Downtown Chicago is in full bloom again.
Its dynamism is manifest in the $1.5 billion-plus cluster of projects under way around North Michigan Avenue that will sprout new hotels, entertainment spots, shopping and high-rise homes.
Its appeal to young comers and the well-off who want to spend their wealth in exciting places is reflected in the estimated 7,500 new condos, converted loft dwellings and town homes that have been built in the central area and its fringes in the last six years, with thousands more on the drawing boards.
The skyline is not only a magnet for tourists and a continuing source of exhilaration for residents but also a lure for investors, who spent more than $3 billion to buy about 45 Chicago buildings last year, an urban buying spree almost certainly exceeded only in New York.
And Mayor Richard Daley’s enthusiasm for municipal ornamentation, from median flower planters to wrought-iron fencing to fancy light fixtures, wins admiration even from those who chuckle over gussying up the City of the Big Shoulders.
That’s all good news. But, like the shadow of a skyscraper over an open plaza on a sunny day, there is a dark side.
Along with the envied vitality has come uncertainty, suspicion, frustration and fear for the future. Something is missing in the downtown success story: a sense of where it is all leading.
In a city made famous by Daniel H. Burnham for its urban planning, there are no more really big plans. Instead there is a patchwork of little plans.
There are localized plans written or in progress for areas such as River North, the Near West Side and State Street, and theme-based plans that look at issues such as open space. What is lacking is an overall vision for the central area that links these piecemeal plans to ensure that what is good for one area is also good for the next.
Because development issues are controlled by ward bosses rather than City Hall, and the City Council virtually never votes against the wishes of the local alderman, an integrated vision for the city becomes even more critical.
The winner of this mayoral election, whether it’s Daley or his challenger, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, needs to bring order to the development boom.
That includes articulating what he wants his city to look like, but also his using power to codify those ideas and principles. The zoning laws are 40 years old and nearly obsolete; they need to be rewritten. And a master plan for the city, a blueprint if you will for zoning and other development issues, needs to be a priority for the mayor who is to lead Chicago into the next century.
Without such planning, thorny issues such as affordable housing rarely get addressed, and developments are thrown up without adequate exploration of their impact in and around the immediate vicinity.
The billion-dollar River East development, for example, was approved despite concerns in the neighborhood just west of Navy Pier and at City Hall that the impact on traffic congestion needs further study.
While the lack of a cohesive plan affects every part of the city, its absence is especially worrisome in the central area, an ever-expanding district now bounded, roughly, by Cermak Road, North Avenue, Ashland Avenue and the lake.
Problems of congestion, open space and conflicting land uses are multiplied in the central area because of its density. At the same time it is an area to which the world flocks and by which the world judges the city.
The lack of planning is partly the result of political calculation. Planning, by its nature, involves controversy, and Daley appears to do everything he can to avoid controversy.
In addition, Daley doesn’t like the long, involved planning process. Indeed, within his Planning Department, the focus isn’t making plans for the city but facilitating development–any sort of development–in Chicago.
“It’s a project-driven department,” said Lynne Cunningham, executive director of the SouthEast Chicago Development Commission.
It’s also a department where the burnout rate is huge. In 10 years, the agency has gone through four commissioners, and important midlevel planners have left at an even speedier pace.
“The whole focus of (Daley and his aides on) the fifth floor is: Build it tomorrow!” says one of those former planners.
The last comprehensive plan for the central area, spurred by the chimerical prospect of a World’s Fair here, was completed in 1983. Among other things, that plan laid the groundwork for the now acclaimed Museum Campus and relocation of the Outer Drive.
“It’s time to step back, take a look and re-evaluate doing another master plan,” said Bill Martin, urban planner with the Central Area Committee, the business group that worked with the city on the 1983 plan.
The matter gains urgency because of the accelerating and far-reaching change the area is undergoing with a heavy influx of residents. Sales of new units in the area have risen explosively in recent years from 500-plus in 1995 to more than 2,600 last year, according to figures from home-building consultant Tracy Cross & Associates.
This residential evolution of the central area, where the population is expected to exceed 120,000 in a couple of years, is one of the main reasons that downtown Chicago has remained vital despite the inexorable move of businesses to the suburbs. It not only adds excitement but acts as a shield in an economic slump.
