12 stories of turmoil

By DAVID ROEDER Business Reporter

An artist’s rendering of a proposed redevelopment of the old Lincoln Park Hospital. The complex is in the foreground and includes the white and dark buildings.

Community opposition is blocking a proposed redevelopment of the old Lincoln Park Hospital property on the North Side, but the local alderman said she hopes to broker a compromise before she leaves office next spring.

Ald. Vi Daley (43rd) said developers will have to redesign plans for a 20,000-square-foot Fresh Market grocery on the site at Lincoln and Webster. Sandz Development Co. wants the store, a medical office building and about 160 condominiums on the three-acre site nestled in one of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

Critics argue the development would bring commercial traffic to their residential streets. David Goldman, partner at Sandz, said vocal neighbors are intimidating others, including Daley, into opposing the project.

“They are determined to stop this and aren’t interested in the facts of the presentation,” Goldman said. Sandz bought the property out of foreclosure for about $31 million.

But Chicago tradition requires that he get aldermanic support for a major zoning change, and he doesn’t have it. Daley listened at a Tuesday night community meeting on the project that several hundred people attended, and later expressed her feelings to the Sun-Times.

“We’ll have to work harder to see if the developers will address the retail component,” Daley said. The Chicago Plan Commission is scheduled to consider the project Dec. 16, but Daley said she has asked the agency to remove it from its agenda. City planners typically grant such aldermanic requests.

“I don’t think anybody wants this to go to the plan commission and have the hearing be a free-for-all,” Daley said. She said she hopes a revised design and a consensus supporting the plan will be a capping achievement of her aldermanic career.

Daley is not seeking re-election and a dozen candidates have filed petitions to replace her in the Feb. 22 race.

Working with a new alderman could kill the project or set it back months. Goldman said Sandz already has made several concessions to neighbors but declined to say if there’s further room to deal.

Most of the proposal involves renovating buildings already in place and empty since the hospital closed in 2008. He said the buildings are deteriorating and getting more costly to maintain as time goes on. “No one else will make this vacant hospital go away any time soon,” Goldman said.

The Lincoln Park Chamber of Commerce backs the plan, as have some residents who don’t live in the immediate area.

Attorney Martin Oberman, a former alderman hired by opponents of the project, said Sandz is asking for extraordinary concessions. Developers who ask for a large-scale rezoning generally have to respect the character of the surroundings, yet, “the supermarket is dramatically contradictory to a residential zone.”

Sandz wants to move on construction of the store first, because that part is ready to go. Sandz can collect revenue while it waits for the housing market to improve.

Oberman said the scale of the housing is too large. Most condos would be in a 12-story former hospital building, with Sandz expanding the top two floors to cover the full width of the building.

The only reason the high-rise exists in the neighborhood is because zoning rules permitted a hospital, Oberman said. “It’s just an excuse to get a 12-story condo building when they have no right to have one,” he said.

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