Tired of the responsibility and maintenance of a lawn and a large house in Lincolnwood, Daniel and Ruth Culberg sold their home last spring and moved into a three-bedroom apartment high above Chicago Avenue in downtown Evanston.
“It was time for a change. We wanted to be free,” says Culberg, a retired contractor, about leaving the quiet greenery of 1960s-style suburbia for a home above a busy commercial corridor.
The Culbergs chose the Park Evanston, a 283-unit apartment building with street-level retail development that opened last spring at 1630 Chicago Ave. in the suburb.
They are among the growing stream of Chicago-area residents opting to live in commercial-residential, or “mixed use,” projects, a living arrangement as old as cities themselves.
A common–though relatively low-rise–housing arrangement prior to the 1950s, the concept of living above the store became as unfamiliar as living without a car to millions after families streamed from Chicago and other urban centers into the mushrooming suburban subdivisions following World War II. Now, thanks to a strong housing market, growing demand for convenience by buyers and a scramble by communities to maintain viability and tax revenue, the popularity of mixed-use buildings is rebounding–albeit in developments from and vastly larger than 50 years ago.
A surge of such projects has invigorated several Chicago neighborhoods, perhaps most visibly North Michigan Avenue. Mixed-used developments are attracting residents and enthusiasm in a number of suburban downtowns as well.
New projects in downtown Evanston, Skokie and Wilmette are combining housing with street-level retail space. Projects combining commercial and residential uses are wending their way through the approval process in western suburbs such as Wheaton and Glen Ellyn.
“We’ve gone from a Ma and Pa shopkeeper who lives above the store or even in the store” to residences in converted department stores and hospitals, says Jerry Ettinger, owner of Hallmark & Johnson Properties Ltd., commerical real estate sales and marketing. “The fact is, above the store, the space is good, the views are good and it’s convenient.”
The phenomenon is part of a “return to traditional lifestyles” that includes the reappearance of back alleys, front porches and farm house styling as people seek a place to live where there is a sense of community, says Robert Teska, president of Evanston-based Robert Teska Associates Inc., an urban plannning consultant specializing in reviving downtowns.
The profile of residents in such developments is broad, says Terry Jenkins, who is both executive director of Evmark, an association of businesses in downtown Evanston, and president of Business Districts Inc., a consulting firm specializing in downtown revitalization.
Jenkins lists two core groups as especially important:
“Young folks–post-education who are single, newly married, have good jobs. They want an active, vibrant area, close to public transportation with lots of things to do and a sense of community, a sense of place,” he says.
And “there is a significant empty-nester element,” adds Jenkins. “People whose kids have gone from the home want the same elements as the post-education group, though they are not looking for the latest hot club. Vibrant for them may be lots of restaurant choices, movie theaters, legitimate theater.”
Among the latter group are the Culbergs. They watched the complex to which they moved as it rose on land once occupied by the headquarters of Washington National Life Insurance Co.
“My wife’s beauty shop is near and my tailor is around the corner,” says Daniel Culberg.
In June, the couple was among the first tenants to move into the building developed by Chicago-based John Buck Co., which is 90 percent leased and where rents for studio to three-bedroom residences range from $700 to about $2,700 a month.
Today they enjoy not only stunning views of sunsets and cityscapes but the surrounding community.
Urban planners traditionally have advocated mixed-use projects because they offer a combination of efficient land use while providing a built-in customer base for commercial areas to thrive, says Richard Dunn, director of planning and development for the Village of Glen Ellyn.
Planned communities, such as Walt Disney Co.’s new town of Celebration in Florida, include residences on the upper floors of retail buildings. They also mix apartment buildings with commercial buildings so people can live downtown.
Such mixed uses, however, are a rarity in fast-growing, outer-ring Chicago suburbs such as Naperville, where there has been plenty of open land for single-family housing development.
“The market has to be able to pay for it” before developers build mixed-use structures, says Dunn.
Chicago and other established communities are embracing mixed-used projects as a way to stabilize and maintain emptying center city commercial areas.
