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Retrofitting North American Suburbia: Tales from Chicagoland Ellen Dunham-Jones
If Chicago is the quintessential American city, Chicagoland is quintessential American suburbia. In 1926, the editor of the Chicago Tribune coined the term “Chicagoland” to refer to the network of railroad towns, villages and farms that spread in a 200-mile radius from the growing downtown. The term continues to be widely used today in reference to the vast flat suburban terrain that has largely engulfed the earlier settlements in post-war waves of lower density development, expanding further and further into the periphery. Today, much of that suburban landscape is aging. Dead shopping malls, vacant big boxes, out-of-date office parks, shuttered industrial sites, dying commercial strip corridors, and acres and acres of under-utilized parking lots are being retrofitted into more sustainable places. What’s driving the different retrofit strategies? How do the suburban retrofits of Chicagoland compare to national retrofitting trends? What lessons from both might the growing global middle class learn about the unintended consequences of suburbanization? Should we be careful what we wish for? The iconic North American suburban landscape of detached houses perched on individual lawns provided generations of families an access to “the American Dream”. The default model of affordable housing has been “drive ‘til you qualify” to the cheap land at the ever-expanding exurban edge. But it evolved during decades of access to cheap oil, cheap credit, cheap water and cheap farmland. While it has produced many beloved and prosperous neighborhoods, higher costs for all of the above, and growing awareness of suburbia’s unintended consequences, have challenged its long term viability. The savings associated with cheaper houses on the edge - in the periphery - are increasingly eaten up by rising transportation costs. Similarly, energy costs have doubled in the past decade and detached buildings are pricey to heat and cool. These costs have contributed to the rapid rise in the suburbanization of poverty. Contrary to the stereotype, since 2005 more Americans in poverty have lived in suburbs than in cities or rural areas. Municipalities are feeling the pinch as well. Delivering roads, utilities, school buses, garbage trucks and emergency services costs considerably more per household at lower densities than it does in compact areas. Only a fraction of the life-cycle maintenance costs of that infrastructure are covered by residential property taxes, causing some to argue that suburbia is essentially a Ponzi scheme and creates a false appearance of wealth. Nor do shopping malls, big box stores,
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and office parks deliver tax revenue that come close to that provided by urban multi-story buildings on a per-acre basis. Chicagoland displays all of these characteristics: a 2001 study of decentralization’s impact on its municipalities concludes that sprawls appear to have produced more fiscal “losers” than “winners”. Quite simply, suburbia is not economically sustainable. The costs of sprawling suburbs on public and environmental health are also unintended and unsustainable. While Americans tend to think of the suburbs as leafy and cities as paved, on a per-capita basis suburbia consumes far more land for asphalt in comparison. From 1970–1990, Chicago’s population only increased by four percent, but its urbanized area grew by 47%. In other words, density dropped almost in half in just 20 years. Jobs were decentralized at this time as well. Between 1972 and 1995, the city’s share of total metropolitan employment fell from 56% to 34%. Despite this high rate of land consumption, the greater region is still approximately one-third farmland. Given the unforeseen fallout from suburbanization, it is easy to understand why planners and designers viewing the issues from 30,000 feet might propose the need for retrofits. But is change actually desired on the ground? Somewhat surprisingly, the increasing answer is yes. One third of U.S. enclosed shopping malls are dead or dying. Vacancy rates at strip malls (10.5%) and in suburban office buildings (18% nationally, 24% in Chicago) have been at the highest rates since anyone started counting. No one really knows just how many empty big box stores there are. Leapfrog development for the past fifty years has gradually robbed older suburbs of market share by enticing consumers to the newest malls and subdivisions ever further out. However, it has also given them something incredibly valuable – a relatively central location in their now larger metropolis and the opportunity to become a more urban destination should they so choose. While surface parking lots made sense when they were first built on the cheap land at the edge, with a more central location with abundant existing infrastructure, it often makes sense to build parking decks and to