Our property-tax bill came today.
The Village of Northbrook portion is 25% higher than it was last year. While it still represents only about 9% of my total property-tax bill, and nearly every taxing body got a bigger piece of us this year, it is a non-trivial increase that will become quite noticeable if we continue to see similar year-over-year increases.
I started writing about Northbrook at the beginning of 2025 and have consistently centered on three recurring themes:
- Fiscal reality: Northbrook faces significant long-term financial pressure from underfunded pensions and the need to replace aging and end-of-life major public-service facilities. Sales taxes account for roughly 33% of General Fund revenue and property taxes about 13%, by far its two largest revenue sources. The General Fund is the primary funding engine for Village operations.
- Leadership and execution: The Village repeatedly deals with major issues one transaction or project at a time without clearly defining the destination, explaining the tradeoffs, or following through on prior commitments.
- Civic trust and polarization: Village leadership has consistently been unwilling or unable to do the harder work of actually leading. The 2025 election further fractured the community, and little was done afterward to rebuild trust or bring people back together.
Our property-tax bill is a pretty good illustration of how those issues intersect.
The financial pressures are real, and the Village ultimately has to generate the revenue to pay for them. Most residents would vastly prefer that revenue come from a growing commercial tax base rather than ever-larger property-tax bills.
But sales-tax growth is not easy. It requires successful businesses, smart economic development and enough commercial activity to bring more spending into Northbrook, ideally from people who do not live here. Done well, it is also the more attractive source of revenue. The upside is substantial and a meaningful portion of the burden can be carried by people outside the Village rather than Northbrook homeowners.
Doing that requires the Village to decide where it wants to go, actually execute a plan to get there and build enough public trust to navigate the tradeoffs along the way.
I have less than zero confidence that our current Village leadership can do that.
When the Village approved the original Hometown Coffee agreement in 2024, staff laid out a specific implementation schedule for recommendations from the Economic Strategy Commission (https://www.northbrook.il.us/DocumentCenter/View/8298/Downtown-Revitalization-FAQ?bidId=).
The proposed timeline included (with my grades included in italics):
- Downtown Improvement Plans: Develop an RFP, review submittals and engage a design professional from December 2024 through March 2025; conduct asset mapping, community engagement and plan development from April 2025 through April 2026; and issue a report and adopt recommendations in May 2026. Grade: F. Nothing done.
- Business Investment Programs: Draft and pilot a business investment program, subject to funding approval in the FY2025/26 budget, from April 2025 through March 2026. Grade: F. Nothing done.
- Economic Strategy Commission: Meet regularly with the ESC to review economic development progress beginning in December 2024 and continuing thereafter. Grade: F. Nothing done, and the ESC had basically disbanded by the time this plan was even shared.
- Events: Have the Village Board lead a process to engage the Chamber, Convention and Visitors Bureau and individual businesses to determine whether there was community support for forming a nonprofit entity to engage businesses and develop more downtown events, from May 2025 through October 2026. Grade: F. Nothing done.
- Infrastructure Improvements: Complete engineering, design, demolition and construction for the 1300 block of Shermer and Meadow Road streetscape improvements beginning in December 2024. Grade: C. The work was completed, and maybe the trees will fill in someday, but the economic impact on businesses was not consequential.
The winning candidate slate, which included our Village President, doubled down on those commitments during the 2025 campaign and expanded the list:
A Reimagined Downtown: Building a more vibrant downtown is underway. Our goals are to attract the right investments so that residents have a downtown that is full of fun places to eat, great retail, and things to do. With a phase one of new streetscaping, a new Hometown Coffee & Juice, and a bike and pedestrian pathway extension down Shermer Rd. from Willow Rd into downtown. We also plan to:
- Kick off a new Downtown Master Plan with an urban planner and public input.
- Roll out new economic incentives for existing and small businesses.
- Improve both parking and wayfinding signage.
- Create additional events with partners in order to attract more downtown foot traffic.
- Look for new opportunities to improve density so that our downtown has more daily foot traffic.
- Consider developing a non-profit to focus on the needs of downtown - events, marketing, and volunteers.
- Continue to work closely with downtown businesses and the Chamber to monitor impact and needs.
As I have written about, we should not put any weight on the claim that a more vibrant downtown was already “underway.”
The streetscaping largely made permanent outdoor seating businesses already had access to. Hometown Coffee & Juice still does not appear close to opening, should never have been treated as the cornerstone of a downtown strategy, and now will receive back the sales tax it generates under its revised incentive agreement. And while the Shermer bike and pedestrian path may be a perfectly nice amenity, I do not see it having any meaningful economic impact on downtown.
