[ibimage==46720==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-center]From left: Roosevelt adjunct real estate professor Dennis Harder; student team member Ainsworth Thompson; Roosevelt’s Marshall Bennett Institute of Real Estate Director Jon B. DeVries, student team member Daniel Gutman; Roosevelt adjunct real estate professor Jonathan Dennis; and student team members Karli Mayher, Mary Fran Gill and Hubie Greenwald.
Imagine you’re driving on the Kennedy between Lake Street and Jackson Blvd and up above your vehicle are restaurants and retail shops, an indoor four-season garden, a fountain, a high-tech high school and a tech incubator. Thanks to some Roosevelt University students, such a creation might not be far from becoming reality.
Imagine you’re driving on the Kennedy between Lake Street and Jackson Blvd and up above your vehicle are restaurants and retail shops, an indoor four-season garden, a fountain, a high-tech high school and a tech incubator. Thanks to some Roosevelt University students, such a creation might not be far from becoming reality.
The space described above is called The Landing. Proposed by a team of Roosevelt University students, The Landing won first place on April 11 at the fifth installment of the Harold E. Eisenberg Foundation Midwest Real Estate Challenge — the third consecutive win for Roosevelt.
“We wanted to really create something that was cohesive with the neighborhoods and would kind of create more of a flow from the Loop into the West Loop,” Mary Gill, a student studying for her master’s in science of real estate and team captain, said. “Currently the highway kind of creates that barrier that keeps the central business district from moving west. We wanted to create kind of an entertainment district that could also act as green space and restaurant space for some light retail to add to the West Loop aesthetically.”
Fifield Companies sparked the competition with its desire for such a development, an initiative called Cap The Kennedy. According to an article on Roosevelt’s website, teams from Marquette University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign pitched proposals, as well.
Gill said her team estimated that constructing The Landing would cost about $99 million. She said the project could be financed through TIF and TIFIA funds and EB-5 Visas.
According to Gill, the Roosevelt team originally identified park space as the cheapest option for the development, which has a one-story restriction. But, the team found that proposal boring, and it thought The Landing could be much more. Along with restaurants and an all-year garden, tech became part of the bigger picture.
“We also wanted to feed off Google coming to the area and the tech industry growing,” Gill said, who credited Roosevelt with providing great support.
For winning the competition, which was judged by a five-member panel that included three Fifield executives, Fifield granted Roosevelt’s real estate program a $5,000 scholarship and the team will be honored at October’s Harold E. Eisenberg Foundation.
So, in regard to The Landing, what are the next steps?
“That’s a good question. We asked Fifield the same thing after the competition, and they said they’re definitely still working on it,” Gill said, adding that Fifield seems optimistic and told them they will keep moving forward with it. “I think it’s very time consuming. Building over the highway is a lofty project, and there’s a lot of factors that go into it. But they’re definitely still pursuing it, is what they told us. I think it’s got great potential. Even if the whole thing doesn’t get capped, I think a portion of it could. I think it could definitely happen in the future.”
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