On Wednesday City Council will vote to approve Pegasus-Ablon’s application to drop a 20-plus-story high-rise into a 36-foot-height neighborhood. I say this with certainty.
The votes have been metaphorically counted and the hearing before city council is mere theater to let any opposition believe they actually had a chance of swaying a vote. They don’t. And I believe they rarely ever do. All that’s missing from city meetings is a Playbill and a Flora Street address.
As I wrote in November, in my opinion there is nothing to like about this project. The neighborhood gets less than nothing while the city nets 23 affordable units. The Oak Lawn Committee will suffer its second coffin nail after the Lincoln Katy Trail project was green-lit last month by an unconcerned council — despite being almost uniformly opposed by anyone without a profit motive.
What will the city council approve Wednesday?
The current zoning, put in place in 1997 by the seller (Caven Enterprises), limits development to 36 feet on most of the lots and is additionally secured with a residential proximity slope. Small portions allow for 120-foot heights. Total building density is limited to 250,000 square feet. There are also setback requirements and prohibitions on where driveways can be located (not on Dickason).
The original 1997 case file shows that Caven Enterprises’ reasoning was specifically to limit development and protect the two-story neighborhood across the street. There was no time limit on these protections nor was there a dollar value to the land above which protections were negated. No one can argue that today those protections are unneeded (in fact, this case proves their merit).
We’re here because, in 1999, two years after Caven Enterprises put in place these protections, corporate ownership changed to being employee-owned. This change gave every employee a monetary incentive to sell – so many foxes approaching retirement watching the henhouse.
The development plan being approved on Wednesday calls for triple the amount of building and density, and (based on CPC’s recommendation) nearly six times the height. It calls for raising the urban setback from 36 feet to 75 feet to contain an enormous above-ground parking garage — the likes of which you will be hard-pressed to find in Oak Lawn. Completing the picture, it adds entrances and exits on Dickason — one across from a school.
What makes it so bad?
First, in addition to knee-capping the Oak Lawn Committee (more later), I think it it royally screws the neighborhood.
It’s already a catalyst to upzone the rest of the area – more than one neighboring building has been listed for sale (as also happened when Lincoln Katy Trail was approved). Dropping a high-rise where it doesn’t belong invites more of them.
Similar projects in the Oak Lawn area offer underground parking (this offers, at the last look, only one story underground and only on the parts of the lot they’re developing). Streetlights’ future apartment building at Lemmon and Oak Lawn managed to squeeze more underground parking while still preserving Eatzi’s – and still be profitable – and 35 feet shorter – and offering 25-foot sidewalks on Oak Lawn Avenue – and burying power lines – and wrapping their aboveground garage portion in restaurants and apartments – and additional parking for Eatzi’s.
Ablon-Caven offer none of this.
Third, the city is dumb.
When Ablon-Caven hit the City Plan Commission, they lowered the 260-foot height to 210 feet. You’d think this made the project smaller? No. Reducing height is only one piece of shrinking the project. To truly make a project smaller, they also have to lower the floor area ratio (FAR) and the lot coverage (and in this case, the parking lot podium). They did neither. Cutting the height was more theater – and made the project more profitable as it’s cheaper to build a fatter floor than a taller building.
This is also part of the larger picture of a city habitually complaining that downtown stinks while approving huge zoning increases where they don’t belong. Maybe if they curbed inappropriate projects like this, it would force developers to build where the city wants them to build.
Why does the city let this happen?
Bully politics. This City Hall seems to lack the backbone to judge cases on their merit and to stop immovable bullies pushing forward.
Maybe it’s time for the Trinity Tollway to make a comeback.
It’s all a ruse.
The tactic used since Day One is a strategic lie of fear-mongering. Convincing everyone into thinking this was the only option outside bulldozing many of the city’s gay bars. I never believed it for a second. ANY project generating the money Caven wants requires a zoning change. A by-right project would likely net less than a third of the money.