And it staves off business flight as well. Loop employers like the fact that they are surrounded by a pool of highly educated young workers who don’t have to commute a long way and thus are willing to spend more time at the office.
It’s worth noting that the residential evolution didn’t come about by accident. The major impetus for downtown living came from the construction of Dearborn Park in the South Loop in the early 1980s as the result of a historic campaign by the city and corporate community–all stemming from a 1973 master plan.
But, increasingly, central Chicago seems to be paying a price for this rapid change and its lack of a blueprint for making sense of that change.
For instance, a study put out last spring by the Chicago Development Council, a group of downtown developers, property owners and large tenants in the central area, raised fears that the city could run out of land for new office buildings, particularly in the West Loop.
And a series of conflicts over development has occurred during the last several years in which the city’s role has often seemed wavering at best.
The two biggest downtown developments, the $1 billion River East and $500 million North Bridge projects, which will transform the blocks around Michigan Avenue near the Chicago River, were both approved last year amid messy wrangles that left all sides shaking their heads. Many still fear the outcome will be ugliness and gridlock.
The 3 1/2-year fight over developer John Buck’s North Bridge centered mostly on the fate of the McGraw-Hill Building at 520 N. Michigan Ave., a muted Art Deco edifice. The ultimate compromise is seen by landmark preservationists as a bad precedent for the future: tearing down the building and reconstructing the facade on a new structure.
And many fear traffic congestion will become a nightmare, compromising visitors’ ability to get to Navy Pier, which the city worked so long and so hard to turn into an attraction.
With River East, developer Dan McLean and Department of Planning and Development chief Christopher Hill said privately that they drove each other crazy in nine months of tortuous negotiations.
Meanwhile, Streeterville residents who fear that overcrowding and traffic jams will accompany the now-approved development are still worried because there was no Streeterville-area plan or city traffic study by which to judge the project. River East and smaller adjacent projects in the immediate area could bring 2,000 more housing units, 1,000 more hotel rooms and theater complexes with 37 movie screens.
Hill said a transportation management association including the developers and Navy Pier has been set up to deal with traffic problems, primarily through subsidizing a free trolley route. But, he said, “I’d like to do more.”
McLean and a Streeterville community group decried the lack of clear guidelines during the negotiating process. “There is a feeling that no one is looking at the overall process,” McLean said.
A master plan by itself is not going to result in solutions to development problems. But the process of creating it would engage developers, residents, businesses and preservationists in defining their concerns before specific projects are on the table. The inevitable controversy could at least be free of the added complications of already-invested money, market timing and deadlines.
And a plan would deal with development questions in a larger context. For instance, do more movie theaters, condos and hotel rooms around Michigan Avenue cause parking and congestion problems blocks away, perhaps near the expressway ramps on the west side of River North? And do height restrictions in the Gold Coast send developers scuttling to Streeterville or elsewhere?
Still, some city traditions blunt the efficacy of any plan: Political power in Chicago is closely held, and the divisions of power are firmly entrenched. Under a system that has grown even more rigid in recent years, the mayor controls citywide programs and policies, as well as the downtown area, while aldermen wield autocratic power within their wards.
This makes for a system of government that seems to put all the power in Daley’s hands and leaves the aldermen to rubber-stamp his wishes. But the aldermen are getting something in return.
In essence, an alderman has final say over any proposal in his or her ward; colleagues and even the mayor are loath to overrule an alderman when that person is deciding a ward matter.
Sometimes, that can work to the advantage of developers and community activists. When projects big and small can be shaped by negotiation rather than forced to conform to zoning codes, both sides have a chance to get at least some of what they want.
But in a city where friendships matter and money talks, every project is at the mercy of not only City Hall negotiations, but also neighborhood politics. And, without some central vision against which to measure aldermanic decisions, the process can give rise to nagging questions of whether a development is negotiated in good faith or clouted into existence.
Reuben Hedlund, a former head of the Chicago Plan Commission and a Gold Coast resident who spearheaded a recent effort to change zoning laws there, supports the aldermanic system because it puts government “as close to the public as possible.”
But he acknowledged that it isn’t always the best policy: “It does become troublesome when you deal with the development issues in a particular ward that have citywide versus merely local ramifications.”
That’s why it might make some sense to cede some power, once again, to the planners and put some thought into the rules of the development game.
