Unamended consequences

With luck, the $350 million renovation of the Illinois State Capitol north wing will open by the time the snow flies and Springfield will get a glimpse of the new main entrance to the Statehouse. Visitor screening, conference rooms and parking are now bunkered beneath the lawn on the Monroe Street side. Readers old enough to recall when the people’s government did not fear the people will struggle to see these changes as improvements. I find it cheerier to think of the new works as public art, a kinetic monument to 9/11. 

The north entrance is just the most recent phase of the larger Statehouse redo that began in 2011. That’s long enough ago that I had to look up the Illinois State Capitol Master Plan 2050, released in 2021, to remind myself what other changes are in the works. Still to come is a dead building (the Armory) brought back to life, a living one (the Stratton) made to disappear and the Statehouse given a backyard like your house or my house. On the new Great Lawn protesters can be safely contained by people with guns without impeding traffic flow (as happens when they gather on the building’s front yard on Second Street), thus simultaneously satisfying two of the essential purposes of good government. 

I’ll bet they don’t have anything like that in Lexington or Jefferson City.

As a citizen of Illinois government’s host city, I am less interested in the plan’s effect on the future Statehouse campus than the effect the new Statehouse campus will have on Springfield. The authors make nice noises about their neighbors across the street. They intend, for example, to “leverage the planning effort for revitalization of downtown Springfield and surrounding neighborhoods through partnerships with City/County and tourism.” 

I don’t know what that means, exactly, but whatever it means it will not be easy to do. For one thing, the city has no planning effort for revitalization of downtown, only marketing plans. For another, revitalization takes people, which downtown ain’t got enough of. 

The 2050 planners explain that only about 10% of Springfield’s population and housing units are found within a mile of the downtown core. Most of Springfield’s peer small rural capital cities, such as Des Moines or Madison, in contrast, sustain larger shares of their populations downtown “and are growing those concentrations at a faster annual rate” than Springfield.

The 2050 plan does not explain that one of the reasons there are not more people living in downtown Springfield is that the state incited (and the city permitted) the destruction of hundreds of dwellings around the Statehouse beginning in the 1970s, when that neighborhood was mostly residential. For example, when the Department of Revenue building was being built, the workforce was expected to bring as many as 2,000 cars into that neighborhood each day but the state agency provided space for only 600 of them. Most of those dead houses and apartments were killed to provide cheap parking for the rest. (I know; the three houses I lived in in that part of town in the 1960s are now parking lots.) Thus did the state solve its parking problem at the expense of making Springfield’s housing problem worse. 

The 2050 plan deals with the facilities and infrastructure needs of the Capitol complex but what is needed is a plan that addresses the larger possibilities of a more benign state presence in the capital city. The state wields its economic power clumsily and, to my knowledge, has never officially acknowledged a responsibility to anticipate, much less to remedy, the bad effects that state operations have on the city.  

Those effects are many. One is the 2001 plan backed by the General Assembly to demolish buildings north of the Old State Capitol to create an unobstructed “vista” view of Abe World and the restored Union Station visitor center. Or our prairie Pennsylvania Avenue, a gift in 2009 of $17 million worth of faux brick from then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich to turn Capitol Avenue into a grand gateway to the Statehouse complex even though few tourists use that street. Then there is the Y block, which is the sort of thing that happens when an over-enthusiastic DIY-er tears out his old kitchen before he gets a loan to pay for a new one. 

Worse, the state is an opportunistic tenant unafraid to impoverish landlords at the expense of the city’s commercial building stock. Its recent tendency to relocate smaller ancillary agencies, bureaus, commissions and the like on the urban periphery – another solution to its parking problem – contributes to sprawl. A more far-sighted state establishmentwould explore whether to group such quarters on one or two satellite campuses whose collective working population would be large enough to makes garages economical and support the convenience shops, cafes and parklets that the 2050 plan hopes to laud. 

Imagining your own private Springfield is fun. Somebody has to plan a better city. State planners won’t.   

This article appears in August 20-26, 2026.