build upwards with greater density on top of all of the “underperforming asphalt.” Slightly more than half of the U.S. population live in suburbs but although the common perception is that suburbs are family-focused, that’s not in fact who lives there. U.S. census data shows that since 2000, two thirds of suburban households have not had children in them. Census demographers predict that through 2025, 80–85% of new households in the U.S. will not have children. The reason for this is that neither of the two large demographic groups – the baby boomers and Generation Y – are in prime childrearing years. The baby boomers are just starting to retire; most are empty nesters, still live in the suburbs, and most hope to age in place. However, they do not wish to become their parents and their view of retirement is not a quiet retreat on a cul-de-sac. 70% of Gen Y say they wish to remain in an urban place even after they’ve had children. However, the majority of jobs remain in the suburbs. As a result, Gen Y has joined the baby boomers in
forming the bulk of the market for retrofits that provide urban amenities in a suburban location. As with the rest of North America, these factors have resulted in Chicagoland producing a wide range of types and sizes of suburban retrofits. The first generation of retrofits beginning in the early nineties and continuing today tended to be developer-led, single-parcel redevelopments on the cheap land of the first ring suburbs. Chicagoland’s “Purple Hotel” redevelopment is one of dozens that displays many of these characteristics. Built in the suburb of Lincolnwood in 1960, the modernist box with distinctive purple brick infill panels was surrounded by parking lots on its 11-acres. (See Figure 2.) Over time, it went from glamorous to seedy. During the recent recession the momentum in retrofitting shifted to the public sector. Federal planning grants (as well as the lull in developer activity) helped municipal planning departments become much more pro-active about revitalizing suburban corridors with transit, updating their zoning to enable mixed-use, compact development, and leveraging their publicly-owned land and resources in complex public-private partnerships. Non-profits, business improvement districts, and foundations have also emerged as important players in accelerating retrofitting. So what do retrofits look like? June Williamson and I find it useful to categorize the growing number of retrofits in terms of three basic strategies: reinhabitation, redevelopment and re-greening. Market conditions determine which strategy is appropriate. The most satisfying retrofits mix and match these approaches by creating places that connect us to the past, to the future and to nature. Reinhabitation involves modest reclamation of public space or adaptive re-use of suburban properties with more community serving uses. Street art on vacant walls and tactical urbanist interventions in vacant lots and buildings, such as those by the Build A Better Block team have been great accelerators of more permanent investments and revitalization. At the building scale, the availability of cheap space in commercial buildings can enable non-profits, low-profits, mom-and-pop and entrepreneurial start-ups to get a foothold and make for a more complete community than the retail uses alone which dominate in new construction. There are scores of examples of former big box stores and strip malls retrofitted into schools, libraries, neighborhood restaurants, gyms, incubator offices, government offices and medical centers. Many of these new uses create “third spaces.” Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term to describe places in which a community is built. If home is the first place we gravitate towards and work the second place, third places are where we go for creative interaction. It might be the neighborhood pub, the hair salon, Main Street, the market or the megachurch. Suburbia in general has a dearth of third places. Built around families, the assumption has been that social life in the suburbs revolves around the schools. However, now that the majority of households no longer have children in them, more and more retrofits are including spaces that either formally or informally encourage socializing. Several enclosed shopping malls outside of Chicago have been reinhabited in ways that demonstrate the incorporation of different kinds of third spaces and responses to different market demands. The most dramatic has been the demalling of Park Forest Plaza into a traditional, mixed-use Main Street. An innovative regional mall from the early 1950’s, Park Forest Plaza arranged three anchors, shops and some civic uses on 48 acres around an open air pedestrian mall and served as the
