City Council Expands Downtown Residential Development Options

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — A zoning code amendment approved Monday by the Highland Park City Council allows for entirely residential developments along the perimeter of the city's central business district. City officials said the change is aimed at bringing more residents closer to downtown businesses and increasing the area's walkability.

The newly created Central District Residential Overlay zoning district includes an 8-acre area that runs along the south side of Elm Place from Sheridan to Green Bay roads. It eliminates the requirement that ground floor space in the area be limited to commercial use.

The overlay extends from the condominiums across Elm Place from Indian Trail School to the site of the planned 89-unit Albion at Renaissance Place mixed-use development at 1849 Green Bay Road, the former Saks Fifth Avenue site, which is set for final approval Jan. 11. It also includes a small portion of St. Johns and Park Avenues.

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Community Development Director Joel Fontane said the change was consistent with the city's long-term plans for the downtown area.

"It allows multi-family residential buildings, which are currently only allowed above first-floor commercial within the B5 Zoning District, to be allowed as a permitted use in these certain areas of downtown," Fontane said.

According to the zoning code, multi-family residential developments of up to four stories and 51 feet are allowed in the B5 district outside of planned developments, which can be five stories and 63 feet.

Fontane said the city could have also allowed for fully residential developments by rezoning the area from a B5 to a B4-5 Service/Commercial district, but that would have also allowed automotive uses. He said an entirely residential multi-family development would be more appealing to developers than a mixed-use one.

"What we're seeing in the market is there is a demand in the area shown on that map for these types of residential developments," he said. "And there is some concern about adding additional commercial space to our downtown, in that it is a rather large downtown relatively speaking, and additional commercial space may not be needed."

The City Council's vote to establish the new overlay district comes nearly two months after it elected to eliminate the Pedestrian Oriented Shopping Overlay, or POSO, a district created in 2004 that restricted ground floor uses to retail-oriented business.

It was created in response to an influx of non-retail, non-sales tax-generating business coming to the downtown area — especially drive-thru banks. Over time, the City Council adjusted its boundaries and added to the categories of permitted businesses in an effort to address vacant downtown commercial space.

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Ahead of the Oct. 26 vote to put an end to the POSO, downtown property owners reported to the council that vacancies on the east Central Avenue portion of the overlay had reached 41 percent. Most of the vacancies preceded COVID-19, with many existing for more than two years.

"We need more people and we do not need more commercial development," downtown property owners Rick Nelson and Dino Dimitriou, the president of the Downtown Property Owners' Association, told city staff. "[We] probably now have too much commercial development in the CBD as evidenced [by] the number of current vacancies (and seemingly more vacancies to come.)"

The City Council voted 4-2 to do away the overlay. Councilwoman Kim Stone and Mayor Nancy Rotering, who said she preferred to only eliminate the east side of the district, voted against the change. Councilman Adam Stolberg was absent from the meeting.

At that meeting, Councilman Alyssa Knobel said the coronavirus pandemic provides a clean slate for city officials to demonstrate how business friendly the city is.

"We're in a time when we can be bold and we can re-invent ourselves and we can do whatever we can to help our businesses survive and thrive and attract, and then we can look at it again," Knobel said. "I think the POSO did what it was supposed to do for a very long time, but we've been chipping away at it, and even pre-pandemic we did not see the results of our chipping away at it."

Ahead of Monday's unanimous vote to create the new Central District Residential Overlay, Rotering said Knobel had made it a "life's mission" to work to improve the flexibility of zoning in the central business district.

"Talk about a commitment to this, since being, I think, on the Business and Economic Development Commission when it was such a thing," Rotering said. "So thanks for your tenacity and thanks to [the] Community Development [Department] for making it happen."

The mayor said in a statement after the meeting that city officials looked forward to working with developers and businesses to make the downtown area more vibrant and livable.

"We've been talking for a long time about how to get more feet on the street to keep our downtown area vibrant," Stone said before the vote. "I think this is a good solution to that issue, so I'm comfortable moving forward with this overlay zone."

Councilman Tony Blumberg, who served on the council when the pedestrian overlay was first adopted, said the new downtown residential overlay only applies to what he would describe as the perimeter of the central business district.

"I'm very comfortable with that even though I, for a long time, really opposed removing the POSO," Blumberg said. "The thinking — as I understand it from the world of planners — is that increased residential density around the perimeter of small downtowns like Highland Park's encourages a greater amount of shopping to occur because it puts potential shoppers within walking distance rather than driving distance.

"You have the opportunity to get more shoppers, to get more people to use the downtown for a variety of uses," he continued, "without necessarily dramatically increasing the number of cars and the need for parking downtown, which to me makes a lot of sense, at least on a fairly obvious level."

Knobel said this year's zoning changes to the central business district have been years in the making.

"We have property owners that have been asking for this, so this is just another step in the right direction of us shrinking our retail and expanding our livability downtown and our walkability," she said. "It's just time."