New growth towns face challenges that come with more people

By James Fuller

Fairview School was closed last year after more than three decades of serving the Darien area.

The more than 400 students now attend a grade-level center.

Fairview's shuttering and Darien Elementary District 61's revamped system is the result of declining enrollment and an aging population.

Yet, 16 miles southwest, an enrollment boom continues in Plainfield Unit District 202 reminiscent of the old woman who lived in a shoe.

The district's population began to explode with the turn of the millennium. On average, more than 2,500 new students enroll in District 202 every year. It's now one of Illinois' five largest school districts with about 29,000 students in 28 schools. More of both are on the way.

The growth is a reflection of an ongoing migration from suburbs that at one time were considered the outer ring -- such as Darien, Elmhurst and Elgin -- to a newer outer ring -- Plainfield, Oswego and DeKalb, for example.


U.S. Census data and projections from local planning agencies show a decrease in Cook County's population, but an explosion in the far west that will see the population nearly double in the next 20 years. That growth has various levels of government scrambling to keep pace.

Money and melting

Perhaps the biggest impact to the outlying suburbs is the influx of young families with school-aged, or soon-to-be-school-aged children.

That's because families are buying their first homes farther out these days, as the cost of real estate prices them out of areas that once were magnets for such buyers.

DuPage County, for example, has a reputation for good schools. But the median home price in DuPage now is the highest in the area.

"What we see happening is that the younger people that are ready to buy their single-family house or first townhome, we find that we're taking them west and taking them out to the Fox Valley area and beyond that," said Wheaton Realtor Pat Callan, president-elect of the Illinois Association of Realtors. "We're going to Oswego, the west side of Aurora, St. Charles, even DeKalb."

That's resulted in huge tax increases to build new school buildings in some areas.

In the past two years, Plainfield, Oswego and DeKalb residents approved tax increases for a combined $812 million to build 25 new schools and renovate existing buildings.

They'll need those schools to accommodate an influx of children in coming years with different backgrounds than they've seen before. Education is the new spoon that stirs the melting pot.

Unlike the baby boom generation, most newborns in the area now are not white; they're Hispanic.

For example, for every white person who dies in Cook County, only one white baby is born. Meanwhile, there are seven Hispanic births for each Hispanic death.

This phenomenon is playing out farther out, too.

The 1990 Plainfield Unit District 202 profile showed a 96 percent white population in its hallways. Less than 3 percent of the students were Hispanic. And there wasn't a single black student.

By 2006, the population was 62 percent white, 20 percent Hispanic and 9 percent black.

"The face of Plainfield is definitely changing, and it's something that we celebrate," District 202 spokesman Tom Hernandez said. "We are now much more akin to what the real world presents to our students. We are very pleased with it."

Yet that also creates new language and cultural barriers to learning that the school districts must adjust to.


A total of 62 different languages are spoken by students in Plainfield schools. Spanish is the No. 1 language besides English. But now there's a notable Polish community and something District 202's Hernandez never thought he'd see.

"Who would've thunk that Plainfield would've had an Urdu community?" he said.

And don't let the housing market slowdown fool you into thinking the growth is over.

Kris Monn, the assistant superintendent for finance in Oswego Unit District 308, said the new schools will still be built and open eventually. They just won't be at capacity on the first day of school.

"We are definitely a new-construction community," Monn said. "Eventually the residential growth will continue. We've had a lot of the larger retail stores that continue to come on board out here. They wouldn't continue to build if they didn't believe the people were coming."

That commercial growth is exactly the economic development communities such as DeKalb seek.

With every new community, subdivision and neighborhood, municipalities in the far west strive to seek a tax balance between residents and their commercial and industrial businesses.

Controlled growth

DeKalb has long been synonymous with Northern Illinois University. The school is the largest employer in the area.

The continued population growth and a pro-growth city council has the community thinking about that identity. Is the goal to be and stay a college town? Or should DeKalb be a community that just happens to have a college in it?

"I think it's inevitable that we'll transition into the latter of the two things," said City Manager Mark Biernacki.

For now, that means concentrating on economic growth to balance out tax burden on residents.

Ten years ago, the majority of the city's tax income came from the larger apartment complexes in town. Now the cash cows are the major retail and warehouse manufacturing businesses.

The city is edging toward a 50/50 tax burden between residents and businesses mainly through zoning and permitting that allows major residential developments only when the city deems it's ready to handle that growth.

The result is no sudden influx of people, nor an unreasonable expectation of growth that sinks economic projections during a housing market slowdown.

DeKalb is also one of those communities that's nearing capacity in terms of developable lots. Biernacki said there's roughly 300 lots still available for single-family homes and townhouse development.

But the other growth factor the city is watching are the transportation challenges of getting all the new residents to their jobs, and all the potential customers to the new businesses. In recent years, the city has seen double-digit percentage increases in traffic on I-88.

All jammed up

The Illinois Department of Transportation is figuring out what commuters already know.

The road system in far western communities was built for the population that used to exist, not the cars now on the roadway, and certainly not the migration still to come.

The Prairie Parkway Study group is charged with finding answers to that problem. By 2030, the study found the average daily traffic count on state and federal highways in the far west will increase by 76 percent. County highway traffic will increase by 55 percent.

The grid system of roads that works in Chicago doesn't exist in the far west suburbs. Indeed, the farther west you travel, the more spaced out the roads become. That limits the alternative routes for commuters.

And don't even ask commuters how they feel about all the truck traffic on routes 23, 34, 47, 71 and 126 to Plainfield.

Life is somewhat easier for those traveling east into Chicago and west back home. But the Fox River and limited north-south routes in the far west make commutes between suburbs much more difficult.

The lack of suburban connections is the same problem plaguing public transportation options.

"The big challenge is how do you creatively serve that transit market and what should you do with your land use to make it more transit-friendly," said Rick Powell, a studies and plans engineer for IDOT in the far west.

On the roadways, Powell said, the answer is not just adding more lanes on existing routes, he said.

"Widening does address the capacity, but because there's development going on at the same time along these routes, you're still getting more traffic," Powell said. "The road becomes a victim of its own success. Once it's built, it draws even more development."

So the answer may be more roads and highways, but they won't come without a price.

More fuel-efficient or electric cars are expected to be on roads in the next 20 years. That means less money from the motor fuel tax to fund road improvements. Powell said the funding solution is likely to be more toll roads or a replacement of the gas tax by a mileage-based tax. Such a tax is based on the length of commutes as tracked by a transponder placed on cars.

"Of course, there's privacy concerns with that," Powell said. "Some people don't want a device that follows you wherever you go."

Even with all the new challenges of building more schools, balancing tax burdens and crawling through traffic, the far west population continues to grow.

Plainfield's Tom Hernandez said he knows why.

"People want the American dream, but they also want their green and their lawns," Hernandez said. "They have backyards here. The American dream is here."