Lombard extended-stay hotel may turn into apartments

A New York real estate firm is looking to convert an extended-stay hotel in Lombard into 144 garden-style apartments.

Churchwick Partners, a company known for turning hotels into housing, bought the Sonesta Suites property at Highland Avenue and 22nd Street about a year ago. The firm is aiming to renovate the long-standing hotel into an apartment complex called Saint Regis Village.

The 144 hotel rooms – housed in two-story buildings – would be repurposed as studio and one-bedroom apartments. Each hotel room already has fully-equipped kitchens with full-sized refrigerators, ovens, microwaves and dishwashers.

Churchwick needs to clear a series of zoning hurdles. The property owner is seeking an amendment to the village’s comprehensive land-use plan. The company is asking the village to rezone the nearly 5-acre property from a community shopping district to general residential. The firm also has requested relief from parking, density and open space requirements.

Lombard plan commission members were scheduled to discuss the project. An interdepartmental committee of village staffers recommended that plan commissioners advise Lombard trustees to reject the proposal. The village board has the final word.

“What they want to do is functionally convert the hotel into a residential development,” Lombard Community Development Director William Heniff said.

The hotel was built in 1987. Sonesta Suites is bounded by an office building to the north, multifamily housing to the south, another hotel to the east and a fire and gas station to the west.

Lombard’s 2014 comprehensive plan – a road map for future growth and development – designates the properties at the northeast intersection of Highland Avenue and 22nd Street as a “community commercial” area. A hotel is consistent with that designation while a solely residential use of the property is not, village planners wrote in a report to the commission.

The proposed amendment “may benefit the community by providing additional housing choices,” according to the report. However, the “comprehensive plan’s statements in support of providing a wide variety of housing does not necessarily mean ... that any given property in the village should be developed as such a use.”

According to its zoning application, Churchwick argues the apartments would provide a “housing product that is in critical demand.” About 75% of the hotel rooms would be converted into studio apartments and the rest would become one-bedroom units. Many hotel occupants already are staying for longer than three months.

Churchwick expects to spend more than $1 million on exterior renovations. The company would retain and refurbish the existing clubhouse, pool and other amenities. The site design, though, is “highly inefficient” for hotel operations, according to the firm’s application.

“It was literally built before there was an internet. Before COVID. Business travel is far less necessary and desirable. Labor costs have skyrocketed, making hotel-style daily cleaning and turnover services untenable, particularly with this scattered site layout.”

Churchwick has acquired 15 extended-stay hotels and owns and manages 1,000 apartments in the New York area.

https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20230616/could-lombard-extended-stay-hotel-turn-into-apartments?cid=search