Whither Evanston, Skokie & Niles? Hard to tell

Suburban development isn't arbitrary. Right?

Carvana rendering (Village of Skokie)

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You can live in the same town for decades and still wonder how relatively important things are going to turn out.

That’s the case right now if you live in Skokie, Evanston or Niles. It’s a crapshoot. 

Skokie trustees will take a vote Monday night on allowing a really weird addition to their town. But it may not be too weird for them.

If you play the odds, you figure they’ll actually approve a 134-foot Carvana “car vending machine” at 9801 Woods Drive.

The Skokie Village Board barely ever turns anything down. And the Carvana thing could bring in tax revenue, which municipal boards tend to like a lot.

But will they really approve a 14-story glass PEZ dispenser for used cars right next to the village’s biggest residential building, the 650-unit Optima Old Orchard Woods? That would hang over Harms Woods and the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center? That two ornithological groups and the Sierra Club say is a bird killer? That 800 people have written hate letters to them about?

Maybe they will. The Village Board members, as usual, aren’t talking. Only independent trustee James Johnson has taken a position against it and says he has no idea if anybody else will vote with him.

After all, the Skokie Plan Commission says Carvana would be fine, and there’s another car vending machine already up in Oak Brook and one on the way in Schaumburg. Not quite as tall, but still. 

At that same 8 p.m. Skokie meeting, trustees will doubtlessly pass an ordinance maintaining that the glistening Westfield Old Orchard shopping center is blighted, so an extra penny sales tax can be charged to customers. Westfield will get to use all those pennies to remodel the shopping center so it will be positively blinding.

The Golf Mill Shopping Center in Niles had to be considered blighted, too, so a Tax Increment Finance district could be formed there. A few days ago, Niles Mayor George Alpogianis told the local chamber of commerce that his village has struck a deal with the center to rebuild much of it, partially paid with TIF tax dollars. Under a TIF, when property taxes go up, the Up Part gets skimmed off for up to 23 years. 

Among the few aspects of Niles’ new deal that seems solid is that the AMC Niles 12 theaters will be gone, and so will the big, white, cylindrical and decrepit office building at the back of the center.

Bye.

One of those ubiquitous suburban apartment complexes will be added, and two dumbbell moves of years ago will be undone: Golf Mill will go back to being an outdoor center, and the AWOL mill wheel that reminded people where they were will be replicated.

The rest of the proposed changes are currently so lacking in detail so as to not be worth wasting words on them. It’ll all have to go through an approval process, though Niles rubber-stamps most proposals anyway.

At least now, the principal consideration isn’t whether Nick Blase gets the insurance business.

The Evanston City Council isn’t typically a rubber stamp. They shot down in 2020 a 19-story building proposed for 1621 Chicago Ave. that would dwarf its neighbors. The developer is back with a building a whole story shorter, apparently hoping that at 18 stories, no one would notice it.

(City of Evanston)

The zoning allows 54 housing units on the property, but the developer wants a change to get 180, plus 7,200 square feet of commercial space. Evanston requires only 10% affordable units, so the builder would get plenty of fancy-schmancy ones. This despite the city being glutted with luxe units.

The kind of housing Evanston needs is for poor people, but they’re not part of the deal. 

Everybody else involved stands to make money here, including the city, which can always use it.

The building would house hundreds of new adult residents, but give them only 57 parking spaces. How does that work? Do all those well-heeled inhabitants take the L everywhere? Do they stroll to the public parking garages every morning?

Maybe they can park in the Carvana vending machine.

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