For more than a decade, the old Dominick's at Chase Plaza sat empty. The anchor space at 1160 W. Lake-Cook Road went dark when the grocery chain folded, and nothing filled the gap. Not because nobody tried. Because that stretch of Lake-Cook Road had become one of those retail dead zones every suburb has, the kind where you stop noticing the empty building because it's been empty for so long it looks permanent.
Then this spring, the village confirmed two tenants at once: Sprouts Farmers Market and Club Studio, a fitness operator. The developer behind the deal was Shorewood Development Group, which had closed on the building and pulled a permit for demolition and remodeling. Village President Eric Smith called it meaningful progress after over a decade of vacancy along the corridor.
If you have lived in Buffalo Grove for a while, that name might sound familiar. It should. Shorewood is not new to town, and Chase Plaza is not its only project. Once you line up what this one company has built, is building, and just bought across three different corners of the village, a pattern shows up that explains a lot about why Buffalo Grove suddenly feels like it is remaking itself all at once.
The Second Corner, Same Signature
Drive out to Dundee Road and Old Arlington Heights Road and you will find Bison Crossing, a 16-acre redevelopment of the old Rohrman auto dealership site. Shorewood partnered with St. Louis-based Double Eagle Development on the project, which broke ground in 2024 with a ceremony that drew Village President Eric Smith and Shorewood founding partner Louis Schriber III. The site is anchored by a 50,000-square-foot Tesla sales, service and delivery center, with four four-story residential buildings surrounding a shared greenspace, pool and clubhouse, plus 30,000 to 40,000 square feet of retail.
The numbers behind it are not small for a suburb this size. Shorewood is putting roughly $100 million into the project, and Buffalo Grove committed $11 million in tax increment financing to help make it happen. Village officials have projected the finished development will generate $400,000 to $500,000 a year in sales tax once it is fully built out, split between vehicle sales and retail activity.
This is the same company, working two different corridors on opposite sides of the village, at the same time.
Three Corners, One Playbook
Line the projects up side by side and the repetition gets hard to miss.
| Site | Former Use | New Use | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chase Plaza, Lake-Cook Rd | Vacant Dominick's, empty 10+ years | Sprouts Farmers Market, Club Studio | ~27,000 sq ft grocery anchor |
| Bison Crossing, Dundee Rd | Rohrman auto dealerships | Tesla center, apartments, retail | 16 acres, ~$100M investment |
| Shops of Buffalo Grove, Milwaukee Ave & Deerfield Pkwy | Older retail parcel | New retail center | Earlier Shorewood project in the village |
Shorewood built the Shops of Buffalo Grove, the retail center that sits across Deerfield Parkway from the village's Woodman's grocery store, before either of the other two projects broke ground. Bison Crossing and Chase Plaza are not a company discovering Buffalo Grove for the first time. They are a company that already knows this village returning to finish a job it started years ago.
A Formula Good Enough to Export
Here is the part that changes how you should read all of this. Shorewood is not just working inside Buffalo Grove anymore. In May, the company paid $13.1 million to acquire the vacant Walgreens corporate headquarters in neighboring Deerfield, a 37.5-acre property at 1411-1435 Lake-Cook Road purchased from the Phoenix-based REIT Orion Properties. Schriber told the Daily Herald the firm had wanted a foothold in Deerfield for years, even while it worked on projects in Naperville, Schaumburg, Bolingbrook and Arlington Heights.
His stated goal for the Deerfield site sounds a lot like what Sprouts and Club Studio are meant to do at Chase Plaza:
"Our goal is to develop a project where people have a reason to come and stay awhile, not a grab-and-go destination."
The point is not that Shorewood is a Buffalo Grove company doing business elsewhere. It is that the specific approach the company perfected here, buying a stalled retail parcel and rebuilding it into something people linger in, is now the template it is exporting across the border. Buffalo Grove was the test case. Deerfield is the next rollout.
The Ranking Landed Mid-Construction
All three of these projects were still under construction or newly opened this spring when U.S. News & World Report released its 2026-2027 Best Places to Live rankings and put Buffalo Grove at number one in Illinois and 15th nationally out of 250 communities evaluated on quality of life, value, desirability, job market and livability.
The numbers behind that ranking are worth sitting with. Buffalo Grove's median household income came in at $135,543, well above the national median of $83,181. Unemployment sat at 2.1 percent, less than half the national rate of 4.5 percent. And the median home value was $380,110, compared to a national average of $359,870, a gap small enough that the report specifically noted Buffalo Grove offers a higher value of living than similarly sized communities elsewhere in the country. Average commute time came in at 24 minutes, short by any Chicagoland measure.
Niche's separate 2026 rankings placed Buffalo Grove as the best place to live in Lake County and fourth in Illinois overall, with a number six ranking for public schools statewide. Different methodology, same general conclusion.
What is easy to miss is the timing. The ranking did not arrive after the redevelopment was finished and polished. It arrived while Chase Plaza was still mid-demolition and Bison Crossing's retail outlots were still filling in. A national publication looked at a village with active construction fencing on two of its major corridors and still ranked it above 235 other American communities. That is not a town coasting on reputation. That is a ranking that priced in the unfinished work.
What This Means for Your Next Six Weeks
None of this is abstract if you already live here. It shows up in what is actually happening around town this season.
Buffalo Grove Days returns September 3 through 7 at Mike Rylko Community Park, and this year's schedule is set:
- Carnival hours run 6 to 10 p.m. on opening night, extending to 6 to 11 p.m. and 1 to 11 p.m. as the weekend builds
- The parade steps off at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 5, marching south on Buffalo Grove Road from Thompson, then west on Deerfield Parkway to the park
- The Meet Me on Main Street Business and Craft Fair runs Saturday from noon to 7 p.m.
- The Rotary Club's annual Duck Race streams live on Facebook Sunday evening, with results posted the following Monday, September 7
- A Community Blood Drive is scheduled for Saturday at the Alcott Center
If you want carnival access for the full run without paying at the gate each night, advance megabands run $70 for all five days.
Over at The Clove, the redeveloped former Town Center site, a combined Cinnabon, Jamba and Auntie Anne's location opened under the GoTo Foods umbrella. It is one of only three locations in the country where all three brands share a single storefront, and the first in the Midwest. If you have driven past and wondered why the line moves through three counters instead of one, that is why.
Sunday mornings still bring the Buffalo Grove Farmers Market to Mike Rylko Community Park, the same park hosting Days a few weeks later. Between the market, the festival, and the ongoing work at Chase Plaza and Bison Crossing, this stretch of Lake-Cook and Dundee Road is doing more at once than it has in years.
The thread connecting all of it is not luck or a hot suburban market in general. It is one company that already knew this village well enough to finish what it started, and confident enough in the result to try the same approach one town over.
If you're curious how any of this, the Chase Plaza rebuild, Bison Crossing, or the ranking bump, is showing up in what homes near these corridors are actually doing, Lyn Wise Group tracks this kind of local detail closely and is always happy to talk through what it means for your particular block.
