Ten years ago, the borders of metropolitan Chicago were roughly defined by the Wisconsin state line in the north, the Fox River in the west and a swath of southern suburbs stretching from Romeoville over the Indiana state line to Merrillville.
If you didn`t live within those boundaries, you didn`t live in metropolitan Chicago.
No more.
Powered by the creation of thousands of jobs in the outer suburbs, the Chicago area now reaches north over the Wisconsin line to Kenosha, west past the Fox River toward Rockford, and could someday extend all the way south to Kankakee when a third airport is built early in the next century.
Once separate regions, metropolitan Chicago and Milwaukee are now coming together as developers build housing for Lake County workers in Kenosha and Pleasant Prairie, Wis.
At the PPG/Mazer Chemical plant in north suburban Gurnee, half of the 250-member work force roots for the Chicago Bears. The other half cheers for the Green Bay Packers, who play some of their home games in Milwaukee.
”We used to think of ourselves in isolation as the City of Chicago and some northern suburbs,” says Allen Kracower, a Buffalo Grove planner. ”But now it is one large urban area.”
In 1950, the Chicago area was a classic metropolis: An economically dominant central city surrounded by bedroom suburbs. But now, Kracower and other experts say, the area more closely resembles a megalopolis: A sprawling region that combines several cities-each with separate centers, but with suburbs that touch one another.
”There are clearly new ways to be thinking about this region,” says Robert Teska, an Evanston planner. ”The mass physical evidence of these trends will not be witnessed by the general public for several years to come. But the pioneers, the real estate speculators and the residents, are already in place.”
The traditional Chicago metropolitan area encompasses Cook County and the five ”collar counties” of Du Page, Lake, Will, Kane and McHenry. It has almost 7.2 million people, 3 telephone area codes, and takes in 3,721 square miles, all in Illinois.
The emerging megalopolis includes parts of three states and 11 counties, nearly 8 million people, five area codes, and more than 5,600 square miles-almost as much territory as Rhode Island and Connecticut combined.
To be sure, a wheezing economy is slowing the region`s outward push. But experts say the wave of the future is symbolized by people like Greg Vassmer, who lives in the unincorporated Boone County town of Garden Prairie, 69 miles northwest of the Loop and 15 miles east of Rockford.
”It used to be out in the country,” says Vassmer, 34, manager of research and development for an Elgin automotive parts manufacturer.
Now, he explains, one of his neighbors commutes to northwest suburban Hoffman Estates, future home of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Merchandise Group. On his own drive to work, Vassmer goes past farm fields on U.S. Highway 20, then swings onto the Northwest Tollway, making the trip to Elgin in 30 to 45 minutes.
Many maps of the Chicago area don`t include Boone County, Kenosha County, or Grundy and Kendall counties, which are fast becoming bedroom towns for the job-rich suburbs of Cook, Du Page, Lake, Will and Kane Counties.
The definition of the six-county area was fixed in 1957 when, after a decade of rapid suburban growth, the Illinois General Assembly created the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission as the comprehensive planning agency for the six counties.
But in 1957, key roads such as the Tri-State Tollway, the Northwest Tollway, the East-West Tollway, the Stevenson Expressway, and the Dan Ryan Expressway were anywhere from one year to almost a decade from opening. Once they were finished, the eventual expansion of the Chicago area beyond its six- county borders was all but inevitable.
The highways improved access to such suburbs as Oak Brook, Schaumburg and Deerfield, where millions of square feet of office buildings, shopping malls and factories were constructed in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the late 1980s, a new wave of growth brought jobs even further out from the Loop to such suburbs as Naperville and Libertyville.
In theory, the growth meant that people could live closer to the workplace. In fact, the commercial boom drove up land prices, increasing the price of houses. That spurred builders to move even further away from the Loop-all the way to Wisconsin, for example-to provide housing that middle- and lower-income people can afford.
