Elm Street Development Heads Back To Plan Commission

DEERFIELD, IL — Village trustees unanimously sent a proposal for a housing development on Elm Street back to the Deerfield Plan Commission last week amid continued opposition from neighbors. Highland Park-based Avanti Construction Group reduced the density of its proposal a fourth time, as the developer seeks rezoning through the village's planned development process to seek a rezoning of the properties at 464 and 502 Elm Street.

After initially seeking to build 14 townhouses Avanti President Gene Rezvin has gradually reduced the scope of the plan for the combined 1.08-acre site, which currently contains a pair of single family homes.

From the initial 14, it was reduced to 12 homes last summer of 2017. Later, that was dropped to 10 units, then to eight and now to six detached single family homes.

The proposal will head back to the plan commission, as Village Manager Kent Street said the reduction in size and increase in the proposed setbacks to the east and west of the development meant that it constituted a substantially different proposal.

That commission previously voted 4-2 to recommend that the village board reject the proposal. Commisioners Sean Forrest, Jennifer Goldstone, Elaine Jacoby and Larry Berg voted against the eight-home project. Al Bromberg and Justin Silva voted to send it to the village board with a positive recommendation. That version of the proposal never made it to a board vote.

In an April 4 letter to the commission included in the materials for that meeting, a pair of residents of the 400 block of Elm Street wrote that Revzin said it was a "financial hardship for him to build less than 8 houses."

The proposed four-bedroom homes would be built to sell around $600,000 each. According to the minutes of the public hearing for the project, Revzin told the plan commission it would be inconceivable to keep only two single family homes on his property.

There were more than 100 people on hand for the commission's April 12 meeting, the Deerfield Review reported, with 17 residents speaking in opposition to the development and no one speaking in favor of it.

Several residents who spoke at the June 4 meeting said they had hoped for the board to vote against the plan instead of giving it another shot at plan commission approval.

"We're quite a community," said Bill Vaananen, a recently retired Northbrook music teacher and Deerfield resident for more than 25 years. "We're all a close knit family of neighbors, we have block parties, we have Oktoberfests, we snowplow each others drivers when needed, and we are so focused on stopping this development and stopping the rezoning." He said about 30 families who live in the vicinity of the property have been fighting its development for more than a year.

"At the last plan commission meeting, the developer called out neighborhood a decaying neighborhood," Vaananen said. "And how would you like to hear from a builder that your neighborhood is decaying? Well, we didn't like it at all, it kind of woke us up."

Linda Vaananen said even the revised proposal was too dense and remained incompatible with the neighborhood. She described the proposed design as aesthetically unpleasant, "stark, not attractive, all uniform, no individuality, in the middle of our R3 neighborhood where we have front yards, back yards, trees, individuality, uniqueness," which she described as the wrong place for such rezoning.

"If we can change an R3 to an R5 like this in the middle of our neighborhood," she said, noting it was not close to the train station. "Where does the line get drawn? If we keep scooting further away, then what are the next two properties that are going to be pulled up? And then there's this trend of development and we keep moving out, and pretty soon the landscape of our neighborhoods and the integrity of Deerfield and our character as a community is drastically changed."

Andrea Weisberg, another nearby resident. said it was very upsetting to confront encroachment on her backyard after having lived in Deerfield for so many years, regardless of what setback the developer's revised plans include.

"Whatever it is, I'm going to have a tall building shadowing by backyard," Weisberg said. "And when I open my curtains I'll be looking into someone else's curtains, along with the rest of my neighbors, and it's not what I signed up for."

Andrew Marwick said the plans did not fit the site. He said it was misuse of the planned development process.

"What's going on here is [the developer is] just shoehorning as many units as he can dream up. What is in it for the community of Deerfield? Four more units? Two more units? This does not do anything to increase the housing supply in Deerfield, it really doesn't increase the tax base for Deerfield, it doesn't really affect the schools, it only affects the neighbors on a street that has no parking available," Marwick said.

Mayor Harriet Rosenthal said she understood the frustrations of residents.

"We try very hard on this board to give everyone the opportunity to express themselves, including developers who have purchased property," Rosenthal said the board did not have a chance to review the new revision.

"I know it's been drawn out, it's been drawn out for us, it's been drawn out for the plan commission," the mayor said. "We're all spending our time on this but we want to be as fair and as equitable to our resident and to developers as well."

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