The metro area’s housing market has remained strong at the same time “manufacturing and offices have been moving out of Cook County en masse,” says Jenkins.”Municipalities are riding the wave.”
Mixed-use developments provide new housing to retain or attract new residents and are an affordable way for for some buyers, particularly younger buyers, to get into an attractive community. At the same time, the residents serve as customers to keep and attract business, says Jenkins.
Municipal officials in Skokie changed zoning laws several years ago to allow housing atop commercial spaces in the village’s municipal center around Lincoln Avenue and Oakton Street. The move was one of several measures aimed at stabilizing and bolstering a commercial district that saw little construction after the 1970s.
Since the changes, two retail-residential complexes have been built. In May, John and Geraldine Clennon moved into a two-bedroom condominium in Skokie Towne Square, a 95-unit complex with six street-level stores, at 5000 Oakton St.
Geraldine Clennon had been looking for an all-on-one-floor residence on the North Shore for several years. John Clennon had resisted moving because he was comfortable with local merchants, banks and the church the couple has attended for 50 years.
The Towne Square development, whose one- to three-bedroom units go for $140,000 to $251,000, is more than 70 percent sold. It provided both Clennons what they wanted and kept them in Skokie.
“Rather than moving to another town, we decided we liked it right here,” says John, delighted they are within walking distance of services for most of their needs.
Skokie’s municipal neighbor, Evanston, has suffered a drain of major office headquarters and manufacturers over recent decades, much like Chicago. But the community has a “hot condo market,” says Jim Wolinski, director of Evanston’s Community Development Department, and his office is seeing mixed-use concepts “from virtually every developer.”
“I think the market is driving this,” says Wolinski. “The market for large commercial is not there. The market for mixed use is.”
But mixed use “won’t work for every development,” cautions Diane Watry, director of sales and marketing for Norwood Builders, developer of Skokie Towne Square.
“It depends on the surrounding uses. It will work in some suburban downtowns. But people have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. Downtown (Chicago) is one thing. But you can’t take the John Hancock building, chop off 50 stories and plant it in downtown Arlington Heights.”
Jenkins agrees. In addition to promixity to public transportation, commercial-residential buildings, like lively downtowns, are most successful in areas that are relatively attractive, feel safe, have adequate–though not necessarily great–parking and a reason for people to be there.
Buyers in mixed use buildings usually tend to look at businesses on the street level–when they think of them at all–as amenities. But there are some major exceptions. Bookstores and video stores often are welcome but restaurents, especially fast-food shops, and many other food-oriented retailers are not.
“Restaurants have potential problems with fire, rodents, garbage” explains Ettinger.
Living above the store is not for everyone, of course.
“You are always going to get people who don’t want to live on a busy main street,” says Ettinger. “I would say there is a much broader market for strictly residential.”
But he adds, “There is a market for those living above the store and it is more than it used to be.”
Teska, who, with his wife, is selling their single-family home in Evanston to move into a two-bedroom condo in the Optima Center, now under construction at 705 11th St. in downtown Wilmette, is confident mixed-use is one wave of future housing.
The project into which he is moving is 78 percent sold, he notes, although construction is not quite half done, evidence of strong buyer interest.
The development by Optima, Inc., Glencoe, includes 54 one- to three-bedroom units, priced from $180,000 and $398,000, above 20,000 square feet of retail space.
Furthermore, Teska sees a greater willingness among buyers to pay premium prices for such units, a change he calls a “big breakthrough” and a sign of growing demand.
Personal experience also bolsters his confidence.
“It is a life change,” he says of the move he and his wife, parents of three adult children, are about to make. “A chance to simplify our life . . . an opportunity to close the door and travel from time to time.”
He believes, if housing remains strong, young buyers currently snapping up large single-family homes in one or two decades will feel a similar yearning to pare down and are the over-the-store residents of the future.
“We’ll see more of it as Baby Boomers age,” he predicts. “This is definitely an idea whose time has come.”
