Community members will soon have a chance to learn more about local leaders’ vision for the future of Roosevelt Road.
Oak Park’s village government and the Berwyn Development Corporation will host a joint open house providing information on the Roosevelt Road Corridor Plan that the two bodies are developing together. The plan will look to guide economic development along the road, which serves as a defining border for suburban Oak Park, Berwyn and Cicero.
The event will take place Wednesday, July 9 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Salerno’s Pizza & Pasta of Oak Park, 7128 Roosevelt Rd. Attendees will receive free pizza and refreshments while sharing insights with the planning team, according to the village.
In March, Oak Park’s village board approved a contract worth $100,000 for The Lakota Group, a project management and urban design firm that had helped develop Oak Park’s Pleasant District streetscaping project, to help develop the plan. Oak Park’s planning and urban design division sought a large increase to its annual budget for this year in part to cover the work on this plan.
In the firm’s project proposal, Lakota Group staff said that the Roosevelt Road plan must help the corridor develop a stronger identity, encourage local entrepreneurship, fill storefront vacancies and bring both communities’ zoning into alignment.
“Our team relishes the opportunity to immerse ourselves in this process and work with the Oak Park and Berwyn communities to create an exciting vision forward for Roosevelt Road,” wrote Scott Freres, The Lakota Group’s CEO. “As you will see in this proposal, we are passionate about planning and design and we love engaging people to help them improve their sense of place.”
Next month’s informational event will serve as an early step ahead of more community engagement efforts planned for the summer, as project leaders also hope to conduct resident surveys and hold other community workshops this summer, according to the project’s website.
The Roosevelt Road boarder between Oak Park and Berwyn has long been a target for development, as this plan comes 20 years after the communities jointly-adopted the “Plan for the Redevelopment of Roosevelt Road” in March 2005. That plan, which took four years to finalize, was “the first-ever comprehensive redevelopment study of this corridor,” according to Oak Park documents.
Several other communities in the area have started projects focused on economic development surrounding Roosevelt Road, including a joint plan between the villages of Glen Ellyn and Wheaton, development efforts on the near west side of Chicago and a recently announced collaboration between the Village of Maywood, the Chicago Metropolitan Planning Agency and the RTA.