Business View Magazine | January 2020

312 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2020 boon in the Chicago suburbs over the last two years,” he explains. “Some of our neighboring communities have seen a lot of apartment growth in their station areas, and Lemont has been planning for TODs since 2002; there’s a 2004 plan, and a 2015 plan. In the last two years, we’ve picked up these plans and started running with them. We’ve met with multi-family developers, contacting our neighbors to find out who’s developing in their communities, having them come in and sit down with us. So, we try to be proactive - not wait for the opportunity to come to us, but to go out and find it. A local developer, Rob Abbinante of Addison Properties Development and Management LLC, is doing a really special, adaptive reuse of an historic Catholic school building, St. James Academy. This is a building that was threatened with demolition and he came in and saved it. It’s a Lemont limestone building and he’s converting that to nine apartments. The same group took on the challenge of TOD housing for Lemont. It’s Downtown Lemont - Stephen Street Pollyanna