Quote:
Originally Posted by oshkeoto
Ardecila, do you know anything about the decision-making process to do that in Des Plaines?
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It's an interesting question. I'd love to dig into it, but I don't really have the time to do it fully.
One point is that the zoning code includes an R-4 "Central Core Residential" district. The entire downtown area, a sizable trapezoid of land bounded by River Road, the UP New Line, the the CN/Metra North Central Line, and Oakwood Avenue, is zoned either R-4 or higher, and many of the 4+1 (or 5+1/6+1) developments in the R-4 are built as-of-right. The only exception is the triangular, Olmsted-esque Silk Stocking neighborhood, which is all single-family.
Politically, I don't know how Des Plaines managed this. One wild-ass guess is that the City of Des Plaines focused its growth on the periphery for decades, and by the time they ran out of developable land in the 1980s, the single-family blocks around downtown were low-income/blighted, making an upzoning more politically palatable.
Des Plaines also seems to have different demographics than surrounding suburbs, with a much higher percentage of Latino and Eastern European immigrants that may not share the same desire to maintain single-family homes.