With the Aurora City Council on the verge of voting on a plan for the former Carson’s building on Lake Street, some residents in the area are asking if this is the best use possible for the site.
Aldermen will have before them Tuesday four items that would create a conditional use subdivision for Indiana-based Storage of America to convert the 187,117-square-foot former department store into a storage unit facility.
The plan also includes new frontage along Lake Street that includes a five-foot setback and landscaping and a second lot that would feature a Super Suds Aurora car wash.
As part of repurposing the former Carson’s building, Storage of America would create two units with a total of 16,000 square feet for retail use, in the front of the building facing Lake Street. One of those units would be reserved for a restaurant.
City officials have said this is the best redevelopment offer they’ve gotten since Carson’s closed the store five years ago. Trevor Dick, the city’s deputy economic development director, told aldermen the staff actively marketed the building to businesses and “there was no interest.”
The only other bite came from a church, he said.
Officials have stressed that the development would be better than the building remaining empty, especially because it would create new landscaping along the front of Lake Street in what one alderman described as a tangled mess of concrete.
They also have stressed that unlike many such developments, the storage area would have the restaurant and retail use facing Lake Street.
But is it the best the city can do in that spot?
Residents have said no. They have referred to the development as “inactive,” and have said it would create a large dead zone along Lake, and in their neighborhood.
Jimi Allen, an Aurora businessman who lives in Riddle Highlands, an historic district neighborhood nestled behind the proposed development, has taken a different view than city officials.
“It isn’t the best we can do,” he said. “If we vote this in, it’s locked down for decades, a nail in the coffin for our community. If you’re going to say, this is the market reality, then what’s your next move. You’ve decided this is a dead zone.”
Allen runs Bureau Gravity, a digital integrated marketing business in downtown Aurora. He runs his business out of an historic business on LaSalle Street that was redeveloped into an older building with the use of some city monetary help, and New Market Tax Credit Loans, which are low-interest, require less equity, limit the risk factor and have a longer amortization to keep upfront costs down.
They are loans that stress opportunity, which Allen said Aurora is full of, if pursuing creative alternatives.
An area has to be eligible for New Market Loans, and a look at a New Market Tax Credit map online shows the area at 970 N. Lake St. as being in an area of “severe distress,” making it eligible.
Allen praised Aurora city staff – he said his building could not have been done without intense help from the city’s economic development and development standards departments.
He said those departments “have gotten a lot done,” but that they are “overworked,” and have “a lot on their plate.”
He has offered the services of Bureau Gravity at no cost to create a marketing plan, and help with active marketing for Lake Street – both the Carson’s building and Lake Street itself – if the city would delay its vote on the development plan for 12 months.
“If we had six to 12 months, imagine what we could get done,” Allen said. “We’re asking to partner. What would happen if they had a couple of partners helping them?”
Allen points to The Plant, a redevelopment of one of the buildings in the Stockyards area on Chicago’s South Side. It took a large building that once processed meat and broke it into smaller units, becoming an incubator for a number of small businesses that now grow plants and vegetables – many of them supplying Chicago restaurants.
He said instead of thinking the former Carson’s building has to be marketed only as a big box store, think of it as 36 spaces of 5,000 square feet. And it’s possible with New Market Tax Credit loans, Allen said.
Aldermen will vote Tuesday on a development that would clearly improve the property, proponents say.
“It’s not going to look like it does now,” said Richard Williams, a Geneva attorney representing Storage of America. “It’s a significant investment.”
But aldermen also have to decide if the city could do better.
“I can’t live with, ‘this is just the best we can do,'” Allen said.
