Writing about regional planning often seems a waste of time and ink because government planners are a day late and a dollar short of the real estate developers.
They’re not about to catch up, either, the way things are going. Trying to channel growth in northern Illinois is like trying to catch falling water with a net.
You might think this isn’t your problem, but you’d be wrong. Twenty-five years from now, when you’re waiting in the left-turn lane on Illinois Highway 47, hoping to make the next green arrow onto Kreutzer Road, you’ll know what I mean.
Highway 47? Kreutzer Road?
They sound unfamiliar now, but Route 47 and Kreutzer, where the skunk and possum now roam, are destined to become the epicenter of new construction in the Chicago region. By the time your newborn child or grandchild reaches college age, that rural intersection, 48 miles northwest of the Loop, will be as familiar to the mind’s eye as Golf and Meacham Roads near Woodfield Mall.
That much became apparent last week with the announcement that the giant Del Webb Corp. is about to plunk down 4,700 new homes for senior citizens off Route 47 in Huntley. A frost-belt version of Del Webb’s successful Sun City spreads out West and down South, the instant community will be down the road from the Huntley Factory Shops, one of those outlet malls which are springing up along the suburban fringe. Nearby there will be a discount “power” mall (whatever that is), an automotive mall featuring up to 14 dealerships and an industrial park where the anchor tenant will be manufacturing–what else?–Weber barbecue grills.
And that’s just Huntley, a sleepy burg of 3,000 that’s projected to become a go-go-burb of 41,000 by 2020. All up and down what’s being called the Route 47 “corridor,” crossroads towns with names like Lily Lake, Elburn and Plato Center are in the throes of the next great suburban land rush. From Oswego on the lower Fox River to Michigan City across the lake in Indiana, the region’s next outer ring is under construction. The Schaumburgs and the Napervilles, the Bolingbrooks and the Orland Parks, soon will be yesterday’s news. For developers, the game has moved farther out.
There was bitter-sweet irony in the timing of last week’s announcement by Del Webb. The very next day, a consortium of government planners called the Chicago Area Transportation Study, or CATS, released its high-minded vision of the way the region ought to grow over the next 20 years.
The consortium’s “2020 Regional Transportation Plan” is a map of a world that ought to be. It places heavy emphasis on maintaining and improving existing roads and commuter rail lines. It calls for more and better transit links among the region’s existing employment and residential centers (like a new transit line from the Kennedy-Edens Expressway junction to Midway Airport and then east to the Dan Ryan Expressway, similar to the old Crosstown Expressway route.) It has plans for greenways and bikeways, for dedicated van-pooling lanes and for park-and-ride lots. And there is a sense, throughout the plan, that the Chicago region needs to husband its transportation dollars because the Washington spigot will gush no more.
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Which is all well and good, except for the fact that the private real estate market is running off in an entirely different direction. And in northeastern Illinois, it’s the developers and their political allies who direct the path of growth, not the regional planners with their maps and charts.
My guess is that, by 2020, the region’s top transportation priority will be another north-south expressway serving that Route 47 corridor. And that this additional beltway, the region’s third, eventually will get built . . . whereas the O’Hare-to-Midway transit line, like many of the sensible CATS proposals, won’t be.
Illinois has no mechanism to channel development along paths served by public transportation; or to funnel it back into older, emptying-out communities where the public works already are paid for. On the contrary, virtually all the important economic incentives are stacked in favor of building new in places like Huntley and Lily Lake. Land out there is clean and cheap. And the little towns in Kane, McHenry and Kendall Counties, pitted against one another by Illinois statute in a sink-or-swim race for sales and property taxes, will be quick to offer sewer and water. Huntley stands to collect about $250 for every Chevy Blazer sold at that new auto mall. Why let the gravy go to Gilberts or Marengo?
The planners at CATS might like to deny that third beltway to the Route 47 boomtowns, but when decision time comes, they won’t have a prayer. After the traffic starts backing up at intersections like Kreutzer Road, the Illinois Toll Highway Authority will ride to the rescue, just as it is riding now into central Lake County with a tollway spur aimed at relieving the tie-up at Route 53 and Lake-Cook Road. The authority, you see, is an independent political creature, not bound by CATS’ maps and charts. It follows the developers, making possible their new subdivisions while passing along the cost of getting there to the driving public.
And what of that public? Who’s to deny the right of Americans to live and work in Huntley or anyplace else they choose?
Certainly not me. But I don’t much like paying for the sprawl. Which we all will, in more ways than most folks realize, long after the developers have made their money and moved on.