Ryan Companies, a real estate development and management company that has worked with corporate giants including Amazon and Target, is the latest comer in the six-year fight over the development of Calumet Country Club.
Kyle Schott, Ryan Companies’ vice president of real estate development, gave a presentation about the company’s interest in the property earlier this month before the the Hazel Crest’s Oct. 14 Village Board. Schott didn’t go into detail about any specific proposals, saying the company would need to assess market prospects, community desires and interested corporate clients.
“We would like to start a transparent dialogue with the community on the site redevelopment. And that’s going to mean a lot of different things,” Schott said. “We have our thoughts, but we need to find alignment with other folks that might have different ideas, with the community.”
When asked for more detail by trustrees, Schott said Ryan Companies saw the most potential in industrial development.
“We look at what companies are out there, where they want to spend their money,” Schott said. “And we’ve identified industrial as a very good use at this stage, but that doesn’t mean that can’t be mixed with something else, or that there’s not other opportunities that a third-party market study might show to us.”
That may be a community deal-breaker, based on the recent history of the property.
Calumet Country Club was purchased in 2020 by Arizona businessman Walt Brown, Jr., CEO of real estate brokerage and development company Diversified Partners, with the intention of developing it into a warehouse hub. At the time, the property was part of Homewood, but substantial public pushback prevented the site from being rezoned for industrial use.
“They said, ‘It’s a done deal. We’re going to vote on it,’” said South Suburbs for Greenspace co-founder Liz Varmecky. “And they tell us, if Homewood doesn’t approve it, the developer’s going to leave Homewood and they’re going to annex into Hazel Crest.”
As part of a settlement with Brown, Homewood allowed the club to disconnect from from the village. It was then annexed by neighboring Hazel Crest.
However, Hazel Crest residents have been no more enthusiastic than Homewood residents about the prospect of turning one of the area’s only major green spaces into an industrial development, and pushback continued when another company associated with Brown, Catalyst Consulting, also attempted to get the parcel rezoned.
“There’s almost no green space in Hazel Crest or Homewood. There’s no Cook County forest preserves. Very little parkland. And so I said, like, it’s not that we’re huge fans of the Calumet Country Club,” said David Sacks, also a co-founder of South Suburbs for Greenspace. “But it’s 130 acres with over 2,300 trees. That is providing a huge air quality buffer right now from (Interstates) 80 and 294.”
“We do wonder how aware Ryan Companies is of the community opposition,” Varmecky said. “And it’s not just our group. We don’t meet people anywhere who are for this development and we’ve knocked on, I would say, thousands of doors.”
Ryan Companies didn’t respond to requests for comment on the community pushback.
At the Hazel Crest board meeting, Schott said the company has a purchase and sale agreement on the site with the current owner.
“Ryan would intend to purchase the site, whether the entire site all at once or portions of the site at any given time, to produce some level of development,” Schott said. “So Ryan would then be owner of the site and the asset or assets we would ultimately build.”
Advocates like Sacks and Varmecky want to see the property purchased by a government entity, ideally the Forest Preserves of Cook County, and maintained as public land. Any use that would involve industrial re-zoning, they said, is a complete nonstarter.
“Our goal is for them to walk away from it, and I’ve had experience where that happened with another project,” Sacks said. “The developer just walked away once they saw community opposition. They had a similar thing, where they had like a purchase agreement on a property, once they realized they weren’t going to get the zoning, they just decided to build somewhere else, pursue something different. Wasn’t worth their time and energy.”
Varmecky saw a racial element to the repeated attempts to develop the land for industrial purposes, as opposed to residential or other uses. Hazel Crest’s population is 85% Black.
“To me, it’s one of the most offensive things. Their thought is, obviously the people in Hazel Crest want to have these low wage warehouse jobs, because of their demographics,” Varmecky said. “But that isn’t what the socio-economic situation is in Hazel Crest. This is a middle-class, like, bedroom community where people commute to the city, where people have higher-paying jobs than that.”
Varmecky said that even if industrial development brought new jobs, it would still do more harm than good to Hazel Crest, lowering the property values of nearby homes and injuring the town’s tax base.
“They keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s going to bring jobs,’” Varmecky said. “Which would be literally the only economic benefit, because it’s not going to bring taxes, because they’ll want a TIF. And a TIF freezes the taxes where they are now, so the tiny amount of taxes that property brings in now is where they’ll be frozen for 23 years.”
A TIF district, or tax increment financing district, is a type of subsidy originally intended to stimulate private investment in economically depressed or blighted areas. In a TIF district, property taxes are frozen for a certain period of time, and any incresed tax revenue from the development of the area has to go back into improving the district.
The creation of a TIF district was one issue in the lawsuit between Brown and the Homewood Village Board. The widespread use of TIFs in the Chicago area has led to extensive criticism of the practice, in part because it delays tax income to other taxing bodies such as school districts.
For now, the argument over the future of the Calumet Country Club is ongoing. In the meantime, the property continues to operate as a golf course, though it closed for the winter this month.
