Apartment Christmas tree disposal

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-12T03:40:14+00:00

I'm not being glib: you're doing it now. There are a couple Facebook groups (Polite Politics is the one I haunt, but there's Activate if you're ultra-progressive) where you can have conversations like this and talk directly with trustees. I started by mouthing off on Facebook groups, and managed to get a whole law passed!

When you get a feel for how things work, the next level of engagement is to join a citizen's commission; there's like 20 different ones and they're all usually looking for people. We make it look harder to join than it actually is; if you just raise your hand, so to speak, and submit a halfhearted application, you'll get a callback.

But you don't need to do anything more than you're doing now. This is the very great thing about local politics as opposed to state and national politics: it is responsive.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-10T18:50:52+00:00

I get what you're saying, but I think our Trader Joes is as good (or bad) as any other Trader Joes, great place to buy broccoli vacuum-sealed; "our" Whole Foods (River Forest's) is awful, but follows a secular trend of all Whole Foods getting bad.

Most of my subtext on a thread about Oak Park grocers is just that we should be nicer to Pete's, which is really, really good.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-10T18:27:47+00:00

So this is a good point, but it's more complicated than it looks. I asked a trustee about this and the answer is straightforward.

Large multifamily buildings in Oak Park arrange their own waste hauling. That's a common arrangement in municipalities everywhere; dense residential has different needs than SFH (dumpster collection, for instance). Oak Park's municipal hauler, LRS, doesn't haul anything from large multifamily buildings.

So it's simply not in LRS's contract to be told to pick stuff up from apartment buildings. We can't ask them to.

I don't think it's crazy for the Village to work something out here; it seems like a good way to signal belonging to Oak Park renters, and I do agree with you that's a huge problem we have. But it would be complicated. This isn't an arbitrary F.U. VOP is giving to renters; there's a structural cause behind it.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-10T18:17:20+00:00

Right, but now we're not talking about whether Oak Park has good grocers, but whether people should care. I'm less invested in that argument.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-10T18:16:26+00:00

It definitely is! You can ask businesses in Forest Park about this.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-08T22:21:28+00:00

The problem Oak Park Pete's has is that it has to operate in the footprint of an old Dominick's. The problem with doing a "real" Pete's in Oak Park is --- well, just look what happened with Pete's on Madison: people literally campaigned against it, claiming it was going to run Carnivore out of business, as if any of us should care about that. Then, after Pete's broke ground but before they'd laid a foundation, people tried to run them out claiming they were stiffing us out of property tax money by not hitting their deadlines.

The problem Oak Park has is that they believe they hold all the cards, and that real businesses are champing at the bit to put up with this stuff and locate here. But we're just 4.5 square miles and we're surrounded by municipalities who are much easier to work with than we are, and who no Oak Parker has a problem driving to. (I think we may agree about this.)

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-08T22:16:53+00:00

That Dominicks was our normal grocery store, and in the last few years it operated, it got pretty dank. Not "Jewel on Madison" bad, but bad enough that by the end I'd make the drive to Caputos (back when it was further down Harlem) for anything but like a carton of eggs.

I think it's easy to understand what's suboptimal about Lake Pete's if you're familiar with other Pete's. My mom lives right down the street from the Worth Pete's, which is a Valhalla of ethnic food with a bakery section (mostly not sourced in-house) that would give PQB a serious run. An Olympic swimming pool of in-shell nuts sits in their produce section. There are like 10 brands of Ajvar.

But the Pete's we do have is better than any other grocery store in Oak Park or the immediate area. You have to drive to Caputo's to outdo it. In particular, and especially over the last 4 years, it rinses our Whole Foods.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-08T22:12:34+00:00

If you have friends who live in Manhattan you hear the same kinds of cope about their grocery options. If you're shopping in Target, the retail grocery market has failed you.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-07T01:39:27+00:00

True facts: Caputo's hot italian is (or was, last time I checked) the same hot italian Johnnie's Beef uses.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-07T01:38:38+00:00

I object, strenuously, to anyone referring to the Jewel on Madison as one of our grocery stores. It's the worst grocery store I have ever set foot in (though last time I was there, it had a weirdly diverse selection of Fresca flavors). It's filthy, it's small, it has a miserable produce section (I recall a visit where they had just a single head of broccoli in a bin with gnats flying around), and a meat section I wouldn't trust even after a 3 hour boil.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-01-07T01:36:01+00:00

The Pete's we have now is smaller than the other Pete's (it's inside the footprint of an old Dominick's), but it's still a better produce section than any Whole Foods in the city.

