CHICAGO | Economic & Business Development

[marothisu]

Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright

All companies come with vendors, the question is whether they have the gravity to single handedly suck entire offices into relocating with them. Mondelez may not have the kind of clout on their own, but given the agglomeration of food companies piling up in this area, it's probably going to attract more vendors to this kind of company to the area.

Yep exactly. Don't forget that also in the general area for food is Conagra, Kraft Heinz, Beam Suntory, ADM, Morton Salt, Ferrara Candy (upcoming), Quaker Oats, Hillshire Farms, etc.

[LouisVanDerWright]

You also forgot about Miller Coors. The area is quite a mecca for the industry as Chicago has always been. This is what I am talking about when I say companies moving into downtown is not a zero sum game. The suburbs loss is not a 1 for 1 gain for the city. Concentrating all of these businesses in a small area makes our agglomeration of food companies exponentially more attractive to the next company looking at a relocation or to the next international customer or vendor of a bunch of these companies who is looking for a convenient location for their NA HQ.

If you take these same companies and scatter them all over Chicagoland you don't get anywhere near the gravitational pull this cluster has being all crammed into essentially 1 square mile of downtown.

Therefore... Death to the suburbs!

[IrishIllini]

Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright

You also forgot about Miller Coors. The area is quite a mecca for the industry as Chicago has always been. This is what I am talking about when I say companies moving into downtown is not a zero sum game. The suburbs loss is not a 1 for 1 gain for the city. Concentrating all of these businesses in a small area makes our agglomeration of food companies exponentially more attractive to the next company looking at a relocation or to the next international customer or vendor of a bunch of these companies who is looking for a convenient location for their NA HQ.

If you take these same companies and scatter them all over Chicagoland you don't get anywhere near the gravitational pull this cluster has being all crammed into essentially 1 square mile of downtown.

Therefore... Death to the suburbs!

The suburbs don't need to die, but major corporate campuses in the suburbs should. If the region's population continues to contract for the foreseeable future, it's possible that concentrating employment and people may counteract some of those negative consequences.

[SIGSEGV]

Suburban office campuses were a huge mistake so it's good that they're moving downtown no matter what.

[LouisVanDerWright]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

We want a vibrant downtown, but that doesn't mean we want everywhere else to be declining, or viewed as unlivable.

Another way to put it is, when we view a corporate relocation we often focus on the attributes of where the company is moving to. But lets not forget that with the same movement said company is moving from, and hence rejecting, another community.

Ok, but let's also not forget that the only reason a lot of these communities exist in the first place is that some bigwig got the bright idea to bail on downtown so he could have a shorter drive from his Lake Forest villa to work. Many of the communities you are lamenting only exist because of the flight of corporates from the city to begin with.

I'm watching this hilarious TV show right now called "The Marvelous Ms Maisel" about a 50's housewife whose husband cheats on her and then she ends up falling into the world of standup comedy in a time when the industry was just starting and women were nowhere to be seen.

There is a scene where she had just gotten back together with her husband and slept with him again. A few days later his mistress shows up at the wife's job at a department store to chew her out. The mistress is like "how dare you sleep with your husband, that's just cruel!"

That's basically what you are saying here. "How Dare McDonald's leave it's mistress Oakbrook for it's wife Chicago! That's just cruel!"

None of this is to say that people can't or shouldn't live or work in the suburbs if they so choose, but it is to say that competition giveth and competition taketh away. If suburban locations are less beneficial than they were purported to be, then no one has the right to demand they stay put to subsidize what was ultimately a matter of:

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

Suburban office campuses were a huge mistake so it's good that they're moving downtown no matter what.

This, building job nodes in far flung places was never a good idea. No one can complain when a bad idea fails due to it's own insufficiency.

[the urban politician]

^ I'm not advocating for suburban campuses--at all. I'm cheering downtown's resurgence as the center of all greatness for the region.

All I"m pointing out is that we need more success stories in the Chicago region, not fewer.

Dallas and Houston, Atlanta, etc etc are growing everywhere and pumping at all cyclinders. We seem to be pumping pretty much with only one (central area of Chicago), and that's one HUGE cylinder, don't get me wrong.

At the end of the day I would hope that at least some of these suburban campuses survive to play some role to provide employment for residents in their respective towns, and hence keep people from fleeing the region. I wouldn't want them all to decay into blight.

The Bay Area proves that you can still have an internationally recognized, urban city that pumps way above its weight (SF), while still having a huge source of jobs outside that core (Silicon Valley). We don't want to stomp out any opportunities in our region. The next Uber or Google could very will start out, at least, in some office park in Downers Grove, for all we know.

[Leveled]

The sunbelt will pay for its sprawl.

[galleyfox]

San Francisco and Houston and other such cities have never faced deindustrialization and economic collapse like the Midwest has dealt with. The only way to keep off decline is to ensure the health of the core, and that means consolidation. The suburbs just are not productive enough by themselves to fuel any new growth or recovery. They will decline with or without their current campuses.

It's like the death of a star. After the initial fuel runs out, it can either fade away into nothing, a mere white dwarf. Or we can consolidate into something so dense that nothing can escape our gravity.

