Redrawing the American City

(Page 2 of 5)

PRAIRIE CROSSING

In the northwestern corner of Chicagoland, some 20 miles north of Hoffman Estates, lies the community of Prairie Crossing. Getting here on the Metra commuter train from downtown Chicago takes about an hour and 20 minutes. City folk refer to the area as "the country," but when I get there, I find that working farms and forest preserves are outnumbered by roadside mini-marts, strip malls, and midcentury subdivisions.

Back in the early 1970s, sprawl reached the doorstep of the Ranney family in Grayslake, Illinois: a 1,600-home subdivision was being planned on the site of what was then a 677-acre farm. Alarmed by the rate at which farmland was disappearing, George Ranney and his uncle, Gaylord Donnelley, rounded up the neighbors -- farmers, owners of country estates, people who cared about preserving agricultural and wild lands -- to stop the development. It worked, and they eventually bought the site themselves. But that led to a new problem: no government agency wanted to buy and conserve the land (one county official thought it might make a good landfill), leaving them with what was then a $5 million property. So they began drafting plans to develop it themselves. But they would not create the usual sort of housing subdivision. They would build a community that stood in opposition to suburban sprawl, one with a conservation ethic, environmental protections, and agricultural stewardship at its core.

The first of Prairie Crossing's 359 single-family homes went up in 1994, built in accordance with the Environmental Protection Agency's Building America energy-efficiency standards. This was before the advent of LEED ratings, the now ubiquitous system established by the U.S. Green Building Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The development's traditional farmhouses are rendered in Crayola's most tasteful, grown-up hues -- burnt sienna, goldenrod, forest green -- and arranged neatly around village greens and along small culs-de-sac on lots of about one-third of an acre. They use less than half as much energy as an average home of comparable size. The vast majority of the original parcel is set aside as farmland and permanent open space, which residents and visitors can explore on a 10-mile network of trails suitable for walking, running, biking, and horseback riding.

In 1995 Ranney hired Mike Sands, who was then managing director of the Rodale Institute, a nonprofit organic farming research and advocacy group based in Pennsylvania. Sands planned a series of organic farms on the 677-acre parcel, including one 40-acre commercial farm that generates about $400,000 in revenue a year. He has graying, curly hair, a husky build, and an always-on-the-go nature, which is immediately apparent as he takes me on a bike tour to see Prairie Crossing's native plantings. He points out a series of shallow ditches, or swales, that channel the water that runs off roads, rooftops, and driveways and filter it through the soil and plant roots. The water in turn feeds the wetlands that surround Lake Aldo Leopold, named for the Midwest's most famous twentieth-century conservationist. All of this is part of Sands's pioneering plan to preserve green space and lessen the burden on local stormwater management systems, which require a lot of energy and are nearing maximum capacity in many American cities and towns. The strategy, known as green infrastructure, has since been adapted to suit the needs of countless locales, from downtown Chicago to New York City and beyond.

Leaving Sands, I pedal over to the latest phase of Prairie Crossing's development -- Station Square, a cluster of bold yellow and red low-rise buildings that surround a nascent town square. As I approach, the single-family homes start getting closer together, though they are no less quaint, with flowering yards and American flags flapping in the breeze. I feel slightly dazed by the deliberateness of it all, as if I've been beamed down onto the set of Jim Carrey's comedy The Truman Show, which was filmed in a real-life development called Seaside in Walton County, Florida. Built 13 years before Prairie Crossing, Seaside is widely regarded as the first master-planned New Urbanist community. As the name suggests, New Urbanism's goal is to transplant desirable urban qualities -- compact dwellings in close proximity to shopping and services -- into a new setting.

Smart growth embraces those principles and adds an essential ingredient: recycling elements of the existing built environment. With its condominium residences, shops, and train access, Station Square is an attempt to fill in the missing pieces of a functional, walkable, quasi-urban environment. Those attributes earned Station Square a spot in the pilot phase of LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND), which scores smart growth developments on criteria that include creating density; making use of existing infrastructure and transportation networks; intermingling residential and commercial spaces to provide walkable access to goods, services, and entertainment; and reducing energy consumption. Where before there had been an empty parcel of land between Prairie Crossing's single-family homes and the Metra train lines, a shiny new "downtown" has been born. Unfortunately, the dragging economy has meant a slow start for Station Square. Many businesses have closed during the past year, and I walk by empty storefronts that look too new to have already seen tenants come and go.

I eventually come upon Paper Stories, which Kelly Maron, one of the owners, describes as "an eco-friendly paper boutique and work space" selling high-end stationery. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows I can see a printing press, a hulking antique built in 1926 by Chandler & Price, which Maron affectionately calls Chandy P., or sometimes just "the behemoth."

Maron, a former high school art teacher with a cherubic face and retro horn-rimmed glasses, is in the process of relocating her work and her home to Prairie Crossing. Step one was to open the shop. Step two is to sell the house in nearby Des Plaines, Illinois, which involves some finger-crossing for the real estate market to pick up. Step three: buy a small, single-family home in Prairie Crossing. What she hopes to find here is a blend of the everything-at-your-fingertips life she loves about the city with the affordability of the suburbs and easy access to open space. A downtown area more compact, walkable, and culturally diverse than the suburbs of a generation ago, combined with immediate access to two of Chicago's commuter rail lines, should give Maron everything she is looking for -- and all without using her car.

Maron's landlord is Ben Ranney, the principal of the Chicago-based green development company Terra Firma and the son of George and Vicki Ranney. Terra Firma is the primary developer for Station Square, and Ranney also hopes to develop vacant parcels of land immediately adjacent to the train station.

Most of the retail spaces opened in 2007, and all but one of the dozen shops quickly filled with businesses offering the types of goods and services that you might need after hopping off the train at the end of the workday or on the weekend: a café, a bookstore, a children's toy store, a yoga studio, and a knitting shop.

Maron and her business partner, Tami Rasmussen, who has her own line of stationery, are precisely the sort of tenants Ben Ranney wants. They don't just sell stuff; they also enrich the community by offering classes and workshops in their studio. The knitting shop next door does the same. To get the right mix, Ranney says he's prepared to make economic concessions. The nursery school, for example, cannot pay full market rent, but it provides the kind of service that a real village ought to offer.

The downturn in the economy is only one obstacle. Looking south, across the main road that borders Station Square, the plot of land between the two Metra rail lines sits vacant. Although it's owned by Prairie Crossing's developers, it lies outside Grayslake in the village of Libertyville and is not zoned for the dense, multipurpose development that makes for a bustling center of pedestrian activity. That's what Terra Firma needs to fully connect the community's fledgling downtown with the train station. A shift on Libertyville's zoning board might change that, but for now only retail and commercial use is allowed. If Terra Firma wants to build the smart growth way, mixing residential and retail, the land next to the train station will have to wait.

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