Although Downers Grove predates Woodridge by more than 80 years, the neighboring villages have a few common ingredients that seem to make people want to call them home.
For Jim and Jackie Heiniger, it was practical matters that drew them to Downers Grove as newlyweds 19 years ago: the availability of affordable housing and location.
“We found a home we liked off the pond. Nineteen years ago, it was a house we could afford,” said Jackie Heiniger.
Jackie, who came from Darien, and Jim, who was originally from Oak Brook, said they wanted to live close to their families and that the Downers Grove locale is easily accessible to Jim’s workplace in Joliet.
Property taxes in Downers Grove also seemed more reasonable than in some of the other west suburban towns they had considered, so the couple purchased their first house in a village that traces its roots to 1832 with the arrival of Pierce Downer from New York.
“We got a little house and didn’t know if we would stay forever,” Jim Heiniger acknowledged.
Nineteen years later, with their family having grown to include six children ranging in age from 2 to 17, the Heinigers are planning on remodeling their home, saying they intend to stay put. What’s keeping the couple in Downers Grove is perhaps less tangible.
“I think Downers Grove is family-friendly. We’ve got the YMCA and a lot of parks and open space,” Jackie Heiniger said. “It’s just a nice town.”
Also as a matter of practicality, Woodridge homeowner Geri Slovacek said she and her husband, Leo, chose Downers Grove’s southwestern neighbor as the place to live because of its accessibility to major transportation networks, among other things. The semi-retired couple made the move to DuPage County seven years ago after living for 36 years in Berwyn.
After sifting through such suburbs as Naperville and Bolingbrook, the couple was sold on a $200,000-plus new home in a subdivision on the south side of Woodridge, off of Woodward Avenue between 83rd and 75th Streets.
For the Slovaceks, Woodridge’s location is the key, with Interstate Highway 355 slicing through the center of the village, Interstate Highway 55 cutting through its south section and Illinois Highway 53 extending through the western section. The town also is close to U.S. Highway 34 and the East-West Tollway.
“This is such a convenient area,” Slovacek said. “And it’s pretty out here; there are so many new things happening out here.”
But Downers Grove and Woodridge, which both boast serene wooded settings with nearby forest preserves and expansive park land, have their differences.
“Downers Grove represents the established, traditional DuPage County community that is over 100 years old, that was built and expanded along the Burlington railroad tracks,” said longtime Woodridge Mayor William F. Murphy, who added that his town is one of the newer communities in the county, one that grew up along major transportation networks instead of a railroad.
That puts the towns at different stages of growth.
What 41-year-old Woodridge is experiencing is still new growth, much of which is occurring near the interchanges of Interstates 355 and 55, said Staci Hulseberg, the town’s planning and development director.
Internationale Centre, said to be one of the largest multiuse business parks under development in the Chicago area, continues to be a major generator for new growth in town, Hulseberg said, as does Seven Bridges, a 400-acre residential, commercial, office and recreational development, which this year added a multiscreen Cinemark and IMAX theater complex and a 1,200-guest banquet facility.
Woodridge’s first 20 years of development were primarily residential. When some 400 homeowners in the south DuPage area agreed to incorporate their neighborhood into the Village of Woodridge in 1959, the town encompassed only two-thirds of a square mile. Aggressive annexations and comprehensive land-use planning over the years have yielded an 8.5-square-mile town with a population of 29,624. Planners expect annexations to continue through the next 20 years to bring the projected size of the village to 12.25 square miles, Hulseberg said. The town’s population is projected to increase to 42,327 by 2020.
Today, officials tout the town’s diverse housing stock, which they say ranges from condominiums priced at $70,000 to half-million-dollar luxury single-family homes. They also praise a local multifamily housing ordinance adopted in 1993 that places maintenance standards and requirements for annual inspections on owners of apartments, condominiums and townhouses, which make up around 40 percent of the more than 11,000 households in town, Hulseberg said.
While new housing development is continuing (officials note that more than 70 single-family homes were built last year, ranging in price from $237,000 to more than $320,000 each, and 24 luxury townhouses ranging in price from $208,000 to $260,000 were built), village leaders in the last 20 years have shifted their attention to the economic development of the town.
