Developer plans walkable, old-time neighborhood in Geneva

By Dennis Rodkin

A developer who has brought his brand of old-time walkable downtown suburban neighborhoods lined with front porches to Libertyville and Skokie is now planning to launch another, in far west suburban Geneva.

The Geneva site, at State and Richards streets, was the location of a Cetron electronics factory that closed in the 1980s and was demolished in 2015. What it has in common with the locations of SchoolStreet in Libertyville and Floral Avenue in Skokie is that “it’s a few blocks from a vibrant downtown where you can walk to the restaurants, the coffee shops and the train,” said John McLinden, principal of StreetScape Development, based in Skokie.

If approved by city officials in Geneva, StreetScape’s plan would put 42 new homes—a mix of houses, townhouses and apartments—on the site. It’s the residential component of Hamilton Place, a mixed-use development proposed by Karis Capital.

The plan “fits in with the way people are living now,” said Karis Capital principal Jake Finley. “There’s a return to the suburban downtown, but they don’t want to maintain a yard or buy a 100-year-old house in the historic district that they have to work on.”

There are about 50 restaurants in Geneva’s downtown area, Finley said, as well as shops, a Metra station seven-tenths of a mile from the Hamilton Place site, and a new public library under construction two blocks south of the site, on Seventh Street.

Karis is “aggressively trying to find a downtown-type of grocery store/market for our first-floor retail space,” Finley said. “It’s desperately needed in downtown Geneva,” where residents now drive west to sprawling Randall Road to shop, he said.

The project received preliminary approval from Geneva’s city council in July but the final OK hangs on the developers’ submission of final plans, according to Kevin Stahr, the city’s communications coordinator. In a prepared statement, Stahr wrote that “while Geneva prides itself on its historic character, Hamilton Place also would provide some modern retail space along the State Street corridor. This development, along with construction of the new (library), should serve as a catalyst for future economic growth in the area.”

Hamilton Place’s residential component includes 20 apartments above the retail space of State Street, plus 16 houses and six attached townhouses on the northern portion of the site, off busy State Street. The houses will come first, McLinden said. They’ll be 2,400 to 3,200 square feet, with prices in the $600,000s to around $750,000, he said. If city approvals allow for construction to begin around the end of 2018, the first houses would be ready for occupancy in late 2019, he said.

Every house will have a front porch, and the exteriors include gables, shingles, overhanging roofs and other elements that make them look like throwbacks.

Design options for the houses will include a master bedroom at the rear, near the garage, connected by a “bridge” passageway to the family room that creates a small courtyard between them, McLinden said. Coachhouse-style secondary living spaces will be available above some garages.

StreetScape’s projects generally follow the principles of New Urbanism, a reprise of traditional urban layouts that put shops, jobs and homes within a short walk of one another.

All 26 homes and 16 lofts were sold at SchoolStreet, launched in 2010 during the last recession on the site of another developer’s unfinished townhouse site immediately east of Libertyville’s thriving downtown blocks of Milwaukee Avenue. In 2014, the firm launched Floral Avenue on a comparable site in Skokie. McLinden said the last of the 20 Floral Avenue homes is sold and scheduled to close by the end of the year, when construction is finished.

Sale prices at Floral Avenue averaged about $650,000, McLinden said.

StreetScape’s 2015 proposal to build 17 homes in Lake Zurich did not move forward.