A non-stop parade of plans for new subdivisions, which could add 3,300 homes to the small town of Sycamore over the next decade, galvanized a group of residents last fall into working to slow growth on Chicago’s suburban frontier.
Alarmed at the loss of farmland around the DeKalb County town of 12,000, the group collected enough signatures for an advisory referendum asking the Sycamore City Council to stop approving subdivisions for seven years–essentially until developments already on the books are built out.
“The growth. The schools getting crowded. Taxes going higher and higher,” said Grace Adee, who along with Joyce Smith and Carolyn Watson helped organize Citizen Action for Reasonable Expansion. “We’ve seen such a dramatic change in the quality of life.”
The measure was approved by about 70 percent of Sycamore’s voters in March.
Concerns about growth haven’t changed much during the decades of suburban expansion across the Chicago region. What has changed are the places where those issues are being debated–no longer in DuPage and Lake Counties but in rural areas of McHenry and Will Counties and in DeKalb, Kendall and Grundy Counties along the perimeter of the region.
Planners and developers say that a new ring of collar counties seems to be emerging.
One of those is Kendall. With an estimated population increase of 22 percent between 2000 and 2003, it was one of the top 10 counties in the U.S. in rate of growth, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Will and Kane Counties are in the top 100.
“It’s probably a continuation of the suburban movement into more open and rural areas,” Kendall County Board Chairman John Church said. “People want a more rural area or more of an open feeling. The issue is that, when you grow at this rate, you experience the same dilemma you had in the place you left.”
Also pushing development to the frontier are policies in Kane County, which has long sought to protect its agricultural areas. In recent years Kane has begun to use voluntary conservation easements and the purchase of development rights to preserve farmland and control growth.
“The impact of that is seen in DeKalb and northern Kendall Counties,” said Matthew Fiascone, senior vice president of Oak Brook-based Inland Real Estate Development Corp.
A comprehensive plan adopted last year by the DeKalb County Board notes that Kane’s policies could result in “premature urbanization in DeKalb County as development `leap frogs’ western Kane. …”
Some communities on the edge of the Chicago area, particularly those in Kendall’s northeast corner, seem to have embraced growth. But there also are efforts to avoid what are seen as the mistakes in older suburbs.
About 35 people, many of whom serve as unpaid members of township plan commissions in a largely rural area of southwest McHenry, attended a planning summit last week in Marengo Community High School to share a vision for the future and their anxieties about growth in booming Algonquin and Lake in the Hills to the east.
The workshop was organized by Marengo Township officials and brought together representatives from Seneca, Coral and Riley Townships, as well as from county government and the municipalities of Marengo and Union.
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“The Marengo-Union area is under a growth siege,” Marengo Township Supervisor Steven Weskerna said. “There is a tremendous amount of growth approaching from the south and east.”
At the workshop, participants struggled sometimes to explain what it was about their community that they wanted to preserve, but one described it as the difference between going into town in a pickup truck and driving to a store in a mini-van.
The outward push in the region is partly a result of a continuing search for cheaper land and affordable housing and the decades-long migration of jobs from Chicago to suburban centers in the Fox Valley and around Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates and Naperville.
Commuting the 60 miles between Sycamore and Chicago would be arduous. Driving between Sycamore and a job in the northwest suburbs or the Fox Valley is tolerable.
The 2000 census found that nearly 190,000 workers are commuting from outside the region to jobs in Cook, DuPage, Lake, Will, Kane and McHenry.
In DeKalb County, the number of people with jobs in the six Chicago-area counties increased by 63 percent between 1990 and 2000–to 12,592 from 7,732. The increase in Kendall was nearly 50 percent–to 18,005 in 2000 from 12,029.
Brook McDonald moved eight years ago with his family to a 1970s-era ranch house in Kendall and commutes to Naperville to his job as president and chief executive of The Conservation Foundation, a non-profit that works to protect open space and water quality in DuPage, Kane, Will and Kendall.
“We didn’t leave DuPage because we didn’t like DuPage. We just didn’t want to live in a little quarter-acre lot. We got a house that was twice as big, and we went from a quarter-acre to an acre lot, and we paid the same as what we sold our little tiny house in Warrenville for,” McDonald said. “The downside is that it added a little more time to get to work.”
The irony is that as more people move to tranquil and less expensive rural areas, the less tranquil and more expensive they become.
“Before, you were looking at farms,” McDonald said. “Now you are looking out over these new subdivisions, and they all look alike.”
It is not clear whether the non-binding subdivision-freeze referendum will have an impact in Sycamore, with its largely intact downtown, a local historic district and a courthouse built in the early 1900s.
Officials said that even before the vote, they had restricted the number of residential building permits the city will make available each year to developers. In November the City Council also adopted a plan that forces developers of larger projects to wait three to six years after annexation before they can begin getting building permits, Sycamore City Manager Bill Nicklas said.
“We’re trying to be inventive about how we pace growth,” he said. “We don’t want a second downtown area like you see in the suburbs to the east. We’re a little concerned about looking like `Any Suburb, U.S.A.'”
The DeKalb County Board allocated $200,000 over the last two years to help cities and villages update municipal plans and then incorporated them into a unique countywide comprehensive plan that takes a coordinated approach to development.
“We want to manage and centralize growth,” County Board Chairman Dennis Sands said. “We’ve seen development heading this way.”
Is DeKalb already a collar county?
“I think we’re right on the verge,” Sands said. “If we’re not there yet, we will be in the next five years.”