Gentrification has long been associated with redevelopment within cities, but a former Chicago architect who's now an educator wonders whether there isn't suburban gentrification underway in some of Chicago's inner-ring suburbs.

Suzanne Lanyi Charles, an assistant professor of architecture at Boston's Northeastern University, studied single-family home redevelopment — better known as teardowns — in suburban Cook County from 2000 to 2010. Those were heady years for teardowns and a lot of newspaper ink went toward documenting the demolition of big houses to build even bigger ones, particularly in well-to-do suburbs.

In a research paper on the topic, Charles called the trend a "conspicuous form of reinvestment." And while her study centered on suburban Chicago, Charles said the area exemplifies what is happening in other cities such as Boston and St. Louis.

Together, the data set Charles studied included 591,101 single-family houses in Cook County suburbs, and she determined that 4,789 were redeveloped during that 10-year period. That's less than 1 percent, but that 1 percent was concentrated and not just in the obvious suburbs one might think.

She found that the teardown phenomenon didn't affect all communities, wasn't driven just by developers (often a homebuyer was behind the first teardown in a subdivision), and wasn't confined to tony neighborhoods where the rebuilt homes were expensive McMansions that stretched from one lot line to the other.

In fact, some of the municipalities that saw clusters of teardowns were suburbs with moderately priced houses and families with moderate incomes, and it was those communities that saw the most conspicuous difference in size between the old house and the new one that replaced it. Charles also found that most teardowns occurred in white and non-Hispanic communities, and in areas with highly regarded school districts.

She found most of the activity was clustered in areas north, northwest and southwest of Chicago, suburbs like Arlington Heights, Park Ridge, Schaumburg, Countryside, Burbank and Wilmette, in neighborhoods where most of the original housing was built from 1945 to 1970.

It's hard to rule all this as absolutely good or bad.

On the plus side, teardowns renew a municipality's housing stock, and smart growth advocates might prefer reuse of the land through teardowns to the construction of new homes on green space.

The Chicago market has plenty of old housing stock, and replacing rundown homes with something much more attractive can be welcome.

Norridge was one of the suburbs that factored in Charles' research, and the community hasn't had much problem with being part of the trend.

"In a way, we welcome some of the teardowns because the housing stock is getting old and starting to show its age," said village building commissioner Brian Gaseor. "It forces (other) people with dilapidated houses to fix them up. They're saying 'I've got this nice home next to mine. I better fix it up.'"

But then there are the downsides, too, namely that teardown trends can alter the character of a neighborhood in terms of how it looks and who can afford to live there.

"In Norridge, there's housing that's relatively modestly priced and replaced with housing that's three times what they bought the original house for," Charles said. "For the household that was able to afford that original house, a household like them may not be able to afford that house. They're pushed to another suburb."

Charles continues to research the topic and interview municipalities, who are again seeing teardown activity pick up. Many builders, preferring to build in well-established suburbs along good transportation routes, continue to buy older homes, raze them and build new homes with all the bells and whistles, and higher prices.

So are the suburbs going the way of some neighborhoods, getting big, pretty houses at the expense of more moderate abodes and pushing out residents?

"I'm not entirely convinced this is gentrification," Charles said. "If you look that the new house is three times as expensive, you'd think the household coming in would have a considerably higher income. By one definition, that's a form of gentrification. But I've heard examples in Norridge of people who grew up in Norridge and wanted to stay there."

mepodmolik@tribune.com

Twitter @mepodmolik

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