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centerpiece for the new planned community of Park Forest, 29 miles east of Chicago. It was renovated in the mid-1980s. However, its central location in the community instead of on a highway limited its ability to compete for regional customers as newer malls opened up closer to highway exits. It was dead by 1995. Finding no one else interested and lacking anchor tenants, the village of Park Forest bought the mall and has been downsizing it to be more local-serving. Instead of a mall, it is now the Main Street they never had, with low-speed streets running through it. Instead of scaling down, the next case study involves scaling up. Pastor Jim Winston is said to have started the Living Word Christian Center in a Chicago storefront with $150 and 20 members. When his congregation grew he looked for a bigger cheap space and found it ten miles from the city in the Forest Park Mall. The 400,000 square foot mall had opened in 1983 and was a retrofit of a torpedo factory. With a competing mall nearby, it never filled to capacity and in 1997 the Living Word Christian Center bought the blighted mall with a $13 million mortgage and reinhabited a former home improvement anchor space. Today the megachurch accommodates its 17,000 members in a 3,500seat auditorium carved out of the mall’s former movie theater, operates a business school in the basement, and manages the now outward-facing retail that includes a grocery store, a Kmart discount department store and several other small shops. Reinhabitation of existing properties can be very effective at building social capital and social sustainability. By replacing chain stores with more local activities they also help to relocalize the place and people. However, to achieve the triple bottom line of sustainability in suburban retrofits requires more substantial redevelopment, densification and urbanization. Redevelopment retrofits often mix and match the following strategies: linear buildings that screen parking lots; single properties redeveloped into more pedestrian-friendly, street-facing formats; office parks infilled with residential and retail; transit, bike and pedestrian infrastructures inserted into edge cities and other suburban nodes; replacement of surface parking lots with parking decks; insertions of walkable block structures and street networks onto superblocks; transformation of park-and-ride transit stations into mixed-use transit-oriented developments (TODs); the integration of road diets, transit and bike lanes into suburban corridors and arterials. The most vivid before-and-after contrasts occur when these redevelopment strategies are employed to urbanize sylvan, green, suburban golf courses. Forty-three of them are in various stages of redevelopment into various uses throughout the U.S. 34 miles west of Chicago, Buffalo Grove is reviewing CRM Properties’ proposal to demolish its municipal campus and convert 65 acres (nine holes) of its 18-hole publicly-owned golf course, into a mixed-use downtown centered around a community park.
Corridor retrofits achieve similarly dramatic results by becoming more pedestrian and bike friendly – and inducing new, more urban patterns of redevelopment in the process. In these cases, urbanizing the corridors often means adding rather than removing trees and plantings. The Roosevelt Road Streetscaping project is one of several throughout Chicagoland and one of hundreds throughout the U.S.. It also added benches, sidewalks and crosswalks, innovative lighting, public art, benches, trash receptacles, signage, on-street parking and bus stops to a 1.5 mile corridor linking three Chicago suburbs: Oak Park, Berwyn and Cicero. The public investments improving the quality and walkability of the auto-oriented corridor is intended to stimulate private investment in the vacant blocks and deteriorating buildings. A form-based zoning code was adopted along the corridor to require that new development creates a predictable and pleasant pedestrian environment. Opened in 2012, the corridor has attracted attention to its walkability with a Facebook page, an annual winter holiday stroll and an annual zombie pub-crawl at Halloween. Chicagoland’s extensive railway system and large subway network is second in size in the U.S. only to New York City. This has resulted in a particularly high number of TOD opportunities and redevelopments at suburban stations. Most of these introduce mixed-use residential on to former parkn-ride lots or other adjacent properties, such as the car dealerships and low rise commercial buildings that used to form a “no man’s land” disconnecting the Park Ridge, Illinois Metra Station from the town’s historic downtown. Today, a mix of privately developed condominiums and rowhouses, retail and restaurants wrap around two attractive public plazas to welcome people to and through the 6-acre Uptown Park Ridge redevelopment. An important new model is the combination of TOD and COD, or CargoOriented Development in Harvey and Blue Island, severely disinvested manufacturing hubs in Chicago’s south suburbs. The old industries have left but as gas prices and interest in more sustainable transportation rise, freight is making a