Earlier this month, Niles mayor Andrew Przybylo stood before a summit of the town’s longest-running business owners and told them the model that built their companies would have to change.

“The first step in creating our plan is to acknowledge some new and some long-held realities of our economic vitality,” Przybylo told members of the Niles Chamber of Commerce during the group’s annual luncheon. “Sales tax is not growing or declining because of less disposable income and Internet sales. Future shopping environments will be recreation-oriented. Big box stores will not all survive.”

Niles, a serpentine appendage of Chicago’s Northwest Side, hugs a 7-mile stretch of Milwaukee Avenue that whisks commuters between the city and its tony northwest suburbs. A scattered collection of chain restaurants, retail giants and supermarkets offer them supplies along the way, anchoring the town’s economy.

But less than a year into his second term, Przybylo is bent on heaving the village through a wholesale transformation from store-brand suburb to national destination, equipped only with word-of-mouth and the regulatory levers of a small-town mayor.

With annual expenditures near $37 million — less than what Chicago allocates for “solid waste removal” in its 2018 budget — Niles leaders are leaning on a dual-strategy of lax zoning and new special taxing districts to draw billions in new development in the coming decades.

The vision is grandiose: a luxury hotel and 70,000 square-foot pavilion next to the village’s iconic Leaning Tower, tree-filled pedestrian plazas filling the busiest traffic chokepoints and a green space full of architectural oddities rivaling Millennium Park. Thousands of new apartments would fill stretches of Milwaukee Avenue now marked by parking lots and aging factories, and a fleet of self-driving shuttles would ferry shoppers through pedestrian-only entertainment parks.

The plan is designed to cull new passengers from a pair of express bus lines set to criss-cross the village when they launch in 2019 and 2020, fusing into the village’s own network of free buses.

“What we want is a cross between Rosemont and Ravinia, or maybe Maggie Daley Park,” Przybylo said before the luncheon. “The retail that’s thriving is entertainment-based — the theaters, the skating rinks, the restaurants. We want to be aggressive in focusing on that trend.”

A slideshow flipped between Matisse-style renderings of lush plazas and cell phone photos of half-built apartment towers in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood.

“These are all conceptual, ladies and gentlemen,” Przybylo said, looking up from his prepared speech. “But if we can get this, if we can replicate what we’re seeing in Chicago, we can get a whole new property tax program.”

Among the 100-plus Niles faithful seated around the banquet hall was Patrick Dalessandro, a realtor who’s managed properties around the village for more than 40 years.

“It’s going to be a tremendous change, but thank God it’s coming,” Dalessandro said. “It’s about time.”

Dalessandro, 69, has seen his town transform before. In 1952, when his parents moved from Chicago’s West Side into a bungalow at Milwaukee and Oakton avenues, the village was “mostly just farmland” home to a few thousand people, Dalessandro said.

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But America’s post-WWII wave of suburban home construction crashed hard over Niles. The 1970 census counted more than 30,000 residents, a mark the village has hovered near every since.

When Mayor Nick Blase took office in 1961, he stamped out an under-the-table gambling district on Milwaukee Avenue and invited developers to build strip malls in their place.

“Mayor Blase realized that in order to keep a low tax base, you need a lot of sales tax revenue,” Dalessandro said. “In most towns, commercial development follows residential — but in Niles, it was the opposite.”

By the mid-2000s, Niles had carved out a reputation as a “socks-and-underwear town,” where residents from Chicago to Glenview could flock every week for basic necessities, according to Niles economic development coordinator Ross Klicker.

“It meant we didn’t take that big a hit in 2008, because people kept coming here to shop for essentials,” Klicker said. “But after that, we saw we saw other communities capture much more of the growth in discretionary spending. So here we are with flat sales tax projections, but our costs are constantly increasing.”

A solution began to take shape in 2014, when the Pace suburban transit agency announced plans to build the first two lines of its new “rapid transit” express bus network through Niles, Klicker said. The first line would trace Milwaukee Avenue from the Jefferson Park Transit Center through the length of the suburb, and the second would stretch from Evanston’s Davis Station to O’Hare Airport after its projected launch in 2020.

“Immediately, we said, ‘We have to be prepared to capitalize on this,’” Klicker said.

Village leaders set about undoing decades’ worth of car-centric development, which left a legacy of wide roads and spacious parking lots, in favor of new homes and businesses clustered near Pace’s planned bus stops.

In 2015, the Niles Board of Trustees approved a sweeping rewrite of their zoning code to allow for multi-story buildings and mixed-use apartment complexes all along Milwaukee. They published a 54-page plan sketching plans for wider pedestrian spaces and tighter traffic controls all along the four-lane thoroughfare.

Leaders keyed in on the Leaning Tower, a half-size replica of Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa built at Lehigh and Touhy avenues in 1934, as the potential centerpiece of an 80-acre entertainment district unlike anything in Chicagoland.

“It would be like Rosemont, but better-planned. You can’t walk anywhere in Rosemont,” Klicker said. “We have so many people furiously driving through, or biking on the North Branch Trail. We want to get them to stop and walk around.”

In an effort to get even more visitors to leave their cars at home, Niles officials began drafting a proposal this year for a new Metra station along the UP-Milwaukee Line near the Leaning Tower.

Even if Metra accepts the proposal, the new stop would take years to build. And the Milwaukee Avenue Pulse stations, though already under construction, aren’t slated to go into use until 2019.

But the prospect alone of better transit is already drawing second looks from developers. This month, one builder unveiled a plan to build a five-story, 72-unit apartment building for low-income seniors near the intersection of Milwaukee and Touhy, according to the Niles Herald-Spectator.

“If we can take a piece of property like an antiquated strip center, tear it down and build retail with three or four floors of apartments on top, that’s going to be great for young families who move in who ... want easy access to transportation,” Przybylo said. “Just like Wicker Park or Bucktown. That’s the way it’s going to be in the city of Niles.”