Skokie Voice Forum Talks Economic Possibilities

There have been recent indications that the economy – which has been so anemic for so long – is beginning to show some signs of life. That being the case, there is hope that Skokie will start to show some results of that. But there is still a lot of work to be done and no one can make any guarantees about the future.

That was a theme of a recent meeting on the state of economic development within the village.

Upstart community activist group Skokie Voice hosted a gathering last week to discuss the economic challenges facing the village. Approximately 125 people listened to Tom Thompson, Skokie’s Economic Development Coordinator and Ann Tennes, the village’s Marketing and Communications Director, to discuss what is being done from a local government perspective.

Also on the panel were Valerie Shuman of the Skokie Downtown Alliance, Randy Miles, the owner of Skokie’s Village Inn and the President of the Independent Merchants of Downtown Skokie, Howard Meyer, the Executive Director of the Skokie Chamber of Commerce and Shalom Klein, a local entrepreneur who has been influential in the development of the new Dempster Street Merchants Association.

The biggest change at hand is the opening of the new Oakton stop on the Yellow Line at the intersection of Skokie Boulevard. The village is optimistic that will start a trend of getting more people into downtown.

“My objective for the coming year is to see that station open and operational,” Thompson said. “That will be a great day when we have the grand opening for that.”

That new stop will particularly benefit the Illinois Science and Technology Park which employees approximately 1,300 people. Thompson indicated that number could grow by as many as 4,000 in the future.

If that happens, that may alter pedestrian traffic.

The overriding question is what impact both the train station and making changes to Oakton’s streetscape will mean to the street’s future.

“My vision of downtown is a unique kind of shopping Mecca, with ethnic and diverse and small type of ‘mom and pop’ type stores and you can go in and see the owners. That is the uniqueness that we can and do bring to our community,” Miles said. “We can’t compete with Westfield [Old Orchard Mall] and we can’t compete with Village Crossing. We have to do things that are a little different and put a personal touch on it.”

West Dempster

Moving north to Dempster Street, optimism abounds that the well-traveled thoroughfare can once again be a destination for shoppers.

“What we’ve tried to create is an opportunity to empower and connect businesses up and down Dempster Street,” Klein said. “We want to create meetings of various business owners because we all deal with the same challenges. When there is traffic on West Dempster, there is traffic on East Dempster. We are all about Dempster Street and hope to go beyond Dempster.”

As for the future of one particular iconic business on Dempster Street, the future of Kaufman’s Deli is still up in the air after a fire gutted the building last year. The village wants the ownership to stay in the same area.

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“We are trying to keep that Skokie institution on West Dempster Street,” Thompson said. “We are doing everything we can to work with the owner of that fine business to either keep her in her location or to help her relocate to another location as long as it is on West Dempster.”

Thompson is optimistic a “major commercial announcement” will be made in the downtown area later this year and they are looking for a developer on the village owned property at Dempster Street and Bronx Avenue. “The village and the citizens of Skokie got fed up with the condition of that property and we bought it,” he said. “We are trying to locate developers now that might be interested in a mixed use site.”

Thompson added, “There is nothing wrong with West Dempster Street that can’t be fixed. It just needs responsible property owners and we need to have development markets return to where they were years ago. I’m confident we will see that.”

In terms of another major development, discussion of a new Super Wal-Mart at Touhy and St. Louis is scheduled to go before the village’s plan commission next month.

While there was plenty of optimism expressed about the future of the village, there was a hefty dose of reality sprinkled in.

“We are constantly out there pitching Skokie,” Thompson conceded. “We are doing so in a horrible economy. All we have to do is look around and we don’t see a lot of cranes out there. There is just not enough development going on, but we have been successful in finding some of the niche players. I think they will serve as a catalyst in the future.”

Any hopes of a Trader Joe’s coming into Skokie were quashed, as the specialty grocery chain believes they have covered the area with locations in Park Ridge, Glenview and Evanston according to Thompson.

In general, competing against Evanston is a major challenge.

“Evanston is a unique situation,” Miles said. “They do have Northwestern University and to a degree of expendable income in that community. That is not the end all and be all of the economic development down there, but what it does do is sustains those stores through the tough periods when the regular community is not necessarily supporting the effort. Our unique challenge is we don’t have a Northwestern University with a lot of expendable income in our area.”

As the session was winding down, resident Bonnie Fell said she would like to see an overall “vision” for the community and to give visitors an idea as to what Skokie distinctive.

Miles contended the village’s mixture of backgrounds makes that difficult, but intriguing.

“It is difficult to have an overall vision in a community as diverse as ours. We have different communities within our community,” he said. “The overall vision is for the village is to have all of these different pockets that are accessible to people and that makes it desirable. Having to sew it up into one way of doing it takes the fun out of it.”

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