If you've driven past the empty lot at 7620 Madison for the last three years, you've probably had opinions about what should go there. Most of River Forest did. On the night of Monday, August 17, after more than five hours of public comment, two breaks, and 18 residents taking the microphone in Trinity High School's Fox Auditorium, the village board finally voted 4-3 to approve a five-story apartment building on that corner, with Village President Cathy Adduci casting the deciding vote at roughly 12:30 the following morning.
Everyone in the room that night talked about height. Five stories versus four. Eighty-seven feet at the tallest point pressed against single-family homes on Ashland and Lathrop. But if you read what the board actually negotiated over the seven months this project took to reach a vote, the real fight was never about how tall the building would be. It was about where the cars that come with it are allowed to go.
What Got Approved, and What It Replaces
The site is three parcels combined: the old Lutheran Child and Family Services building at 7612-7620 Madison, plus two former house lots at 10 Lathrop Avenue and 11 Ashland Avenue. River Forest bought all three in the late 2010s, and the structures sat vacant for years before the village demolished them in 2023. Since then it's just been a gap in the block, a hole in a corridor that the village's 2019 comprehensive plan specifically flagged for revitalization.
What's going up now, built by Chicago-based Five Thirty-One Partners, is a five-story mixed-use building with 69 apartments and roughly 3,256 square feet of ground-floor retail. That's down from the 72 units originally proposed in January. The unit mix runs from one-bedrooms up to a 2,040-square-foot four-bedroom layout with its own 300-square-foot deck, repeated on each of the building's upper residential floors, a range Adduci has said is meant to serve two different River Forest residents at once: young professionals who want to plant roots and empty nesters who want to downsize without leaving the village they've lived in for decades.
The Height Fight That Became a Parking Negotiation
Look at the actual list of design changes Five Thirty-One made between January and the July public hearing, and almost none of them touch height. They added enclosed garages on the lots north of the alley instead of the surface parking originally shown, both for more spaces and, per the village's own project materials, for more privacy for the neighbors looking down on it. They widened the east-west alley specifically so waste haulers and service vehicles could get through without backing up onto the north-south alley. They added a dedicated drop-off and pickup lane along Ashland Avenue so delivery drivers and visitors would have somewhere to stop that isn't Ashland or Madison itself. They even moved the rooftop social space to the building's southern edge, away from the homes to the north, to cut down on noise drifting toward backyards.
During one of the early resident Q&A sessions, Five Thirty-One co-owner Chuck Westphal told residents the garages would include car lifts so two vehicles could share one indoor spot. His partner Viktor Jakovljevic went further, telling residents that assigned resident spots would require a permanent building parking sticker on top of the standard village registration sticker, specifically so residents couldn't hand off their garage spot to a guest while parking their own car on Ashland. That's not a detail about the building's design. That's a detail about behavior on a residential street three years from now, worked out before a single unit is built.
The final ordinance backs this up. The concessions the board actually extracted from the developer in exchange for approval were replacement of lead service lines for residents on the 000 blocks of Ashland and Lathrop, free window washing for homes on that block once construction wraps, and a new neighbor impact fund. Five Thirty-One is also on the hook for the water and sewer infrastructure connecting the new building to the street. None of that is about the fifth floor. It's about what happens at ground level on two residential blocks that never asked to become the backyard of a 69-unit building.
One resident, Greg Abcarian, put his finger on something else about the vote itself after the meeting ended. He noted that the four trustees who approved the project have voted together every time this parcel has come up, and the three who opposed it have voted together every time too.
"All four yeses have always voted yes together. Always voted no together. They have never not voted against each other."
That's worth sitting with. A project that took seven months, three community meetings, two open houses, and a five-hour public hearing to reach the board still landed exactly where the voting bloc always lands. The parking negotiations may have shaped what got built. They didn't shape who said yes.
The Money Behind the Ten-Dollar Headline
Here's the number that will circulate at every coffee shop on Lake Street: River Forest sold the village-owned land for $10. Not $10 per square foot. Ten dollars, total, for three parcels the village spent years assembling.
That number only makes sense next to the rest of the deal. Five Thirty-One also gets up to $2 million in TIF-eligible reimbursement, with $1 million of that payable once the building gets its certificate of occupancy. In exchange, the village locked in a guaranteed property tax floor: a base assessed value of $1.9 million, with future appeals capped so the assessment can never drop below that base plus inflation. Tax consulting firm Ryan LLC projected the development will generate $25 million in property taxes between 2026 and 2056, with $11.4 million of that flowing to River Forest School District 90 and $7.5 million to Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200.
Village Administrator Matt Walsh has said the sales tax side is harder to pin down until a retail tenant signs, since 3,256 square feet is only enough for a handful of small storefronts, not a major retail draw. What the village bought with a $10 land sale and a $2 million incentive, in other words, wasn't a building. It was thirty years of a locked-in tax base on a lot that generated nothing for three years while it sat vacant.
The Developer Who Lost His Own Shop to a Building Like This One
There's a detail in this story that nobody brought up at the podium, but it's sitting in the public record if you go looking. Viktor Jakovljevic, one of the two co-owners of Five Thirty-One Partners, used to co-own Cigar Oasis at 7619 Lake Street. He lost that space after a different ownership group closed on the Lake and Lathrop property in October 2017 with plans to demolish the block and build its own five-story, mixed-use development. Cigar Oasis fought the eviction and eventually moved to Oak Park. That Lake and Lathrop project, meanwhile, is still tied up in Cook County court, still not built, years later.
So the person who just won approval to put up a five-story building on Madison Street is the same person who watched his own storefront get displaced by an almost identical plan a few blocks away, one that still hasn't materialized. Some residents raised his connection to that history as a reason to distrust the process. Jakovljevic's answer, delivered at the podium the night of the vote, was simple: "I think we're going to do great in this community." Whether that history reads as irony or as somebody who's seen this exact fight from the other side is probably a matter of which side of Ashland Avenue you live on.
What This Actually Means If You Live Nearby
If you're on the 000 blocks of Ashland or Lathrop, you have new lead service lines coming and a window-washing crew showing up after construction wraps, both written into the approval. If you park on Ashland regularly, expect a new drop-off lane and a wider alley behind the building, changes built specifically around the traffic patterns residents flagged as far back as January. And if you've been wondering when that lot stops being a fenced-off gap in the block, the answer is that the zoning fight is over. What comes next is construction, and Five Thirty-One will be the name on the permits.
The height was always going to be the headline. The parking stickers, the alley width, and the drop-off lane are the parts that will actually shape how that corner feels once people are living there.
If a story like this makes you curious about what else is shifting in your corner of River Forest, or what a corridor like Madison Street does to property values on the residential streets behind it, that's exactly the kind of local read we track at Angela Walker Homes. Reach out any time you want a second opinion on what's happening on your block, or get a free home valuation to see where your property stands today.