“It’s changing Woodridge from not just a quality residential community, but also a community that offers commercial, warehouse, office and, along with it, jobs,” Murphy said.
Non-residential development helps reduce the tax burden on local residents. But Woodridge also is seeing more employee-rich types of businesses setting up shop in town, which could offer another benefit to residents.
“We’ve been seeing a lot of office and high-tech businesses that have more jobs to offer local residents,” Hulseberg said. “It gives all of our residents the opportunity not only to live here and shop here but also to work here.”
For example, officials expect the employment level of the Internationale Centre business park, which is said to be the top contributor to Woodridge’s tax base, to increase from 4,700 jobs to more than 5,500 jobs once it is fully built out.
Murphy, who has been Woodridge’s mayor since 1981 and who is also completing his 30th year of service with Woodridge Elementary School District 68, where he serves as assistant superintendent of personnel, said that 10 years from now there should be little property left in the village to be developed.
“It’s really going to be absolutely imperative that the developments we allow to go forward are of the highest quality. It’s the completing of the village in a way that everyone can be proud of,” Murphy said. “It necessitates planning that will result in the kind of quality economic development that we’ve seen and the quality residential development.”
The growth occurring in Woodridge is not “haphazard growth,” the town’s planning and development director said. “This is planned growth.”
In Downers Grove, planning services director Ken Rathje said following a plan is essential to responsible growth.
“If you develop in a responsible manner, you follow your land-use plan, you work with your building codes, you do your traffic analysis, you keep things in balance, then your development will fit in very well with the surrounding area,” Rathje said.
For leaders of 13-square-mile Downers Grove, which was incorporated in 1873 and is projected to grow in population from nearly 50,986 to more than 54,000 by 2020, the emphasis is on revival.
“We’re pretty much built out; there’s not enough space for more housing,” said Downers Grove Mayor Brian Krajewski, a 38-year-old lifelong resident of the village who was elected to the town’s top post last year. “We’re a more mature community, so we’re going to see over the next 10 years a lot of redevelopment.”
That redevelopment already can be seen at the heart of the community, the village’s downtown, which is in the midst of an $8.5 million facelift. Officials said the completion of the project, which includes the installation of new sanitary sewers, storm sewers, water mains, pavement and sidewalks, decorative lighting and planting and seating areas, should breathe new life into the village’s central business district.
“We’re the host to the infrastructure. We want to guarantee that if people put stuff there it’s going to work,” Rathje said. “If we guarantee a modern infrastructure, it certainly is the first of a very important series of steps to encourage redevelopment of the downtown area.”
Despite the anticipated strain on business during recent construction seasons, downtown merchants seem to welcome the project.
Duane Baker, proprietor of Herbert’s, a men’s clothing store that has stood along Downers Grove’s Main Street since 1940, said the project can only benefit existing businesses by bringing more parking, and drawing more people and new shops to the downtown.
“It is only going to help revive our downtown and bring people back to our downtown who had maybe lost interest in it,” Baker said. “I think this will be the next best thing to Naperville. We’ll have one of the nicest and most successful downtowns in the western suburbs.”
The village in recent years also saw a need to revive Ogden Avenue, a 3.7-mile commercial corridor extending from the Interstate 355 interchange at the village’s west boundary to Williams Street on the east. The village hired a consultant to come up with a plan that would help steer redevelopment along the corridor and strengthen the village’s economic base.
“In the next five years, we’re looking to see that Ogden Avenue is an example of a rebirth,” said Steve Rockwell, the village’s economic development director. “We’re trying to make Ogden Avenue from the east and west (borders) of our community turn into something that looks like a neighborhood.”
In order for businesses along Ogden Avenue to keep up with area malls or shopping plazas along 75th Street at the south end of town, the village needs to promote sidewalk and streetscape improvements, newer and less obtrusive advertising signs and building renovations.
Since the village implemented the plan last year, Rockwell said, 23 businesses along the corridor have modernized their properties, making renovations to signs, parking lots and buildings.
The village also offered sales tax rebates to spur the redevelopment of a deteriorating structure that had stood vacant along Ogden Avenue, adjacent to a Jewel-Osco, for about five years. The former hardware store is now home to Burpee Gardens retail store, owned by Warminster, Pa.-based W. Atlee Burpee & Co., which is among the nation’s largest catalog retailers of seeds, plants and garden products.
