structures, and population size, might become like cities. This has already happened to some degree in a number of suburbs across the country.

Yet, just because a location has a certain number of people or reaches certain population densities does not necessarily mean that it feels or operates like a city. We also already have some denser urban areas – see the Los Angeles suburbs which are pretty dense compared to many metropolitan areas – but that does not automatically make them cities or urban. What is required? Most American cities have: a core or multiple cores that are multi-use and include a good number of businesses or offices; a walkability that extends for a good distance (beyond just a suburban downtown or large shopping center) and mass transit options to extend beyond the core(s) – in other words, good options beyond operating a car; a vibrancy and diversity that could range from thriving economic activity to restaurants and bars to filled public spaces; and an identity among residents and others that the area is a city.

Imagine Naperville, Illinois really wanted to become a city. It starts approving dense residential and commercial projects throughout the community. (Just to note: the local government has rejected these in the past.) The population ticks upward past 200,000 or even 300,000. There are still some pockets of single-family homes and vestiges of small-town life. How long would it take for the conditions of a city as discussed above arise? How would the community adapt to having so many businesses along I-88 rather than downtown? Would this limit the number of people who ride into Chicago on the Metra each day? (Naperville right now has the busiest stops in the whole system.) How would a city atmosphere develop? This all would take significant time and effort and perhaps decades before Naperville would be considered from both the inside and outside a city.

Chicago suburbs fight over new downtown development

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New developments in suburban downtowns can bring praise and dissent as leaders and residents pursue different goals:

From northwest suburban Barrington to Clarendon Hills in DuPage County, a recent mini-boom in post-recession construction projects has sparked bitter battles over historic preservation and building heights and, in one case, a lawsuit by residents who claim a condominium project was illegally approved and would destroy their hometown’s quiet charms.

The stakes can be so high for community leaders that, in north suburban Highwood, officials have offered a local bocce club the chance to move into a new, $4 million facility in order to make way for a proposed five-story development. Yet where local leaders sometimes see a chance to revitalize aging commercial districts and bring in more tax revenue, existing residents and businesses often worry about what such changes will bring.

“It’s all a balancing act. How do you maintain the vibrancy of a downtown business district for the segment of the community that is clamoring for that, without destroying its history and everything that makes it a quaint village,” said Jason Lohmeyer, a recently elected Barrington village trustee…

Rachel Weber, an urban planning and policy associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the conflicts that frequently erupt between pro- and anti-development factions pit residents fearful of any dramatic changes to their hometown against those who view new development as essential to a healthy local economy.

I have found similar stories in my own research on suburbs. Community leaders often want a vibrant downtown: it can bring in more tax revenue (increased sales taxes, more money through property taxes if the land is improved) and avoid a languishing or sleepy downtown (a black mark) while replacing it with a lively place that draws in visitors and boosts the community’s image. Improving the downtown might become particularly important as a suburb grows in size or if it runs out of open space. Residents may want some of these things as well (lower taxes are good, lively shopping entertainment and cultural options nearby might be desirable) but can often resist development that is out of scale or challenges the quaint look of the downtown. Some of this is hyperbole – one resident in this story claims a three-story condo building is a “skyscraper” – yet residents worry that the suburb that moved into won’t be the same suburb later.

There are several ways to summarize this process and I’ll conclude with my own take as a sociologist studying suburbs:

  1. This is just NIMBY behavior from suburban residents. Some residents act as if they would like to freeze a community in time right when they move in. (There is some truth to this.)
  2. Suburban leaders are determined to grow, even if the residents don’t desire it and their community can’t handle much growth. This would lean toward a growth machines explanation where leaders want to benefit from local deals and make their mark. (There is some truth to this.)
  3. A more comprehensive view: situations like this demonstrate the negotiated aspect of a community’s character. Although large or consequential discussions between residents and leaders are relatively infrequent, some of these discussions over important areas – like downtowns where many people feel they have a stake – can have long-term effects. Because suburbs privilege local control and residents often have some measure of social status (income, education, homeownership), these discussions are bound to happen at some point. Some suburbs will veer toward a quainter character, some will aggressively court new growth and transform their downtown, and others will try to pursue a middle path of growth that matches the community’s character. Yet, these discussions are important to track and analyze if we want to understand how suburban development happens and how it matters for later outcomes.