The phenomenon hasn’t received much attention, but the executive suites of some major corporations are making another migration.
Companies that moved their headquarters from the city to the suburbs after World War II are today moving farther. Even some companies that grew up in the suburbs are heading to the metropolitan fringes.
The number is still small, yet the trend appears to be gaining steam.
Experts give many reasons for this outmigration: the aging of postwar buildings, the growth of some corporations, the downsizing of others. The companies all want to take advantage of lower land costs and wider spaces.
And, as with homeowners who move to the far suburbs, the companies are looking at such issues as quality of life, schools and cost of living, the experts say.
Not that this exodus is for everyone. Sara Lee Corp. left Deerfield in 1991 to move to the Loop. Like most companies, it realized the many advantages the big city offers-and had no desire to be far from them.
A few companies, however, can’t seem to get far enough away:
– Brunswick Corp., the bowling, billiards and boating firm, last year moved from Skokie, 13 miles from the Loop, to Lake Forest, 18 miles farther out.
– Safety-Kleen Corp. recently moved a couple of miles from the north side of Elgin to a more arboreal campus setting on that suburb’s western fringe.
– W.W. Grainger Inc., based in Skokie since 1962, is planning a move to Mettawa 34 miles northwest of the Loop. The move has been delayed by a court fight with the suburb over zoning for the site.
– Amurol Products Co., a wholly owned associated company of William Wrigley Jr. Co., is moving from the Naperville site it has occupied since 1948 to Yorkville, about 48 miles southwest of the Loop.
“We’ve quadrupled our volume in the last six years and need more room,” said Gary Schuetz, vice president of Amurol, which makes bubble gum, candy and suckers.
Amurol will leave behind a 117,000-square-foot building on six acres for a 214,000-square-foot facility on 46 acres.
Though corporate moves between cities and states capture the headlines, the more typical move is within a given metropolitan area, according to a 1988 study by Cushman & Wakefield Inc., a business real estate firm based in New York. Thirty-six percent of the companies in that survey favored the suburbs and 28 percent preferred big cities.
Runzheimer International, a Rochester, Wis.-based consulting firm specializing in corporate travel and relocation expenses, concluded in a 1991 study that the reason that the executive suites were kept within metropolitan areas was to be close to major airports. However, reasonable commuting times was cited by 85 percent of the companies Runzheimer polled as an important site selection criterion-a factor that may explain why companies keep creeping farther into suburbia.
“Until fairly recently, the move out of a community often was based simply on a CEO’s desire to move into an environment that he was comfortable with,” said Richard Schneider, vice president of living cost services for Runzheimer.
This gave rise to the corporate saw that the proximity of the chief executive’s home and golf course were two of the most important factors in a move.
Jack F. Reichert, chairman of Brunswick, said the fact that he lives and golfs in Lake Forest had nothing to do with his company’s move to that suburb last year. The old headquarters in Skokie was so dilapidated that portions of the ceiling in the board room collapsed just before a meeting a few years ago.
“If we had a choice we’d still be in Skokie,” Reichert said. “We told LaSalle Partners that we would sign a 20-year lease if they put up a new building, but they said `no.’ “
Grainger, the industrial distribution giant with annual sales of $2.6 billion, was once based at 819 W. Congress St. in Chicago. That site was condemned in 1944 to make way for the Congress (now Eisenhower) Expressway. Six years later, it was forced to vacate its new facilities, at 740 W. Adams St., to make room for the Northwest (now Kennedy) Expressway.
David W. Grainger, company chairman, said the proposed move to Mettawa is necessitated by the fact that the firm has outgrown its existing Skokie site. “We’re now in five buildings, and transportation and communications under that arrangement are intolerable,” Grainger said.
Corporate relocations these days are often more complex than a decade ago.
“Now, they have to justify a relocation. Companies may move because they need to downsize,” Schneider said.
“The people eliminated during this rightsizing period are the older employees who lived in the inner suburbs,” he said. “The new group seems to have different demographics. They are younger and live farther out where it is less expensive.”
