In an office filled with mementos of his more than 25 years in county government, Phillip Bus calls attention, instead, to a poster-board-size enlargement of a simple line graph that offers a look toward the region’s future.
The chart plots the dramatic population growth that Kane County has seen in the past decade and likely will see in the next two–from about 317,000 people in 1990 to the 403,000 expected when the results of the 2000 census are official and up to 552,000 by 2020.
The growth over the past 10 years is roughly equivalent to adding a city the size of Elgin to the county.
Over three decades, Kane’s population would increase by 76 percent, if the estimates prove accurate.
“That’s pretty clear evidence that we just have to keep preparing for growth and change,” said Bus, a Kane County government employee for 28 years and its director of development for nearly 20 years.
“The next decade,” he said, “will be very challenging.”
Managing growth and coping with change during a time of economic uncertainty are among the challenges that Kane and neighboring DuPage County face at the start of a new millennium.
The two counties are rich in vibrant communities, newer subdivisions, a variety of transportation links, high-technology industries, classy shopping centers and attractive recreational opportunities. There mostly is optimism about the future, but also some unease at news of layoffs and store closings, both close to home and throughout the Chicago area.
“Definitely, it’s going to be a soft landing for 2001,” said Jack Kapoor, a veteran professor of economics and marketing at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. “There is a ripple effect in all the collar counties.”
But, he said, “This is a temporary slowdown. I’m very optimistic over the long run.”
Jack Tenison, DuPage County’s director of human services, sees the impact of a slowing economy in the number of people who have been showing up since mid- to late December at the Illinois Employment and Training Center in Lombard.
The facility, supported by federal, state and county funds, is a one-stop center for people seeking unemployment benefits and job training.
On some days, Tenison said, there isn’t an empty seat among the dozen or so computer stations available for job seekers looking to search for employment opportunities on the Internet.
The sense of anxiety “is almost palpable,” he said.
But, like Kapoor, Tenison sees a bright future for the region in the long run.
“If there is any area of the Midwest that is in the best position to weather an economic downtown, it’s DuPage,” he said. “We will do quite well.”
In DuPage, the explosive population growth of past decades appears to have slowed as the amount of land available for residential development dwindles.
Where once farmfields were planted with acres of new single-family homes, the approach now in DuPage and the eastern portions of Kane tends toward filling in gaps by building on property that initially was passed over for development. Builders also are adding higher-density residential development to vintage downtowns in Elmhurst, Lombard, Wheaton, Aurora and other communities in the two counties.
Planners expect more townhouses and condominiums in DuPage’s future.
“Gradually, with time, you’re seeing communities that are more urban in character than the DuPage of 10 to 20 years ago,” said John Paige, director of planning services for the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission. The commission is a state-chartered planning agency for the six-county metropolitan region.
Paige said that the issue for many of the communities in DuPage and Kane has become how to “mature gracefully.”
DuPage’s population is expected to exceed 985,000 by 2020–an increase of 26 percent since 1990–according to NIPC forecasts.
But employment is projected to grow at an even greater rate, expected to increase by more than 50 percent between 1990 and 2020. DuPage has become a jobs magnet, especially for high-tech businesses that are opting to locate in a corridor along the East-West Tollway.
As businesses and industries move west from Cook County, the communities in Kane are becoming bedroom suburbs for DuPage, Bus said.
DuPage and Kane share concerns about traffic congestion, flood-control and drainage issues, public school funding and open-space preservation. Finding money to pay for mental health programs, without driving up health insurance costs, is another emerging issue.
The call for a fairer way to fund public education “is a drumbeat that is not going to go away,” said state Sen. Peter Roskam, a Republican from Wheaton who represents DuPage’s core.
But it is a topic Roskam doesn’t expect lawmakers to address in depth during a legislative session this spring that will be dominated by tensions over redistricting.
If rewriting the school funding formula and redrawing legislative districts were to be lumped together in one session, said Roskam, “That would be a perfect storm.”
DuPage and Kane also are seeing an increasing diversity in their populations.
Nearly half of DuPage’s population growth in the 1990s is believed to result from an increase in the number of minorities who have chosen to move to the suburbs. The growth in the minority population, particularly in the county’s Hispanic communities, is bringing changes to its religious institutions, its social service agencies and to its politics.
Though there has been little increase in the percentage of African-Americans in DuPage, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates suggest that the county’s Hispanic population grew to 6.1 percent in 1999 from 4.4 percent in 1990 and its Asian population grew to 7.1 percent from 5.1 percent.