In Libertyville, the current average sale price of a house is about $239,000, according to the Lake County Association of Realtors. But in Kenosha, a Chicago-area developer is advertising single-family homes starting at $94,900.
”Just 12 minutes north of Gurnee,” says an ad for the developer, the Zale Group.
The ad depicts a rolling landscape in which Kenosha is practically in the back yard of downtown landmarks such as the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. Milwaukee is pictured so far north along the lakefront that it seems to be halfway to Canada.
In fact, Kenosha is about 25 miles closer to downtown Milwaukee than downtown Chicago. What the ad attempts to do is create a new world view that envisions metropolitan Chicago extending where it`s never gone before.
”There`s always a fear that there`s a psychological barrier of crossing a state line,” says Kracower. ”Those advertisements were intended to illustrate the advantages of crossing that barrier.”
The proposed extension of Illinois Highway 53 through central Lake County would meet the Tri-State Tollway west of Waukegan and further strengthen links between Lake County and southeastern Wisconsin.
A Fox Valley Tollway, which could be approved by the Illinois General Assembly this fall along with the Illinois 53 extension, would have a similar impact in Du Page, Kane, and McHenry Counties.
And to the south, a proposed third airport promises to extend the metropolitan area into Kankakee County, especially if it`s built at a proposed site in that county, or near Peotone in Will County, or at a so-called ”bi-state” site on the Indiana-Illinois border.
The bi-state commission that will recommend a location for the airport also is studying sites in Gary and on Chicago`s Southeast Side.
”Even if (the third airport) is on the Southeast Side of Chicago, it will spark much more interest in that county-line area and in the Kankakee area itself,” said Teska.
Land developers caution that thousands of acres remain to be developed in the five collar counties. For every mile the Chicago region extends outward, they explain, the region adds huge amounts of farmland. Only some of that land will have the necessary roads and sewers for development.
”The farther out you go, you will see the growth jump to Rockford, De Kalb, Kankakee,” says Gregory Mutz, chairman of Amli Realty Co. a Chicago land developer. ”You`ll have these pockets out there that are part of the Chicago metroplex.”
The U.S. Census Bureau recognizes that the Chicago area extends well beyond its traditional six-county borders.
Since the 1980 census, the bureau has counted an 11-county Chicago area, consisting of the traditional six counties plus Kendall and Grundy Counties in Illinois, Kenosha County in Wisconsin and Lake and Porter Counties in Indiana. That redefinition of the Chicago area was part of a national move to reflect ”larger agglomerations” such as San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose in northern California, census officials say.
Scott Deuel, geographic coordinator for the Census Bureau`s office in Westchester, said the 11-county definition more accurately reflects economic activity and commuting patterns in the Chicago area than the six-county definition.
”And it may get bigger,” Deuel says. ”I have someone on my staff who commutes from De Kalb every day.”
For the 11-county region`s 7.97 million people, that may represent a disturbing prospect, given that traffic congestion, air pollution, and flooding have accompanied the march of office buildings, homes and shopping malls beyond the edges of the six-county area.
But residents of this region are not alone: No major metropolitan area in America has been able to get a leash on the unwieldy animal of suburban growth.
To prevent further growth-related problems, planners such as Teska suggest that the mandate of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission be expanded to cover new, urbanizing areas such as Kendall County.
He also suggests that the commission convene a ”super-regional forum”
with its counterparts in northwest Indiana and southeastern Wisconsin. (The commission will hold public hearings on growth in the six-county area beginning Oct. 17 in Chicago.)
But the planning bodies don`t possess the power to enforce their goals. With suburban growth spilling across state lines, it may be time for state agencies, such as the respective transportation departments of the three states, to step up their level of cooperation-even if growth-related issues have rarely been discussed during the current Illinois gubernatorial race.
”They don`t lend themselves to 30-second bites on the 10 o`clock news,” says John Kramer, former secretary of the Illinois Department of Transportation. ”But they are the core of governing.”
