Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Outside of the Northeast, it's less common to have these really old cities surrounded by sprawl that became suburban office centers for professionals mostly living in sprawl. It never happened in places like Pontiac, Joliet, etc.
|
Yeah, the only place in Chicagoland where you have an older traditionally urban suburban town center with highrise office buildings is in downtown Evanston, but:
A. Evanston's tallest buildings top out at around 80m.
B. Downtown Evanston isn't really surrounded by post-war sprawl. It's textbook pre-war inner-ring.
C. Evanston's total office market is only ~2M SF, a relative drop in the bucket.
To point C above, the overwhelming majority of commercial office space in suburban Chicago is either in office park garbage strung along expressway corridors, or a few sprawl-a-thon centers like Schaumburg, often anchored by a giant mall, where you have office towers sitting like individual chess pieces in the middle of gigantic parking lots. The vast, VAST majority of it is less than 10 floors, with only those two exceptionally tall towers over 100m already pointed out, and they are tall purely for developer vanity reasons, not any market forces of traditional urbanism (ie. scarce/valuable land in a prime location = taller buildings).