Now and then you hear about a condominium board or homeowners association from hell, but mostly such remarks are mere pique.
A Sunday episode of Fox’s “The X-Files,” however, featured a planned community so rigid that it employed some totemic conjuration from Tibet to punish violators of its codes with death in some manner too disgusting to show on screen.
If the homeowners association president of “Arcadia,” the mythical California community in the episode, wanted the monster to take someone out, he broke the bulb in the quaint light standard outside the intended victim’s house. They also could be sentenced to death for putting a basketball hoop in the driveway or a plastic ornament on the lawn.
Fantasy? Maybe, but the Arlington, Va.-based Community Associations Institute, which represents more than 200,000 condominium boards, homeowners associations and cooperatives, took it seriously enough to send out a press release setting the record straight.
“Most planned communities offer a positive living experience– a neighborhood with a strong sense of community and a high degree of resident participation,” said Barbara Keenan, the group’s president, in a statement. “But we know that some community associations need help developing effective and harmonious governance principles.”
Institute spokeswoman Donna Reichle said the episode’s writers seized on “an idea with a kernel of reality and took it to extremes to make a science fiction mystery out of it.”
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With all the condo conversions going on in Chicago, there are a lot of newcomers to condo living, and they should be aware of that “kernel of reality” about condo board tyranny.
That way they won’t be too shocked when a slime zombie comes to eat their skin away for putting up a non-standard door knocker.
Over the hill: Speaking of mysteries, how do you hide 30 acres of land in the middle of Chicago?
Put piles of dirt around it, apparently. If there’s something anomalous about hiding land with dirt, perhaps it’s all a question of perception. Is it land or is it dirt?
This conundrum was faced by Jeff Heymann, a broker with Colliers, Bennett & Kahnweiler, who was sent out by his boss, David Kahnweiler, to scour Chicago for property suitable for industrial development after the company saw big demand for newly constructed, high-tech warehouse and manufacturing facilities in city locations.
Ultimately, Heymann came across a stretch of the 4300 block of West Chicago Avenue where one side of the street was edged with a 15-foot dirt berm so extensive it was impossible to tell what was behind it.
“If you drove by the site, you wouldn’t see it. You would see a big mound, but you wouldn’t know what was behind it,” said Kahnweiler. “It’s pretty bizarre.”
Not to be daunted, Heymann climbed the berm to see what was on the other side, and there it was–more dirt.
“After he cleaned his pants and counted what his commission would be, he called me,” Kahnweiler said. “We were all surprised. If you looked at an aerial map, you would see how obvious it was, but no one did.”
The land was owned by Waste Management Inc., which had dropped previous plans for it years ago but hadn’t put it on the market. Kahnweiler closed on the property last year and is working with the city on a plan to develop an industrial park there that could bring hundreds of jobs to the economically depressed Austin neighborhood.
Fueling appetites: Ever wonder what happens to old gas stations when they die?
Hiffman Shaffer Associates, which represented BP Amoco PLC in the sales of a number of the service station properties in the Chicago area that the now-London-based oil giant is unloading, reports they mostly sell fuel for the stomach.
White Castle bought a site on Main Street in Lombard, Leona’s Italian Restaurant bought one at 111th Street and Western Avenue in Chicago to expand its parking, and the J.J. Peppers convenience store chain bought sites on 95th Street in Oak Lawn and on Golf Road in Schaumburg.
On the other hand, fuel of a different kind will be dispensed in Evanston. A site on Dempster Street is to be redeveloped for a currency exchange.
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