Oak Park village board denied a special use permit for an Oak Parker to build what would’ve been a short-lived electric vehicle charging parking lot on a property targeted for a village-subsidized affordable housing development.
The board voted 6-1 to block Yves Hughes, a lifelong Oak Parker and a tech professional, to begin construction on a privately-owned electric vehicle charging station at 6104 Roosevelt Rd, a former automobile service station property which has sat vacant on the high-traffic corridor for many years. The parcel was not supposed to remain just an EV parking lot for long, but the chargers had to go up to satisfy Hughes’ deal with the Cook County Land Bank before he planned to sell the lot to the housing developer who would get rid of them before building an apartment complex.
The proposal drew sharp criticism from several Oak Park trustees.
“The purpose of the zoning request is to create a massive waste,” Trustee Brian Straw said. “This is not a useful development; this is just a small investment to recoup $300,000 in land prospecting. Had the applicant followed through with the terms of his deed in a timely manner that would be one thing, but he did not.”
The development of the EV charging station was delayed for years, and in the meantime village leadership pursued a vision to support a new affordable housing development to go up on the property. In January, Oak Park’s board of trustees approved $700,000 from the village’s housing trust fund to support The Community Builders, a national nonprofit property developer, developing the property into a 28-unit affordable housing complex.
The Community Builders have already developed and operate another affordable housing complex in Oak Park — The 801 property located at 801 Van Buren St.
Hughes purchased the Roosevelt Road property from the Cook County Land Bank in 2022 for $115,000 with the intention of building the ch The arging station, according to documents reviewed by Wednesday Journal. Hughes told Oak Park’s Zoning Board of Appeals over the summer that before he can legally sell the property to anyone else, he must satisfy his agreement with the land bank by building the EV chargers.
“The terms of the purchase agreement was ‘you’ve got to do something, at least meet the requirement of what you agreed to,’ and that’s my intention,” Hughes said in August. “The county has said ‘we don’t really care what you do but do what you said you were going to do.’”
He told the zoning board that he’d already poured over $200,000 into the project, and that the project was derailed by the untimely death of his contractor. He said he heard from The Community Builders about their interest in the property not long after that and saw selling it to them as an opportunity to recoup his investment.
Village President Vicki Scaman was confident that denying the proposal and forcing Hughes to cede the land back to the land bank would likely not jeopardize the future Community Builders project.
“I’m fairly confident that the land bank will work with us, that’s my educated presumption here,” she said. “Municipalities usually have first right of refusal with the land bank, so I presume that the will of the community will matter.”
“But no one is going to give a guarantee of that this evening.”
But Scaman said that by allowing Hughes to retain ownership of the land until the sale went through, it would be the Oak Park taxpayer that paid for him to recoup the investment because the village had been asked to subsidize the developer purchasing the land from Hughes.
Trustee Cory Wesley said that it’s common for entrepreneurs to purchase undeveloped land to quickly convert into something like an EV charging station or a paid parking lot before eventually selling to a developer. He said the fact that no chargers were put up after three years spoke to the insincerity of the proposal.
“The reason people do these things is because they’re quick, then cheap to demolish,” he said. “If he wanted an EV station on this land there would be an EV station on this land. It does not take three years to do these things. This is what he could’ve done and then we wouldn’t have this discussion.”
“This whole thing is unconventional, and frankly it’s B.S.”
The only trustee to vote in favor of the proposal was Jim Taglia, although he also said he wasn’t much of a fan of the idea.
“It does feel like the owner is gaming the system,” Taglia said. “But I just don’t feel comfortable being an arbiter of how capitalism is supposed to work.”
“I don’t feel that it’s our role to call out people who aren’t doing anything illegal and saying they can’t profit. We don’t set the laws in that way.”
