Before the Northbrook Plan Commission was set to hold a hearing Oct. 6 on a developer’s controversial proposal to replace a downtown shopping center, Meadow Plaza, with six-story condominiums, the Village Board held listening sessions last week for residents to share their thoughts.
The proposal brought by Pulte Homes Group has taken up large portions of village meetings in recent months, with dozens of residents showing up to speak out against the plan.
The proposal would redevelop Meadow Plaza Shopping Center, which has offered retail and restaurants in downtown Northbrook since 1959, into three six-story condominium buildings and a riverwalk.
Many residents have organized against the prospective development since a preliminary proposal was submitted by the developer, arguing the plan would take away the character of the downtown, remove longtime businesses and increase traffic and density.
Now that an official application has been submitted to the Board and is set to be reviewed by the Plan Commission this month, residents are continuing to push back.
To help foster more productive conversations around the proposal, the Village Board set up several listening sessions last week to allow residents to share more about what they envision for the future of the shopping center and to ask any questions about the proposal, according to Matt Cassidy, a Village Board Trustee.
“When we do Board meetings, it’s hard because I can’t talk back and forth,” said Cassidy in an interview with Pioneer Press at one of the listening sessions Sept. 30.
“Here, we can have a conversation, and this is a positive conversation even with people who may disagree, and we can get constructive with it.”
Some of the main concerns expressed by residents in the listening session included the loss of retail in Northbrook, the plan only including mostly residential and the changing of the zoning code to accommodate six-story buildings.
The plaza currently sits in a C-2 Neighborhood Commercial District, which only allows four stories or five with a special permit. As of August, Pulte Homes submitted a rezoning application to the Board to go through the Planned Unit Development process to increase the height to six stories.
Cassidy said the Village of Northbrook’s outdated 1988 zoning code was changed as of September 2025 to allow developers to build mixed-use projects from two to four stories high.
“The new zoning code was meant to change a lot of things to make it more efficient, because we got a lot of complaints from people that the village was difficult to work with, there was too much red tape, and so we modernized the code,” he said.
Lee Goodman and his wife raised their children in Northbrook and have lived there for 37 years. He said the removal of the plaza would mean the loss of many local businesses residents have relied on for years, and would altogether change the character of the village.
“Northbrook is not downtown Chicago,” said Goodman. “It was never supposed to be. No one wants it to be.”
Goodman, like some other residents, has attended nearly every Board meeting about the proposal to share opinions before a final decision is made. This included a meeting the developer held Tuesday night to share an outline of their plans and to answer resident questions.
“The audience was just about 100% opposed to this project, just like they have been at every Village Board meeting and every one of these other meetings they’re having,” Goodman said about the developer presentation. “They (developers) really didn’t, to my mind, respond to anything that people were saying.”
After the developer’s application is reviewed before the Plan Commission on Oct. 6, it will provide a recommendation and then it will be sent back to the Village Board for approval or denial, Cassidy said.
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“That recommendation flows through to the Board,” he said. “The Board takes that recommendation and they might have the same answer, or they might have a different answer.”