Shorter building pitched for Brookfield Wheel & Sprocket site

A revised plan for an apartment building with a new Brookfield store for Wheel & Sprocket is back up for local reviews and about one floor shorter after residents raised questions about its scale.

That project is proposed for Capitol Drive and Lilly Road where the bike retailer currently has an aging store and also owns a vacant former car repair shop. It is a partnership between Wheel & Sprocket and Glendale developer The Heimat Group. The project team this month highlighted environmental and other challenges that make the property costly to redevelop, and led to their proposal for new apartments in addition to a space for Wheel & Sprocket.

Wheel & Sprocket has been on that corner since 1994, first as a renter and then as landowner for the past seven or eight years, said president Noel Kegel. Last year, it acquired the neighboring and more visible car repair shop property as it considered options for a more modern store setup in the location.

"This is a good market for us, the western suburbs, on Capitol Drive, very accessible," Kegel said.

But the options Wheel & Sprocket explored over the past five to six years weren't easy to finance. The current building is reaching the end of its usable life, and it floods during times of heavy rain, Kegel said. Contractors said the existing store building isn't worth the cost of renovations. But new construction on the property brings its own financial challenges, including from contaminated soils.

That necessitated a larger redevelopment concept that will generate enough revenue to handle those costs. Kegel called Joseph Lak, an executive with Glendale developer The Heimat Group who he's known since high school.

"We needed to bring additional revenue to the site to make the numbers work," Kegel said. "In general, we are sought out by landlords and developers. They want us as part of their projects because we have a certain activation, certain stability, and can bring energy and traffic to a site."

The circumstances drove the redevelopment plan for a five-story building with 64 apartments, and a ground-floor space for the bike store and other retailers. Those would open into a new, interior street on the site that would also be lined by 10 townhomes.

"We think with the way Wheel & Sprocket as a business operates, the multi-family pairs incredibly well with the lifestyle," Lak said. "It's a sense of community, a sense of place."

The project received some pushback from residents regarding the scale of the apartment building, resulting in the modified designs shown during a neighborhood meeting on Wednesday. The corner apartment building is about one floor shorter by removing a first-floor mezzanine level that boosted the overall structure's height. More two-bedroom units were added to the mix, said Jim Sedgwick of Heimat Group.

Talks are underway with the city of Brookfield over creating a tax incremental financing district to help cover environmental cleanup costs, Sedgwick said. Contaminated soil on the gas station property will have to be removed from the site and sent to a landfill, which comes at a price.

That TIF district would use property taxes generated by the project to pay those costs, Sedgwick said. He said the current plan represents "just enough to make the project viable" in terms of apartments to generate money to pay for the project construction and cleanup costs.

"We sort of have that fine balance right now with our unit count where we have enough apartments that it works," he said. "We’ve studied taking the building shorter and getting rid of 16 units, and it doesn't work. If you take a floor off and make the building shorter, it doesn't work, economically."

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