More importantly, these were specific promises with specific implementation timelines. Outside of the streetscape work, not one was completed by its promised deadline, and certainly not before Pulte’s preliminary proposal arrived in May 2026.
Village leadership knew the Meadow Plaza proposal was coming. Yet in the roughly 18 months before the preliminary proposal, it did not even begin even the most basic work it had promised to do.
Imagine instead that Northbrook had spent those 18 months developing the promised Downtown Master Plan with an urban planner and meaningful public input, building on the 2012 Downtown Plan.
That work should have answered some basic questions before a major downtown proposal ever landed in front of the Board: how much residential density makes sense, how much commercial space we need, where retail should go, what building heights are appropriate, how existing businesses fit into the future, what we want downtown to look and feel like, and how all of it contributes to the Village’s economic and financial goals.
Instead, things have gone haywire.
We are trying to answer all of those questions in real time, in the middle of a fight over a specific development proposal, with very little trust between the Village and a significant portion of the community.
As of September 2, the online petition opposing Pulte’s plan to redevelop Meadow Plaza has nearly 5,400 signatures. It was launched before Pulte had even submitted a formal application, and certainly well before we will see whatever final version emerges from the full formal review process.
More than 30% of those signatures necessarily come from outside Northbrook based on the ZIP-code distribution reported with the petition. Even so, it is a staggeringly impressive display of civic organization in a community of roughly 28,000 registered voters, where even last year’s banner municipal election drew just over 8,000.
A newly formed nonprofit, Save Downtown Northbrook NFP, led by the organizers of the petition, is seeking to raise $500,000 to fight the redevelopment. Its GoFundMe says the money will fund “top-tier legal representation” to challenge zoning and development approvals and pursue litigation or other legal remedies if necessary; independent reviews of traffic, flooding, stormwater, infrastructure, planning and other impacts; and a broader advocacy campaign including mailers, yard signs, public education and communications.
The appeal frames the effort as “a fight for a downtown worth preserving” while expressing disbelief that Pulte was allowed to move forward with a formal application despite the organized opposition. That is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how the Village development-review process works.
As of September 2, roughly $17,000 has been raised toward the first $60,000 fundraising target from 134 donations. By comparison, fewer than 3% as many people have donated as have signed the petition.
Village Board meetings have been packed, although “packed” still means hundreds of people in a community with roughly 28,000 registered voters. Blue Save Downtown Northbrook signs are multiplying in yards near downtown and in Meadow Plaza storefronts. The opposition is visible, organized and hard to miss.
Its leader has also appeared in local media accusing Village officials of lying, raising insinuations about conflicts of interest and advancing a broader narrative that the outcome was effectively predetermined. She carried that same theme into a poem of sorts read at a Village Board meeting, accusing the Board of deliberate opacity, closed-door dealings, zoning manipulation, illegal or nefarious conduct and arrogance, while warning that “the tables are turning” and predicting that Board members would “disappear on election day.” (Ironically, she may be right on the last point. My understanding is that three of the four trustees whose terms expire in 2027 do not plan to run again.)
An entertaining and conspiratorial video is making the rounds online and is now prominently featured on the Save Downtown Northbrook website, suggesting that a shadowy collection of Village officials, staff and consultants quietly rewrote the zoning code as part of a long-running plan to eventually clear the way for Meadow Plaza to be torn down. The blaring echo chambers on social media continue to amplify those claims and fuel the fire.
At the same time, Village leadership has largely remained in a defensive crouch, explaining what it did not do, what it cannot control and why various accusations are unfair, rather than articulating a compelling vision for what it actually wants downtown Northbrook to become.
The Village President has repeatedly been criticized for keeping her head down during public comment time and for declining to extend the standard 30-minute public-comment period at the beginning of meetings. As a result, anyone who does not make it into roughly the first ten speakers generally has to wait until the end of the meeting to be heard.
That has only fueled the perception that the Board is not listening and given more oxygen to accusations about its motives.
There is one notable exception. One of the newer trustees has been very active in the community, doing many of the things one might expect our two-term Village President to be doing. But there is only so much a relatively junior trustee can do.
I have already written about this at some length here and here.
Across both pieces, a few of my views have not changed.
The basic economic case for more downtown density is persuasive. Based on the likely incomes of 150 additional households and assuming roughly 30% of their after-tax spending stays in Northbrook, I estimate that a fully occupied development could generate roughly $6.4 million in potential additional annual spending within the Village, much of it within walking distance of downtown businesses. That would not guarantee a vibrant downtown, but it would improve the economics for the businesses already there and, just as importantly, make downtown more attractive for additional businesses and private investment.
