In 'Evolve Or Die' Business, Developers Hope To Bring Fresh Life To Skokie Mall
Mixed-use mania has arrived at one of the Chicago area’s most well-known malls.
Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is sprinting forward with plans to convert a chunk of Westfield Old Orchard in Skokie into hundreds of apartments as well as new restaurant and retail space.
The conversion is a major move to redevelop the north mall and establish it as a place people want to spend time at for a variety of needs, said Stephen Fluhr, URW senior vice president of development, at Bisnow’s Chicago Northern Suburbs Real Estate event last week.
“Everybody says that in the malls, we fight for dollars, which is true. But what we really do is we fight for people's time,” Fluhr said at the event held at Saranello's in Wheeling. “Because the more time you spend at a place, the more you spend at that place.”
The developer first unveiled plans for the $100M renovation in 2022. Last month, the Village of Skokie gave the green light for the project to continue forward, starting with the demolition of the former Bloomingdale’s department store.
The project will include 400 new apartment units, ground-floor retail and a public green space in its first phase. Another 250 apartment units and a 200-room hotel will come online in the second phase.
The redesigned area won’t be exclusive for the people who live there — it’s also for shoppers who want to visit, Fluhr said. URW has been intentional about having all of its distinct elements connect, whether visually or physically, he said.
The idea is to provide a pedestrian-friendly, rich shopping experience that offers people in the community a variety of things to do, Fluhr said.
Mixed-use development isn’t a significant part of Westfield’s history, so the developer had to make up for its “shortcomings” by partnering with companies who know how to execute these developments successfully.
“It's evolve or die in the retail business,” Fluhr said.
Some mixed-use developments benefit from preexisting infrastructure in the area that allows new residents to work and play in the same area, but other developments need to create that environment from the ground up, said Christopher Coleman, vice president of development at Wingspan Development Group.
The better the experience developers can offer, the better the property will perform financially, he said.
“Residents really do have an expectation today that where they're going to live is going to have all kinds of lifestyle amenities outside the front door,” Coleman said. “When they cross the threshold, as they go out of the property, they want lifestyle just as much as they want lifestyle inside the property.”
It’s one challenge to design a comprehensive mixed-use project, but another altogether to convince residents to get on the same page during the planning process.
One of the ways Coleman said he has been able to get residents who might have otherwise been opposed to a project on board is by investing resources in showing them a completed project similar to the one being pitched. In Mount Prospect, he said, Wingspan took board members down to Wheaton to show them apartment units and they were “blown away.”
“There's always a fear of change,” Coleman said. “There's also a perception, if you haven't been in an apartment community in a long time, you don't know what rental living is today.”
For communities that haven’t had a major project in a long time, resistance from those who have an established sense of what their community is like can present a significant challenge, Fluhr said. But engaging with residents and not shying away from uncomfortable discussions can go a long way toward getting a project approved in the end, he said.
“I have certainly found over the decades that if you get out there and you engage with them, and you invest the many hours that it takes and the sometimes unpleasant, personal conversations, they at least see you as human at the end of the day,” Fluhr said.
