CHICAGO—Golub & Company and Wood Partners have begun building a massive mixed-use project at Lake St. and Forest Ave. that will change the skyline of suburban Oak Park. Once completed in early 2016, the 21-story Lake + Forest development will have 270 luxury apartments, 27,000-square-feet of retail and commercial space, and parking for 588 cars in an attached covered garage.

Although many favored demographic groups have soured on the suburbs and seem to prefer the new luxury apartments springing up in Chicago, the partners expect that Oak Park's centralized, historic downtown and its more urban feel will attract those same groups.

Many affluent families with young children, for example, will leave the city over the next few years, and most won't feel comfortable moving to one of the newer, outer-ring suburbs, Peter Caruso, a vice president for JLL in the Midwest market, tells GlobeSt.com. Next week, Caruso and his colleague Shanna Athas will begin marketing the retail component of the development. “Living in Oak Park means you are officially a suburbanite, but it still gives you an urban feel.”

But the large amount of parking attached to Lake + Forest means this stretch of retail will also draw customers from a wide area, and take advantage of a broad range of residents and income streams. “You're going to have everyone from white-collar residents to blue-collar residents and we're going to try to build on that,” Caruso says. “Most people are going by car, so having access to cheap parking will also give us a leg up.”

Although he remains open to many different types of users, including jewelry, food-related or soft goods stores, Caruso does have a couple of broad goals. He wants the retail portion of the development to provide amenities to the apartment residents, perhaps a café component, and to bring in “some users that until now have primarily stayed in the city.”

Before joining JLL last year, Caruso worked for Mid-America Real Estate Corp., where he handled the retail leasing for AMLI Evanston, a luxury apartment development in a community with similar demographics to Oak Park. He brought in Hoosier Mama Pie Company, among other outlets. “They wanted something unique,” he says, “and we want to go about our work in Oak Park pretty much the same way.”

Caruso hopes to have leases signed by next summer, but for now, he can't say what rental rates the spaces will garner. “This is the only new project going on in the market right now. I don't know where the market is going to be until we dig into it.”