Developer’s Current Plan Has Major Flaws – Neighborhood Residents Need to Push for Something Better

By Janis Tiffin, UCRD

After reviewing the Developer’s Application to the Chicago Planning Commission for an Amendment to the Chicago Zoning Ordinance it is apparent that the maxed out, crammed in, Sedgwick Properties Development Corp. plan for the Montrose/Clarendon site does not fit in with the surrounding neighborhood scale, use, or density. The building heights would overpower the smaller scale residential buildings nearby and do not fit in with the neighborhood’s character.

Neighborhood residents are the only people who can stop the rush to build a poorly designed complex… residents should pressure the developer to come up with better design ideas and solutions that will both benefit the community and fit into the surrounding neighborhood scale in a more thoughtful, integrated way.

Developers will always try to cram as much as they can onto a site because that generates more profit for them, and that’s why we have zoning restrictions. Without them developers would run wild. It’s up to residents to push back and pressure the developer to modify their plan so that it works better for the neighborhood in general.

There is also a political component to consider too. The development plans and final city approvals are heavily influenced by what the ward Alderman approves, regardless of resident needs or concerns or even a plan's detrimental impact on surrounding residential neighborhood.

The Park As Green Space

The Montrose/Clarendon project is a Planned Development (or PD), so some of the normal zoning protections don’t apply. For instance, the developer is planning to build right up to the lot line and eliminate all the current ground level green space around the main building site at Montrose and Clarendon. They claim they are able to do this by counting the existing park lot they intend to acquire across the street as green space! Even though it is located across the street and hundreds of feet away, they seek to use it as part of the building open space area calculation.

Community Meetings Non-existent in Uptown

Recently, residents of nearby Ravenswood and Wrigleyville were successful in getting developers of large projects in their neighborhoods to make plan changes and concessions in response to their comments concerns. But in those communities, unlike Uptown, there was a more open and inclusive process of community meetings and there were actual opportunity meaningful input into the plan. (See the Successful Community Action pages for info.)

By contrast, in Uptown, what the developers held was not so much a community meeting as a marketing poster session with talking point stations set up around the gym at Clarendon Park, not allowing residents to hear and share ideas with each other, but to receive one-way communication from interested parties from outside the neighborhood in kind of a "divide and conquer" scheme. Rather insidiously, there was a drawing that attendees could enter for a chance to win a $100 gift certificate, but to participate attendees had to identify themselves and state whether they were was in favor of or opposed to the development.

But wait, residents were also given conceptual and inaccurate information at the developers so called community meetings with which to base their decisions. For example, the pretty colored perspective drawings showing happy people and shopping at a three floor mall looked nice, but were not what the plans call for… they are only drawn at about half of the real 85’ high shopping base height. The developer told UCRD that the picture was not a picture of what they intended to build and said ‘we did these drawings before we had a final plan.’ Bottom line is that residents don’t have any idea of the actual size or what these buildings will really look like! So how can residents decide for or against?

Residents need access to accurate, definitive information of the development proposal and a redo of the community review process along with a meaningful venue for development changes based on community input.

For the long term good of our community, we should not rush so quickly to approve the developer’s plan as it currently submitted. Once built, this massively dense building will surely have a heavy impact on the surrounding area for many, years. There are also some serious Traffic and pedestrian safety issues still to consider and solve.

What’s the harm of exploring some possible plan modifications or a few different solutions to design of the site first with the goal of a creating a better plan before rushing to construct something so permanent and so big as this building?