Consultants: Divide Motorola's Schaumburg campus into 20 parcels
For years, suburbs that have been home to large, single-user corporate campuses have been struggling with the increasing unpopularity of such developments in comparison to walkable, multiuse urban environments.
But Schaumburg's 277-acre Motorola Solutions campus - from which the company will soon move its corporate headquarters - is large enough to create such an environment almost from scratch, the village's hired consultants reported Tuesday.
The development consultants showed village board members a concept plan that divided the land into about 20 parcels connected by a curved road running from the west side of Meacham Road to the south side of Algonquin Road.
Here, people would be able to live, work in offices, dine at restaurants and stay at hotels without having to move their cars during the middle of the business day, said Ranadip Bose, senior project manager for Chicago-based SB Friedman Development Advisors.
As startling as it may be to compare the two spaces, the defined area of the Chicago Loop is only about 300 acres, said Ferhat Zerin, principal of Orland Park-based Ginkgo Planning & Design.
"It is a very unique site," she said of the Motorola Solutions campus. "It is a great location."
Bose said rents on office spaces in walkable areas see a 44 percent premium over solely drivable environments nationwide.
But representatives of Motorola Solutions, which intends to keep 1,600 employees on its longtime site, expressed some concerns with the proposed placement of the central road.
Chuck Hanlon, principal of WBK Planning & Engineering, said Motorola Solutions thought the proposed road dipped too deeply into the properties along the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway. The company is on the verge of proposing a similar road slightly to the north that could be built in 2016 and act as an even faster catalyst for the rest of the concept, Hanlon said.
"That's our simple request and our only issue with what's been presented," he said.
Village trustees will vote Dec. 8 on whether to send their consultants' unaltered but fluid concept plan to the plan commission for a public hearing in early 2016.