More distasteful are reports from council members of what some say is a concerted campaign by alleged Caven employees begging council members to preserve their jobs (if anything is torn down it will be by Caven’s employee-owners — the supposed authors of this campaign).
They also broadly hint that a vote against the project is anti-gay. As a gay man, I find this crying wolf/dog whistle abhorrent. It’s a bad project, period. Voting against a bad project isn’t anti-anything except anti-bad projects.
No one gives into a child holding their breath until they get what they want. Similarly, no one with a profit motive is credible saying, “We’ll take a third of the money if you don’t give us 100 percent … just 85 percent? … nope, we’re taking 30 percent, you had your chance.” It’s flat-out ludicrous. Yet a majority of Plan Commissioners fell for it – just as I’m sure council members will too.
After the Plan Commission vote, several “yes” votes told me they had big problems with the project – but believed the lie. As AT&T made famous, “You get what you pay for” and Plan Commissioners are, after all, volunteers.
Similarly, Daltxrealestate.com published a column in March, in part bemoaning the bars’ suffering under COVID-19 restrictions. What the author failed to mention was that Caven has been trying to sell the land since well before COVID. Nor was there mention of monies Caven received from the government’s PPP program.
Reality-check: Last weekend I was in Chicago and made a point to walk their Gayborhood. How many high-rises did I see? Zero.
The blocks of Broadway and Halstead pretty much max out at three stories. There are two properties of four and five stories that are on former city-owned lots. Of course, there are high-rises, but in appropriate areas.
And the Chicago Gayborhood isn’t dying without a high-rise in back of Sidetrack or Roscoe’s – in fact, there’s hardly any retail vacancy in stark contrast to the shoppers’ paradise of Michigan Avenue.
The Oak Lawn Committee is dead.
The Oak Lawn Committee is on a ventilator (only partly of its own making). Its council members, David Blewett and Adam Medrano, support projects opposed by the longest-serving neighborhood zoning group in the city. This sidelines the group’s influence.
Blewett has made a recent show at two Turtle Creek Neighborhood Association meetings crying that while he values the committee’s work, he needs it to do its job vetting projects — all while he and Plan Commissioner Wayne Garcia vote for projects the OLC denied support for — with good reason — you know, doing their job.
Lincoln Katy Trail and Ablon-Caven essentially bypassed the Oak Lawn Committee. Lincoln was denied support after years of angst but was ultimately approved by the city because a less thoughtful Plan Commission and City Council couldn’t be bothered upholding the prohibition on upzoning this area going back over a decade.
Ablon-Caven, located in Medrano’s district, presented to the OLC for 10 minutes in November (to a shocked committee), ignored the assembled sub-committee, and then in February said they’d commit to none of their recommendations and were going straight to Plan Commission — because they already knew they had the votes to pass. Which it did easily.
Note: Medrano’s District 2 appointee Joanna Hampton tried to stop the project when it was at city Plan Commission, but when she didn’t have the majority necessary, she let it pass.
Finally, Monday, I received an early notification from the city that 2915 Vine Avenue is applying directly to the city for a Planned Development Subdistrict within the Oak Lawn Planned Development District (PD-193). Their goal is to “redevelop/modernize the site with a new building” and to change the parking requirements to one space per 1,000 square feet of office space. There are so far no plans to present their plans to the Oak Lawn Committee.
What do all three of these projects have in common? They’re all represented by Suzan Kedron of Jackson Walker. I texted Kedron asking if she ever planned to advise clients to present to the Oak Lawn Committee again. No response was received by press time.
So far, the Oak Lawn Committee hasn’t yet vetted a new case in 2021. I think that’s mostly down to COVID-19 stalling development. But more than one OLC member has wondered, based on Lincoln and Ablon-Caven (and now 2915 Vine), whether the group will ever see another zoning change request.
With the current makeup of Plan Commission and City Council, why would any developer bother?
