I have lived in Oak Park for 38 years. I worked in the schools here for 31 of those years. I love Oak Park. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. We are a unique community. We all have opinions, and I love that. Sometimes, those opinions are well-informed, sometimes not; but almost always those opinions are delivered with good intentions.
During the past several months, Oak Park has been embroiled in a controversy about a building to be located at Forest and Lake. Concerns about Austin Gardens are legitimate. Austin Gardens needs to be safe-guarded and not diminished in any way. Most of us could agree on that issue.
What concerns me is that the attitudes about that development in our village have been generalized to all development. Some are against all development. Others are against tall developments. Others recoil at the thought of density. What about traffic! And OMG, the parking!
Most people in Oak Park seem concerned about our environment. We recognize climate change as a major concern, as is pollution of our water and air. Urban sprawl has created terrible problems with traffic congestion and shifted our culture toward an auto-centric dependency. Obesity is an issue as we walk less; we pollute our air and waste energy as we drive more; and we take up more and more farmland in an unsustainable manner. More and more people migrate to the urban population centers around the world.
What to do? Well, one of the most logical and viable solutions is called Transit Oriented Developments, or TODs. What is a TOD? It’s a development oriented around train transit stops that focuses on mass transit use, walkability, safe biking, and easy access to jobs and services that don’t require a car.
Where in the metro region is there a suburban community that could accommodate TODs the best? The answer is Oak Park. We have a Metra stop at Harlem. We have decent bus services available throughout the village. But most importantly, we have two CTA train transit lines with six stations running through our village. No other suburb comes close to having our level of transit access to downtown Chicago.
I would like to shift the discussion in our village away from development vs. no development, toward how can we look on TODs as a way of enhancing the lives of our citizens in the very best way. That means we start thinking about smart growth in tandem with transit oriented development. We haven’t had this conversation yet.
Oak Park is what we could call “hot” right now. People want to live here. Developers want to build here. In my judgment, we need to be thinking in terms of what kinds of development do we want. What kind of requirements should be placed on developers?
My thought: create high, but clear expectations for developers and hold them to those standards. Then make it easy for them to make Oak Park into a greater, greener, more livable, enhanced community than it already is. It is possible.
Change is the only constant in life. We can’t stop change from occurring, but we can certainly influence and guide it in the directions that could make our quality of life much better. This is a complex issue that requires a lot of thoughtful consideration. It would be productive to avoid emotional hyperbole and rigid attitudes and communicate respectfully.
Terry Grace is a resident of Oak Park.