In Kane County, nearly 20 percent of the population was Hispanic in 1999, according to Census Bureau estimates, though some say the number is actually much higher.
Chris Ellerman, executive director of Wheaton-based Outreach Community Ministries, said DuPage is “a county that is becoming more racially and culturally diverse.” But, he said, he is not sure that schools and not-for-profit agencies have caught up with the changes.
There remains a need for outreach in Hispanic communities and among the growing number of Russian-speaking immigrants.
“We’re seeing organizations struggling to make those adjustments,” said Ellerman, who runs a not-for-profit agency that offers community-based programs in Wheaton, Warrenville and Carol Stream.
Diversity may play an increasingly important role in DuPage and Kane during the coming decades.
But the major issue at the present–as well as in the immediate past and probably well into the future–continues to be traffic congestion.
“I think suburbia anywhere in the United States generally has not done a good job of building highway capacity in advance of traffic,” Bus said.
State and local officials are spending millions of dollars on road-building projects in and near DuPage and Kane Counties–and millions of dollars more to plan for future road projects.
“The two counties have an extensive transportation system that needs to be maintained but it also needs to grow wisely to make maximum use of it,” Paige said.
Adding new highway lanes is not always easy in DuPage, where the property needed to widen roads or build new turn lanes is expensive to acquire or condemn. Highway planners also sometimes face community opposition that is more articulate and better organized than in the past.
In the Glen Ellyn and Lombard area, a grassroots group raised money to hire an engineering firm to aid them in their opposition to a state proposal to widen Illinois Highway 53 between roughly North Avenue and Park Boulevard.
Traffic issues increasingly are grabbing the attention of the business community, which sees gridlock as detriment to growth.
The important service sector especially is concerned about attracting employees who are needed to fill lower-paying jobs but must commute from Chicago or distant suburbs because affordable housing tends to be scarce in DuPage.
With the increasing number of corporate offices that have moved to DuPage and Kane have come more restaurants, hotels and other types of service industries. Communities want the office campuses, but they have not planned as well for the diversity of housing stock that is needed to accommodate a diversity of jobs and incomes, Ellerman says.
In addition to the road-building projects, DuPage officials are looking at other methods of easing congestion, such as synchronizing traffic signals across community boundaries. And increasingly, it seems, there is a recognition that mass transit may have a role in a county overrun by cars.
“I’m a firm believer in the fact that the people of DuPage County are going to use their cars to get around,” County Board Chairman Robert Schillerstrom told a business breakfast in late January. But he added that he thinks “there is a niche for public transportation in DuPage County.”
Schillerstrom also notes that more people now commute to jobs in DuPage than leave the county for jobs elsewhere in the Chicago area, which means local governments need to take a regional approach to transportation issues.
“It’s important to us to be able to get those people in and get those people out,” Schillerstrom said. “So we can’t just stop our thinking at our boundaries.”
Doug Krause, a veteran member of the Naperville City Council and a resident of the community since 1969, sees a larger role for mass transit.
He agrees with Schillerstrom that “we need to widen what roads we can widen.”
But he also suggests that transportation agencies study the possibility of building a rapid-transit line in the middle of the North-South Tollway and he supports the ongoing studies that are looking at putting commuter trains on the Eastern, Joliet & Elgin railroad tracks that swing through the western edge of DuPage.
“We need to look at all the problems regionally instead of just in individual communities,” Krause said.
He and NIPC’s Paige are looking at DuPage’s growth and reaching the same conclusion: as population density increases, mass transit becomes a viable option.
Suburban residents may love their cars, but they also increasingly seem to favor acquiring and saving open space–parks, forest preserves, greenways and, at least in Kane County, farmland.
Despite the growing suburbanization of the region, Bus says he has seen positives in Kane during his years in county government. Among them is the revitalization of the Fox River and the downtowns through which it flows.
Officials in Aurora set to work in the mid-1980s to renew parts of the community’s downtown and are pushing ahead now with plans to redevelop a 40-acre RiverCity core. Proposed are a multi-purpose arena, a convention center, a hotel, entertainment facilities and housing.
At one time, Bus said, residents tended to turn away from the river. But now the water quality has improved, and there are attractions for tastes that range from cycling along bike paths to gambling on riverboat casinos.
“It’s something for everybody to be proud of because it required so much coordination and cooperative planning,” Bus said.
He says he also is encouraged by the amount of farmland that remains in the western reaches of the county.
“The general character of Kane County,” he says, “is still intact.”
