Chicago housing market

from this morning's Crain's Chicago Business news wire

Housing bust puts a boomtown on hold
By Eddie Baeb
Oct. 01, 2007

"Two years after breaking ground on one of the biggest planned developments in the Chicago area — almost 4,000 homes, a country club and shopping center in fast-growing Kendall County — a Virginia-based developer has yet to sell a homesite and faces a foreclosure lawsuit.

A lender on the 1,175-acre Westbury project in Yorkville is seeking to recoup $4.7 million from Ocean Atlantic Development Corp., and the city is mulling legal action over the developer's unpaid $500,000 bill for infrastructure work.

Similar situations are playing out around the Chicago area amid home sales that have fallen for 17 straight months. Many homebuilders have stopped buying new building sites from developers like Alexandria, Va.-based Ocean Atlantic and have even walked away from pending deals as they struggle to sell off existing inventory as home sales plummet." ....

"Things are particularly acute in far-flung suburbs undergoing dramatic growth like Yorkville, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago. The town's population has grown to almost 16,000 from 6,189 in 2000. But the housing slowdown prompted the city in July to cut its population projection for 2012 by almost 25% to 43,769.

Just north of Yorkville, in Sugar Grove, another mega-development that was to include 2,100 homes and land for a new city hall and library was scrapped last year by Neumann Homes Inc., prompting a lawsuit from a suburban Detroit investment firm that was to sell the land to Neumann. The developer's CEO, Kenneth Neumann, didn't return calls for comment." ...

for the complete story and a wonderful pair of graphs see:
http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/mag/article.pl?article_id=28
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