Happy ending for Town & Country renovation
Arlington Heights officials figured it would take 10 years to rebuild the Town & Country mall at the southeast corner of Arlington Heights and Palatine roads.
Turns out it took only about three years, officials told the Arlington Heights village board on Monday.
"Give credit to the developer who got the right tenants in there," Village President Arlene Mulder said.
The money to pay for the renovation came from a special taxing district. The Town & Country site is part of a tax increment financing district, the village's fifth, approved in 2005. A TIF district allows the village to redevelop blighted areas by setting aside the extra property tax revenue generated by rising property values and using that money to pay for certain aspects of redevelopment.
TIF districts are controversial because government agencies such as schools do not receive the increased property tax money for up to 23 years.
The total cost of the Town & Country renovation was $17 million. Because of the special taxing district, the village was able to reimburse the developer about $4 million from property tax revenue for the demolition of old buildings, site work and traffic signals at Arlington Heights Road.
The entire TIF district includes Southpoint Shopping Center, on the other side of Rand Road, which hasn't seen the same success and is still without a major anchor.
From here on out, the TIF district will mostly be used to develop Southpoint, said Charles Witherington-Perkins, the village's director of planning and community development.
Unlike the Town & County site, where one developer is in charge of redeveloping the entire site, most of the Southpoint stores have different owners.
Despite the success of Town & Country, there is no sign the district will retire early, Witherington-Perkins said.
In 2006, the 50,000-square-foot Dick's Sporting Goods took over the middle portion of the mall. Town & Country dates back to 1981 when it had an indoor theater, arcade, fast-food restaurants and small shops. Gradually, many of those closed and in 1999, Visconsi Companies of Pepper Pike, Ohio, bought the 324,000-square-foot mall.
The company later gutted the mall and rebuilt it as a traditional outdoor strip mall.
Some tenants, like Best Buy and Marshall's, waited out the construction. Others, like Old Country Buffet, Dominick's and Walgreens, were remodeled and given new facades.