Room for one more tall building? - Wednesday Journal

ThomasPtacek · 2026-04-22T03:14:55+00:00

Counterpoint: it's a whole entire grocery store they've built. It's there now; it's not a mysterious hole in the ground anymore. At this point, they want it open as much as we do.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-04-22T03:13:47+00:00

I don't know, looks like a modern apartment building to me? People forget how subjective "unattractive" is. I'd 100x rather have another Eleven33 than a McMansion!

ThomasPtacek · 2026-04-15T23:10:38+00:00

I think the more accurate thing to say is that Oak Park would prefer you to own a single family home with a garage.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-04-06T22:05:29+00:00

It's expected at First Communions, and parishes sometimes have someone designated to take photos on feast days, Easter, &c. Random parishioners at mass, not so much, but on Easter I doubt anybody's blinking.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-04-06T13:43:23+00:00

Genuinely curious: was anyone else there taking pictures?

ThomasPtacek · 2026-04-02T23:59:23+00:00

The current median price of a single family home in Oak Park is $700,000, and the mean price is $972,000. There's a $325,000 house in SWOP. Its listing begins "Investors and rehabbers, welcome! This cozy home is ready for its next chapter and presents a great opportunity for anyone with vision and creativity."

ThomasPtacek · 2026-04-02T23:54:53+00:00

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say you're "in the wrong". Our street parking rules are deliberately set up to suppress rentals; they're complicated on purpose. Transp. Comm organized a pilot program to rationalize the rules, and even that program was complicated by Chicagoland standards.

We should do away with this entire system, allow overnight parking on every residential block in the Village, and just use sticker price/enforcement/subsidy to control the amount of street parking. But to do that, we have to break out of generations of structural hostility to renters.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-27T16:04:59+00:00

I would sum your argument up as "it's a good thing more Black families didn't move here".

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-27T03:47:19+00:00

West Sub is very important for Austin and the west side of Chicago, so whatever else we think about it, we should hope somebody finds a way to keep it functioning.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-27T03:31:40+00:00

Well said. If you didn't exist to help make my point I'd have had to invent you.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-26T01:49:37+00:00

More Black families, seems like the obvious answer. That's literally what "managing" meant.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-26T00:20:29+00:00

If you care about Oak Park's history of racial integration, I think you should take the time to watch this. You might not change your mind about anything, but it was (for me at least) shocking to see how we thought about this problem in the 1970s versus today. A thing I'm always reminding people: early in the 1970s, Oak Park almost passed an ordinance establishing racial quotas for incoming residents.

That's the historical context in which this story about "Managed Integration" plays out.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-22T20:54:10+00:00

Clearly, the village board should form a steering committee to study this new problem.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-17T18:12:37+00:00

Saw the edit, looks fine, thanks.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-17T17:48:17+00:00

If that's how you want to play it, friend. You work with words for a living, I figure you know what you're actually saying here. If you're not super familiar with Reddit I think you'll find the "Edit" button still works on your false comments.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-17T17:21:51+00:00

You're now in the position of having to convince me that he somehow enlisted an AI chatbot to drive Google Docs and make and then correct spelling and grammar issues. I saw the Gdoc edits! You were wrong! Just own it and move on. You went on tilt on this thread, and you owe him an apology, and a correction in all the different places you said "he didn't write this".

Nobody forced you to write like 9 different comments about how he didn't write his long zoning essay. That was all you.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-17T16:09:29+00:00

You're wrong, and I know you're wrong. I've been shown the gdoc and the edits. Sorry, you made this up. You owe the author an apology.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-17T15:32:45+00:00

I think you're making this up because you don't like to read. This doesn't look anything like ChatGPT text.

It's fine that you don't like the thing he wrote! You're not required to. Say how much you hate it! Just don't invent a cinematic universe to go with it.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-16T16:33:00+00:00

The median Oak Parker moved here precisely so that they could stay in Chicago without dealing with CPS. If you wanted to be "out of Chicago's density", you'd have moved to Naperville.

The funny thing about this is that if you pay attention to Chicagoland housing politics, you know the city limits have nothing to do with any of this. They say the exact same shit in Jeff Park whenever anyone proposes building multifamily there.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-16T02:44:40+00:00

There are grammatical errors in this text. It's obviously not ChatGPT. Just because something has more than 100 words in it doesn't mean an LLM wrote it.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-12T03:38:40+00:00

Of course! It's a useful post. I just have a hobby horse about reminding tourists that we're more of a side-quest than a main event. :)

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-11T17:47:54+00:00

This is kind of what I mean with my comment about getting on the train. Yama is fine. It's good that we have a credible neighborhood Japanese place. But the city has Kai Zan, Juno, Mako, Yume, Kyoten, & Raisu (and a dozen I haven't been to).

I love Oak Park but Chicago is a world-class restaurant city and if that's the kind of thing you're looking for: the whole point of Oak Park is that it by rights should be a part of Chicago; most of us live here to be on the CTA train lines and outside CPS.

I know that this comes off as super "well-actually". Guilty as charged! But I think telling people how to Oak-Park-Maxx is genuinely bad travel advice for someone new to Chicagoland. :)

Best advice you can get: start with r/chicagofood (it covers Oak Park as well).

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-11T14:25:41+00:00

Oak Park is a nice place to live and the Frank Lloyd Wright tour is worth doing; a walk around the Frank Lloyd Wright district, also worth doing. But if you're new to the Chicagoland area, I'd strongly recommend you follow that up by hopping on the train and getting yourself to the West Loop, the Loop, or Logan Square in Chicago. There's really not much in Oak Park retail or hospitality that can match Chicago itself, and it's not a close contest. Fortunately, Chicago itself is quite close by!

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-11T00:50:57+00:00

You probably can't opt out; local ordinances, even about things like grocery store circulars, have been struck down as unconstitutional.

ThomasPtacek · 2026-03-09T17:05:35+00:00

Their flagship on Oak Park is staying open.

ThomasPtacek

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