Fueled by new housing booms in communities such as Plainfield, Joliet and Mokena, Will County’s population bubbled over the half-million mark in 2000, according to census figures released Wednesday, making the south-suburban collar county the state’s second-fastest growing county after Cook County.
With a 2000 population of 502,266, Will County grew by more than 40 percent since the Census Bureau counted 357,313 residents in 1990.
The increase has breathed new economic life into Joliet and accompanied rapid business development in places such as Bolingbrook and Tinley Park. But it has also clogged roads, overburdened courtrooms, strained county services and given school board members many a sleepless night worrying that the new schools they are building will be too small by the time they open.
Mirroring a trend in the west suburbs, Will County and the far southwest Cook County communities of Orland Park, Tinley Park and Lemont have dragged suburban sprawl outward while older, inner-ring suburbs such as Evergreen Park, Oak Lawn and Calumet City have either lost people or experienced little population change.
And keeping pace with another suburban trend, minority populations in Will County have grown at a faster rate than the general population, with Hispanics leading the way. In the 2000 count, Will County had 43,768 Hispanics, a 119 percent increase from the 18,706 counted in 1990. Most of that growth was in Joliet, where the Hispanic population doubled during the ’90s. It has almost tripled since 1980. Bolingbrook’s Hispanic population more than tripled since 1990, gaining 4,980 for a 2000 Hispanic population of 7,371.
The county’s black population grew from 38,721 to 51,980, a 38 percent change. And the number of Asians grew from 4,966 in 1990 to 11,125, up 55 percent.
While minority population increases have been important in Will County, the real story has been mostly non-Hispanic white growth in new subdivisions of single-family homes.
“It’s really suburban sprawl. It’s a lot of people wanting their own homes and more space,” said Michael Mertens, Tinley Park’s economic development director. “Twenty years ago, Oak Lawn was your farther-south major community. It’s just sprawling out from there. The availability of transportation is a big part of it.”
Tinley Park’s population grew to 48,401 up from 37,121 in 1990. But the biggest surge in population still lies ahead for the community that now straddles Interstate Highway 80 in both Cook and Will Counties. Tinley Park’s population by 2020 is expected to top 72,000.
Joliet’s decision to move its borders westward through annexations in the late 1980s has resulted in a 38 percent population increase since the 1990 census. The Will County seat is now Illinois’ seventh largest city, with 106,221 people.
In 1990, when Plainfield was still a 4,500-resident town just beginning to feel the tug from a rural to a suburban lifestyle, it was devastated by a tornado that killed 29 people in Plainfield and other nearby towns and destroyed whole neighborhoods. But the disaster only accelerated the boom. Ten years later, Plainfield is home to 13,038 people, a 186 percent increase.
Mokenahas experienced a 138 percent change in population since 1990, growing from 6,120 to 14,583.
While the census figures do not surprise area planners, who have regularly commissioned special censuses to avoid being shortchanged in per-capita-based tax revenue, they do show growth projections on track.
Those projections paint a picture of a very different place than the Will County of 2000. By 2020, the county could have more than 820,000 residents if the airport proposed for Peotone is built. (Even without an airport, Will County is expected to have 738,000 residents.)
As the subdivisions push south and Will County becomes more suburban, it necessarily becomes less agricultural. And the farmers who cultivate the county’s remaining 294,000 acres of farmland have been feeling that rub for years.
Twenty years ago a farmer peering out from the cab of his combine as he harvested corn or soybeans would see uninterrupted vistas of flat land. These days, his horizons are likely to be crowded with subdivisions of new houses. And inside those houses live people who don’t know much or care much about what it takes to plant and harvest.
Angry calls to police from suburbanites peeved by the nocturnal chugging of tractor engines have become an all too frequent sign of the times, said Mark Schneidewind, director of the Will County Farm Bureau.
Schneidewind has a classic tale of such clashes.
An incident a couple of years ago “hit a nerve,” Schneidewind said. “There was a farmer who was combining along a subdivision. When they combine, it throws the stalks out the back. Some of them kept landing in a guy’s yard, and he called the police and wanted to file a complaint that the farmer was littering in his yard.”
In addition to the culture clash, suburban sprawl presents farmers with an even more pressing problem. Profit margins in small agricultural operations, if they exist at all, are razor thin. Encroaching development often pushes the price of land from between $3,000 and $4,000 an acre to as high as $5,000 an acre, out of the reach of most farmers, Schneidewind said.
Will County’s growth is just part of a development picture in the southwest suburbs that has for years gone largely unheralded in the shadow of booms in DuPage, Kane, Lake and McHenry Counties.
In 1970, Orland Park was still a small town. But as people from the Southwest Side of Chicago continued pushing the suburban frontier farther southwest, builders gobbled up farmland in Orland Township. In the mid-’70s the village secured the development of a regional shopping mall, Orland Square, and things really took off from there. By the 1990 census, 35,720 people called Orland Park home.
The 2000 census counted 51,077 in Orland Park, and the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission projects that by 2020 the village will have a population of 68,820.
These days Orland Park officials are more interested in reining in their growth than in promoting more and more building. Preservation of open space has become a priority. The village has recently acquired parcels of 14, 19 and 26 acres to be preserved as open space. Officials have applied for grants to help buy two more parcels–of 30 and 80 acres.
Orland Park officials also have taken up a nearly constant lobbying effort for state money to widen roads. The main arteries through town–159th Street, 143rd Street, and La Grange Road–are all state roads, community development director Bob Sullivan said.
The immediate impact of all the development Orland Park has enjoyed is felt every rush hour.
“It loads up the state roads,” Sullivan. “We need some help from the state.”