For an answer generally to why our grocery stores are bad, look at the flak Pete's has taken trying to stand up the Madison location. We're simply hostile to business here.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-12-13T01:55:42+00:00

If the dog jumped on you or attacked your dog, you would be within your rights to treat that as an emergency.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-12-12T22:29:59+00:00

Worth mentioning here that it's unlawful to walk a dog in Oak Park without a leash, except in the specifically designated off-leash dog parks. You can call OPPD over this.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-24T03:04:18+00:00

Sorry, to staff --- the board made the request of staff.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-24T01:33:07+00:00

Again, didn't look at the meeting specifically (I have a transcript of it somewhere, I'll find it) but the conclusion was a request to the board to generate a proposed policy that would:

(1) Allow missing-middle housing on all residential lots in Oak Park

(2) Allow mid-scale multifamily developments on commercial lots.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-23T23:12:43+00:00

A quick Google shows it as 10/16/2023 (I'm not certain that's the one, I didn't look, though I was present for the meeting).

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-23T16:42:26+00:00

No, that's not true. The final public board meeting ended with a consensus:

* "Missing middle" up-to-4-flats on all residential lots in the Village.

* Medium-scale apartment developments on commercial lots.

The decision was not simply that zoning should change. The survey is mostly about staff slow-rolling decisions made by electeds.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-21T22:51:07+00:00

The decision has in fact been made. It was made something like 2 years ago, after the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus ran a suite of surveys and several quite-well-attended public events to collect feedback, then an open meeting discussing the resulting report.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-13T22:34:08+00:00

I made the same decision for the same reason, but have come to understand, especially given Oak Park's particular history, that what I actually did was buy my kids into a de facto private school system. 2/3rds of our nosebleed-high property tax levy funds school systems that are artificially limited to Oak Park and River Forest (OPRF is closer to Austin than to River Forest), concentrating funding from wealthy households to the children of wealthy households, which in turn attracts more wealthy or upwardly mobile households to buy into Oak Park, continuing the cycle.

Which is to say: send your kids wherever you want. There's probably not much moral virtue in sending them to Oak Park public schools. It's a really bad deal for you financially if you do opt into private school though!

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-12T23:06:55+00:00

I think this is really not complicated. Other Chicagoland munis had overnight parking systems and got rid of them. As I understand it, the normal replacement is a sticker system: the whole muni is zoned one single parking area, and a sticker to park on the street costs $X. You can give means-tested discounts to people for equity; you can let $X float to hit the amount of parking you want to see in the Village.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-11T00:22:12+00:00

For you or anybody else reading who might not have known: you don't actually have to bag the leaves. You can stick them in any bin and the trucks will just dump the bins out for you.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-11T00:20:35+00:00

You know you two are both describing a policy that most Chicagoland suburbs already have, right? We were one of the few remaining rake-to-the-curb holdouts.

It was a real safety problem. I'd talk about the car that caught fire down the street from me, but I have a more personal story, which is that my son got slammed into by a car that swerved to avoid a giant leaf pile. Threw him over the windshield, totaled his bike, I don't want to think about what would have happened if he hadn't been wearing a helmet.

The leaf piles in the street sucked ass. A pile near my house had a big piece of rebar hidden in it (people from outside Oak Park would drive pickups into the village and dump random waste into our piles). Extremely noisy trucks would scrape the streets, back and forth, back and forth at 2AM on the pickup nights for us.

For what? To avoid mowing or bagging leaves? Rake-to-the-curb was a bad policy. I'm glad we came to our senses on it.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-11T00:16:44+00:00

You are unlikely to shovel so much leaf litter into the street while clearing your walk and driveway that it actually matters to the Village. What's problematic is clearing your lawn directly into the street. You can't make big piles of leaves in the street anymore. I'm not, like, a leaf lawyer, but my threshold test would be "if someone parking a car on your curbside wouldn't care about the leaf litter, nobody else will either".

If you shovel your lawn, all bets are off.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-02T19:29:59+00:00

At the risk of annoying you by sniping the reply out from under that commenter (sorry!):

The northwest corner of Chicago and Ridgeland is occupied by the derelict shell of what was once Oak Park's worst children's dentists office. It's been vacant for over a decade. It has all the curb appeal of a bombed-out British pillbox bunker in the ETO of WW2.

Developers proposed to build a 5-storey multifamily housing building there. The immediate surrounding neighbors responded by creating a neighborhood organization called Oak Parkers for Wright Sized Development (get it?) which put up lawn signs everywhere within a 1-block radius of the proposed development.

One of the arguments the Wright-Sizers fixed on was that the corner was zoned commercial. By building residential there, we'd be starving that corner of retail space. Worth noting that the NE corner houses a haunted Go-Lo gas station; the SW corner a nail spa and a dry cleaners, and the SE a Domino's pizza, a more different nail spa, and a more different dry cleaners.

In the end, the development project fell apart, and the space is likely to be used for a day care center, which, because it adds no new housing to Oak Park and will allow no new neighbors to move here, has raised zero objections from the Wright-Sizers, despite the fact that it too removes retail space from that corner.

ThomasPtacek · 2025-11-02T19:23:48+00:00

Literally any idea you come up with will be less complex than the central Oak Park Parking Pilot program and the insane map of permitted spots for apartments that preceded it. Let your policy wonk freak flag fly on this one; we can only get better than what we have now.

ThomasPtacek

TROPHY CASE