A group of homeowners who live near a site in downtown Glenview where a developer has proposed a five-story apartment building sued to block the deal.
The suit, filed June 1 by the homeowners associations in two townhouse clusters—one next door to the Glenview Road site, the other on the next block—asks the Cook County Circuit Court to void the village trustees’ March 3 decision to approve plans by a Glenview-based developer, the Drake Group, to build on a site where surface parking and a shuttered hardware store now stand. Drake proposes a five-story building with commercial space at the ground level and 68 apartments in the four floors above.
“It’s a huge building on a narrow parcel,” said Bill Seitz, an attorney in his own Chicago firm, who filed the suit and lives in one of the townhouse developments, Station Place, immediately north of the site. “It’s too big, and that’s going to have an impact on all of downtown Glenview," he said.
That is despite the fact that kitty-corner from the site is a blocklong five-story building, Midtown Square, completed in 2014. In the suit, Seitz describes the proposed building as “an ultra-dense, massive apartment complex.”
Lynne Stiefel, communications manager for the village, said Glenview officials would not comment on the lawsuit. Tom Drake, principal of the Drake Group, did not respond to a request for comment. The Drake Group is not a party to the lawsuit; the homeowners are suing only the village.
In their suit, the homeowners at Station Place and Prairie Street Townhomes, which together have 23 units, allege other problems with the village’s deal, including approving the deal with insufficient public input, the net loss of parking, and a zoning agreement for the site that is counter to the village’s downtown master plan, approved in 2006 and updated in 2017.
The primary long-term objection is “the canyon effect,” said Chris Johnson, an owner at Prairie Street. If built to its proposed height, he said, “it’s going to cast a shadow for several hours a day, and that’s going to negatively effect the neighborhood.”
The site, adjacent to Metra and Amtrak tracks and about two blocks from the train station, has been vacant for about a decade, since Bess Hardware closed. Its nearby neighbors along Glenview Road are shops, restaurants and the public library, making it a plum site for redevelopment.
The village purchased the Bess site, about two-thirds of an acre, for about $2.22 million in January 2017. After adding two small connected strips that are village owned, it is offering to sell a site that is about 95 percent of an acre to Drake for about $1.53 million, or a loss of more than 30 percent.
Seitz argues in the suit that a state statute limits municipalities like Glenview from selling property at anything more than a 20 percent loss.
Greg Goodsitt, a financial manager who is a leader in Friends of Downtown Glenview, said the group supports the Drake project in concept, though not in every detail. As designed, he said, the building not only requires the removal of old trees, which Goodsitt said is usually unavoidable with new construction, but “it sits so close to the sidewalk that there’s no room to plant replacement trees.”
The developer might adjust that and other details if the project moves forward, said Goodsitt, who’s had an office in Glenview for two decades but lives in another town. He would not comment directly on the claims in the homeowners’ suit but said a better plan for the the site “hasn’t come walking in the door, and it’s been empty for a decade. We certainly don’t want to see that continue.”
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Glenview homeowners sue to block 5-story apartment building - Crain's Chicago Business
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