The loss or displacement of the Meadow Plaza businesses is real and painful, but also largely outside Village control and governed by whatever leases were signed between the tenants and their landlord.
Traffic deserves serious scrutiny, although I am coming to the conclusion that truly vibrant retail may create a much bigger traffic issue than concentrated residential density.
Flooding does not particularly concern me. The proposal replaces a shopping plaza that is almost entirely impervious surface with a development that includes actual stormwater detention.
Nor am I particularly worried about school capacity. Reports are that the schools could comfortably handle substantial additional enrollment, and there is typically a stark difference in student yield between condos and detached single-family homes.
The character of the neighborhood does concern me, although I also recognize how subjective that is.
Overall, I do not know where I land on this development. I love Northbrook and expect to live here for the rest of my life. I am certainly not eager to see three six-story buildings downtown. I am also not eager to amputate my arm. However, if doing so were necessary to save my life, I would.
If this development is the best way to strengthen our economic engine, then we should be having a serious discussion about the tradeoffs and the alternatives. I had assumed that, at some point in this process, the Village Board would lay those out clearly for residents. I am less confident that will happen.
Perhaps the Save Downtown Northbrook group has a better answer. I have heard the argument that redeveloping Meadow Plaza would amount to destroying almost half of our downtown. That seems like a stretch for a shopping center that contributes roughly 13% of the sales tax generated downtown, particularly when downtown itself ranks a distant sixth among Northbrook’s seven major commercial districts.
In my opinion, given the financial reality ahead of us, we need more businesses in Northbrook. Downtown is a natural candidate to contribute more to our sales-tax base.
But that raises important questions: why are businesses not choosing Northbrook today, despite the empty storefronts we already have, and what would need to change for them to choose Northbrook tomorrow?
I suspect more proximate discretionary income is a big part of the answer.
If there is a viable alternative for Meadow Plaza that preserves substantially more retail, attracts new businesses, strengthens the tax base and still makes economic sense for the property owner, great. We should absolutely be talking about it. But somebody also has to be willing to put real investment dollars at risk to build it.
We can want more retail. We can want a lower-density development. We can want a much more mixed-use project. None of that means the market will actually produce one.
I do not know what other proposals the Meadow Plaza owner received. But the proposal that actually emerged tells us something about what at least one developer is willing to put real money behind.
Simply saying we need more retail, or pretending the plaza as a whole is thriving even if some of the stores are clearly doing quite well, does not answer that problem.
And that takes me back to the property-tax bill that started this post.
If Northbrook cannot meaningfully expand its commercial tax base, the financial pressures facing the Village do not disappear. They have to be paid for another way.
This year, the Village portion of our property-tax bill went up 25%. Maybe that is an anomaly. Maybe it is not. But if we cannot generate substantially more revenue through economic growth, I am not sure what other lever the Village will ultimately have available besides asking property owners for more.
I would much rather have a difficult and honest conversation now about density, development, retail, traffic and the tradeoffs required to grow our economic base than discover over the next several years that avoiding those conversations simply meant increasingly large property-tax increases.
The problem is that we are having that conversation in an environment where facts, legitimate concerns, assumptions, political frustration and outright speculation have become increasingly difficult to separate.
Human beings are not particularly good at separating emotion from analysis. We tend to form an instinctive view first and then go looking for facts and logic that support it. I am certainly not immune to that.
There are still too many things about this proposal and the process around it that I do not know, and far too much conjecture being presented as fact. So, mostly for my own sanity, I want to re-ground myself in what can actually be documented before deciding what I ultimately think.
Rather than do that in one enormous post, I am going to break the issue into a series of smaller pieces and work through one topic at a time:
- What is the Village development-review process, and what was actually said during the first step of that process, the preliminary review? How does that compare with what trustees said at the most recent meeting? I will include transcripts for anyone who would rather review the record themselves.
- What changed in the zoning code that affected Meadow Plaza, over what period of time, and through what approvals?
- What did the 2012 Downtown Plan actually say about downtown development and Meadow Plaza?
I obviously have opinions about all of it, and I am sure they will come through. The point of this exercise is not to pretend otherwise. It is to make sure those opinions are based on what actually happened.
At minimum, I hope working through it this way helps me better understand where we really are. And, like anything I publish, maybe it will help a few other people do the same.
If there are other aspects of this issue you think are worth exploring, please send them my way.