And frankly, I want Chicago to be at the center of the economic universe so if it's a zero-sum game between Chicago and the suburbs, Chicago's gotta win out until it has enough gravity to attract investment from the outside.

[moorhosj]

Originally Posted by galleyfox

San Francisco and Houston and other such cities have never faced deindustrialization and economic collapse like the Midwest has dealt with. The only way to keep off decline is to ensure the health of the core, and that means consolidation. The suburbs just are not productive enough by themselves to fuel any new growth or recovery. They will decline with or without their current campuses.

It's like the death of a star. After the initial fuel runs out, it can either fade away into nothing, a mere white dwarf. Or we can consolidate into something so dense that nothing can escape our gravity.

And frankly, I want Chicago to be at the center of the economic universe so if it's a zero-sum game between Chicago and the suburbs, Chicago's gotta win out until it has enough gravity to attract investment from the outside.

I had the same thought recently and decided to pull some data from the 5-year ACS Census to compare different types of cities (rust belt, coastal, sun belt). I was surprised at how different these cities are from eachother. Chicago seems most like Atlanta and Philadelphia. It is sorted by median income and you can see the cities go from Rust Belt to Sun Belt to Coastal as incomes increase.

[Steely Dan]

with the mondolez move downtown, i believe that puts 13 F500 HQ's in downtown vs. 22 out in the burbs.

we still have a ways to go to centralize corporate chicago.

[the urban politician]

^ Love the Astrophysics analogy

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

^ Love the Astrophysics analogy

Unlike stars, we are not limited by the tyranny of nuclear binding energies

[the urban politician]

Common Spirit Health will be the name of the combined hospital system that will shortly be based in Chicago. Office will be in the West Loop.

This is a non-for-profit Catholic “ministry” ( ), but if it were a publicly traded company it would definitely be in the Fortune 500. A good gain for Chicago

https://www.advancinghealthcaretogether.org/

[galleyfox]

Go to their website where they explain the full details. Two organizations based in San Francisco and Denver merged, but they operate in 28 states.

Their rationale for Chicago is the following (though Chicago's growing healthcare industry and large Catholic population surely played a role.)

"The combined organization will establish its corporate headquarters in Chicago, a new location for a new organization. This decision was made because Chicago is centrally located, has convenient access to all parts of the country where our ministries are located, and offers good infrastructure to support a national organization."

[the urban politician]

The suburban office market is actually not doing too badly:

https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2019...n-2018-report/

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

The suburban office market is actually not doing too badly:

https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2019...n-2018-report/

Well, at least the O'Hare region (which is doing the best, apparently) is kind of in the city. I wouldn't be surprised to see the area around Cumberland/Rosemont growing as a compromise between city and suburbs.

[Randomguy34]

^ I can imagine the new HQ being a good bridge between West Loop and the IMD. Do we know the address of their building?

[pullmanman]

Trunk Club to add about 175 jobs
Brianna Kelly
Crain's Chicago Business
1/15/2019

Trunk Club is adding about 175 full-time jobs to the company’s customer service and styling teams, including about 120 new positions in Chicago, where the company is based.

Trunk Club is a personal styling service offering online and in-person shopping options. The company was founded in Chicago’s River North neighborhood in 2009 and purchased by Nordstrom for $350 million in August 2014.

A Trunk Club spokeswoman said in an email that "we feel very confident in our growth trajectory.

It currently has more than 520 employees in Chicago apart from the approximately 120 it plans to add this year, compared to about 460 at the end of 2016, around the time former CEO Brian Spaly left the company.

The more jobs downtown (River North, technically) the better. Even if these are mostly low- to mid-level service jobs, I think they're a much needed replacement for some of the jobs lost at dying department stores.

[LouisVanDerWright]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

The suburban office market is actually not doing too badly:

https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2019...n-2018-report/

20% vacancy in the longest post war economic expansion in the history of the greatest economy in human history is not "not doing too badly", just for reference high cube warehouse space in Chicago is clocking in at 4-5% vacancy despite a wave of speculative construction. That 20% number is DESPITE the demolition of 750,000 SF or so of suburban office space and includes O'Hare which is really a hybrid market and is doing far better than the other far flung markets. Schaumburg is still at 25%+, that's downright miserable.

The vacancy rates went up in the burbs in the recession and haven't looked back since.

Originally Posted by the urban politician

Common Spirit Health will be the name of the combined hospital system that will shortly be based in Chicago. Office will be in the West Loop.

This is a non-for-profit Catholic “ministry” ( ), but if it were a publicly traded company it would definitely be in the Fortune 500. A good gain for Chicago

https://www.advancinghealthcaretogether.org/

Man the West Loop is definitely not a good office market, all these companies are making terrible decisions, am I right Sam?

[the urban politician]

^ Where did anyone say that the suburban office market is thriving? You’re comparing office space to warehouse space? I mean, the downtown area’s office vacancy alone is often in the low teens, so 20% in that context isn’t too bad.

All that article said is that it’s not in a state of total collapse. It’s treading water despite a lot of HQ decamping for downtown, and has actually still had steady absorption.