There are signs that it can be done, and that it’s worth the effort. City planners, for instance, have reworked the complex density formulas for getting civic improvements–plazas, winter gardens, mass transit enhancements–in return for allowing developers to erect bigger buildings.
While density plans and zoning laws may be snoozers to most people, they provide the rules by which the city grows–ultimately determining how it feels to live in a neighborhood and walk down a street.
Given that just about everyone agrees the current zoning code is outdated–more suited for the 1950s, when it was written, than the 21st Century–a rewrite seems logical.
But that may not be enough.
“You don’t do a zoning ordinance change until you have a new master plan . . . the best thinking of what the city is to be,” said attorney Jack Guthman, former chairman of the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals who often represents builders and is ordinarily no friend to broad plans that could stifle free-market creativity.
The goal of both a master vision and a realistic zoning code would be to inject some predictability into the often chaotic development game.
The first proposed high-rise development in Greektown, a 38-story residential and commercial complex proposed for 1 N. Halsted St., is one of many examples of how vexed the process can be.
Even as the city was developing a plan for the burgeoning West Loop neighborhood, the Plan Commission approved the project. The proposal was headed toward a spring ground-breaking when a neighborhood faction objecting to the size of the tower successfully lobbied Ald. Walter Burnett (27th) to hold things up, effectively end-running the Planning Department.
Burnett, whose ward includes the Near West Side as well as the booming area around Cabrini-Green, deals with more development issues than any other alderman. He decries a lack of communication between the central city planners and the neighborhood residents who have to live with the developments they approve.
Burnett’s advice to developers is, not unexpectedly, to go to the alderman first.
But who is to guarantee that an alderman isn’t subjected to pressures from special interests who don’t necessarily have the public good at heart–for instance, individuals who object to their views being blocked?
That question has also arisen on the Gold Coast, where developer Draper and Kramer is suing the city over whether it has the right to build a high-rise at Banks Street and Lake Shore Drive, a development approved 20 years ago.
But as the company was finally ready to proceed, powerful residents–including Hedlund–
pressured their alderman, Charles Bernardini (43rd), to rezone the land to exclude a high-rise. Then Bernardini and Ald. Burton Natarus (42nd) rammed through a special ordinance limiting future Gold Coast construction to 125 feet or less–a restriction with still-unexplored ramifications.
That kind of ad hoc legislation “is not the preferred route” for rational planning, Hill said.
Instead of sledgehammer fixes dictated by whoever can shout the loudest and hire the most $400-an-hour lawyers, a better option is to articulate a vision of the central city heading into the new millennium.
Guidelines clear to all could perhaps moderate and expedite the protracted and rancorous negotiations between developers, city planners and community residents. They could even soften the common perception that every development is a back-room deal brokered by an alderman under suspicious circumstances.
The very act of creating it–perhaps through a joint effort of the Planning Department and a civic group such as the Central Area Committee–might suggest new initiatives.
Urban planner Martin, who advocates a new 10-year master plan, pointed out that the previous two 10-year plans, created in 1973 and 1983, indeed called for changes that have since come about.
The 1973 plan included a proposal for what became Dearborn Park. The 1983 plan not only included the Museum Campus, which has reconfigured the downtown lakefront, but also a precursor to the Lakefront Millennium Park, which is moving ahead to enhance the Loop’s front lawn.
Not the least, such a plan could improve communication among the city, its residents, politicians, developers and others with a stake in downtown’s future.
Once adopted, it could be put on the Internet for all to examine, with links to specific city development plans like Millennium Park and to traffic or housing studies that back it up.
Such wide access, perhaps including an interactive component allowing for comment, could only enhance Chicagoans’–and even suburbanites’–sense of proprietorship and pride in the city’s core.
Given that kind of broad distribution, a new plan could have the magic, to paraphrase Burnham, to stir the blood.
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ON THE INTERNET: Read the complete series at
chicagotribune.com/go/blueprint
THE SERIES
FEB.7: Chicago’s global role will be defined by its ability to adapt to economic change.
MONDAY: Dealing with the city’s aging infrastructure.
TUESDAY: Downtown booms, but is there a master plan?
WEDNESDAY: Changing neighborhoods and new immigrants reshape city.
THURSDAY: Crime drops, but police corruption lingers.
FRIDAY: City schools have improved-can they be a decent place to learn?
SUNDAY: Chicago no longer dominates state politics, presenting new challenges.
