Oak Park has longed and lusted after Target for a good many years. And on Tuesday morning, the village and Clark Street Real Estate announced that the dream has been realized.
Target will take the entirety of the 22,000 square feet of retail being constructed currently at the Elevate Oak Park development on Lake Street near Harlem. This is a coup for Oak Park and the happy result of the key investments underway in our core business district.
There will be critics who see this as a turning away from small, independent retailers in Oak Park. Likely these are the same people disgruntled by the handful of high-rises in the downtown.
We see Target’s arrival as evidence of sound long-term planning. This store will be a key asset in building both property taxes and adding sales tax revenues to the village. And it is a popular and pop chic destination for a wide range of shoppers.
Our sturdy independents will do better in a downtown with hundreds more permanent residents in the almost 1,000 new apartments constructed or about to be built. And the truth is that finding new independent retail only gets harder in the years to come as trade migrates to online options. That explains the surge in new, and mainly independent, restaurants taking over spaces previously devoted to retail.
Target calls this a “flexible-format store.” We think of it more as Target’s urban solution to reaching customers in densely populated city and suburban neighborhoods. And that is in keeping with Oak Park’s increasingly clear definition and embrace of our dynamic urban/suburban reality.