Recently I took a bus ride into the future of Chicagoland with 25 commercial real-estate agents–an eight-hour excursion along the path of progress (also known as Interstate 88), sponsored by the economic-development agencies of Du Page, Kane, and De Kalb counties. The real-estate people were looking for land; the development people had some to show them.
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As the bus weaved back and forth along roads intersecting the Du Page portion of the interstate, somebody said something about the “ultimate development.” He meant some new office park but could have been talking about I-88 itself, which starts 20 miles from Chicago in Oak Brook and goes west through Aurora and De Kalb and on into Iowa. To most people this stretch of highway is the East-West Tollway, but in the lexicon of progress it is the Illinois Research and Development Corridor, miles of shiny clean suburban skyline that boast three of Du Page’s four regional malls and, for now anyway, many major-league construction payrolls.
Good news about Du Page, the fastest growing county outside the Sun Belt, flooded our ears as we peered through the windows at newly and partially built steel-and-glass concoctions. I-88, then called Illinois 5, was the boondocks when I was growing up in nearby Elmhurst. What happened to the prairies of my youth? One thing that happened is that the percentage of metro-area office space located outside the city proper has exploded from 2 percent in 1965 to more than 40 percent today.
Just outside of Aurora, in the middle of some woods, we visited Stonebridge, which I’ve since seen advertised–on a billboard 30 miles to the east, on the Eisen-hower Expressway–as a “golf course residential community.” Well-heeled rat-race escapees will soon occupy these $300,000 homes, but on this day Stonebridge was just a construction workers’ heaven, with walls going up and roofs going down on a half-dozen different houses. As our red-and-black Northern Illinois University bus edged by a cement truck shooting its contents into the form of a sidewalk, a concrete finisher on all fours looked confused, as if wondering what the hell the Marching Huskie Show Band was doing here.
“That new industrial park over there is testing the pricing,” Hopkins said, pointing beyond a plowing farmer to a piece of fallow land. “The per-acre average is $14,000 to $20,000. But the man who is developing it said he was offering the land at $50,000 and actually sold some for $60,000.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