comeback. COD recognizes that the areas’ numerous rail lines, expressways, intermodal terminals and underemployed labor pools are assets for revitalizing new clusters of manufacturing and logistics businesses around more efficient cargo movements. When paired with TOD, workers get greater access to jobs and access to pedestrian-friendly communities that connect affordable housing with affordable transportation. What began as a pilot project in two communities has become a subregional redevelopment project engaging 32 communities called the “Green Transit, Intermodal, Manufacturing and Environment (TIME) Zone.” Public, private and nonprofit organizations throughout the Chicago region are now investing millions of dollars into the plan to put people back to work, preserve housing near transit, link industrial and logistical growth to intermodal assets, encourage green manufacturing and improve environmental outcomes. The third strategy is re-greening: retrofitting under performing suburban properties into parks, community gardens, daylit creeks, reconstructed wetlands or forest. It is often employed in weak markets where densification is unlikely to work or in areas where we never should have built in the first place. But, it is also a means to provide a community open space around which greater density and urbanization can comfortably occur. This was the tactic applied by the masterplan for the revitalization of the small town of Normal, Illinois. An awkward 5-way intersection dominated by cars and difficult for pedestrians to cross was retrofitted into a sustainable showpiece with a much-improved public realm. The new
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intersection now links the town to a new Amtrak high-speed rail station, a new children’s museum and new mixed-use and retail buildings. The City of Chicago has been a leader in innovating and integrating green building practices in the U.S., especially through its green roofs program. More recently, in 2011 the city adopted an urban agriculture amendment encouraging the building of community gardens and urban farms in clearly defined conditions. But one of its more surprising farms doesn’t even need this zoning. FarmedHere LLC is the largest vertical farm in the U.S. It operates out of the retrofit of a nondescript, 150,000 square foot, mostly windowless suburban warehouse in the suburb of Bedford Park. Attracted by the incentives of the nearby TOD and COD, the farmers benefit from a central location that speeds delivery time of their harvest. The facility uses artificial light and stacked tiers of hydroponic and aquaponic beds to grow organic, pest-free basil, arugula, other greens and fish. The Mayor of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois collectively announced Chicago’s most ambitious retrofit of all in late 2011. The Millennium Reserve will regreen 140,000 acres of the Calumet region as part of President Obama’s Great Outdoors Initiative. This is intended to serve as the biggest urban park in the country and lies in the heart of Chicago’s suburban southland. It is home to coastal wetlands and lakefront parks and trails, many of which are in need of removal of invasive species and other forms of cleanup. It is also home to massive steel mills and heavy industrial infrastructure. The plan calls for respect for the cultural value of the industrial heritage but also for ecological reconstruction. Is Chicagoland more affordable, healthier and more sustainable as a result of its retrofits? Yes – but it still has a long way to go. The region is becoming more polycentric as suburban nodes intensify around the old train stations. The post-industrial knowledge-based economy is less polluting than the belching smokestacks. There are more locally grown food, more bike lanes, and more opportunities to engage in physical activity. But the retrofits don’t erase the sprawling infrastructure that still supports heavily auto-centric lifestyles. What lessons can Moscow and other global metros learn about suburban retrofitting from Chicago? Certainly that the role of the public sector cannot be underestimated in stimulating large retrofits – whether they involve reinhabiting a dying mall, redeveloping station areas into TODs, or regreening vast swaths of contaminated industrial lands. However, the private sector also plays a strong role in retrofitting. The 17 Community Improvement Districts in Atlanta are consortiums of commercial property owners who self-tax in order to provide the matching funds for retrofit planning grants and capital improvements. Developers from Dallas to Toronto and D.C. to Vancouver are more eager than ever to find the redevelopment sites that would allow them to meet the new market. Will Moscow raise the design bar further as it re-examines its periphery? If there is a cautionary tale, however, it is to those around the world who seek to emulate American suburbs – be sure to look toward the retrofits rather than at yesterday’s model.