Along with redevelopment, Downers Grove planners still anticipate a fair amount of development over the next 10 years, specifically in the form of office buildings added to an office park at the northwest section of town, Rathje said.
“It’s not just small potatoes that’s left at all,” Rathje said. “This is an area where the village has focused toward office and office research activities.”
Officials have said that the area, which is in close proximity to the East-West and North-South Tollways, could also be one of the few places in the village that has enough space to house a convention center or a conference facility, an idea that could lure more dollars to the town. The village recently hired a consultant to study the feasibility of such a facility in Downers Grove.
Looking to the future, Rathje said he also sees stability in large parts of Downers Grove.
“We have a well-maintained housing stock. It’s a diverse housing stock. We have older homes that are in good shape and newer homes that are in good shape. There’s a lot of Downers Grove that will just continue on with a great deal of stability,” Rathje said. “It’s not a situation where everything is going to change.”
One situation that has changed over the last few years in Downers Grove is an increase in its daytime population, a result of more office complexes in town, Krajewski said.
“DuPage was known as a bedroom community. Now we’re seeing that we have more residents that stay and work in DuPage County,” Krajewski said. “We’re experiencing more pressure on our police and fire departments; they’ve grown tremendously.”
About five years ago, Krajewski said, the village implemented a utility tax, which “kind of put the burden on having the office businesses having to pay the tax to help pay for the safety.”
A need for more parking in the downtown, the construction of underpasses at grade crossings and the need to curb speeding traffic are all challenges that come with a growing population, Krajewski said.
The mayor said he expects to see an underpass come to Downers Grove in the next few years. And officials are working on a campaign to help remind motorists to slow down.
As for parking needs, Krajewski said: “Ten years ago and 10 years prior to that and 10 years prior to that, they were studying parking decks in the downtown. It’s 40 years later and the village still hasn’t implemented anything in there. I’d like to see a lot of the stuff we get resident input on and studies to be taken to the stage of implementation.”
Officials of both towns tout the wide range of opportunities for residents to get involved in the future of their communities and for their opinions to be heard.
Both Woodridge and Downers Grove conduct annual surveys to determine how residents rate their towns. Woodridge holds an annual town meeting and several neighborhood dialogue sessions throughout the year to keep residents abreast with village happenings and to hear their concerns.
Woodridge’s mayor said the No. 1 priority surfacing from the latest town meeting was the need for increased opportunities for youths to serve their community. As a result, Murphy said, village leaders met recently in a workshop session with young people to identify some of the things the youth felt the community should be doing.
In Downers Grove, the village’s Human Services Commission, a panel that gives the Village Council input on social issues in the community, launched a pilot program dubbed the Community Dialogue Project. Study circles, groups of eight to 12 residents, met for five consecutive weeks in the spring with a trained facilitator to discuss community topics.
“Everyone agreed that we don’t have any real burning issue right now, but if we could get the community to talk to each other in dialogue form, rather than in debate form, we may lay the groundwork for solving community problems,” said Barbara Leiber, director of the village’s Department of Social and Health Services who helped coordinate the project. “There is an alternative that we haven’t tapped into yet, which is the dialogue process.”
DOWNERS GROVE, WOODRIDGE FACTS AND FIGURES
Population
Downers Grove
1990: 46,858
1999: 50,986
2004 (estimate): 52,207
Woodridge
1990: 26,256
1999: 29,624
2004 (estimate): 30,704
Employment
Downers Grove
1990: 40,842
2020 (forecast): 63,529
Woodridge
1990: 4,408
2020 (forecast): 24,482
Sales tax revenue by fiscal year
Downers Grove
1998-1999: $12.54 million
1999-2000 (estimate): $13 million
Woodridge
1998-1999: $2.7 million
1999-2000 (estimate): $2.85 million
Median income
Downers Grove: $83,943
Woodridge: $76,135
Median age
Downers Grove: 37.9
Woodridge: 33.2
Median home value
Downers Grove: $178,000
Woodridge: $140,000
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, MLS of Northern Illinois, Claritas, Villages of Downers Grove and Woodridge.
Note: Fiscal year runs May 1 to April 30.
