The late Kimball Hill once described himself as a scholar as much as a builder, but it’s the builder of homes and communities who will be remembered.
Prefabrication pioneer, creator of northwest suburban Rolling Meadows, national leader in housing research and a charter member (1977) of the National Association of Home Builders Housing Hall of Fame, Kimball Hill, 83, died Nov. 9 in St. Francis Hospital, Evanston, after heart surgery.
Hill graduated from Northwestern University Law School in 1935 and worked for a mortgage company before building his first house in southwest suburban Oak Lawn in 1939 and establishing the firm that bears his name.
Rolling Meadows-based Kimball Hill Inc., headed by his son, David, since 1969, has become one of the leading production home builders in metropolitan Chicago, currently producing more than 730 homes a year at eight suburban subdivisions.
A separate company, Kimball Hill Management and Property Specialists, is headed by another son, Tracy.
The elder Hill remained as a senior consultant and board member to both firms until his death.
During World War II, Kimball Hill developed four- and six-flats as well as duplex ranch homes in northwest suburban Des Plaines as part of a program to provide wartime housing.
After the war, he teamed with partner Ed Smith to operate a prefabricated housing factory in Oak Lawn and develop two subdivisions, southwest suburban Oak Meadows and northwest suburban Park Ridge Manor next to Maine Township East High School.
Today, prefabrication has been so refined that even large homes are engineered and prefabricated. But in 1949 the industry was in its infancy, and Hill was ahead of his time.
“Prefabrication then was best suited for scattered sites, not for larger developments,” he would later conclude. Mortgage defaults at Oak Meadows and tight financial markets would compel Smith and Hill to declare bankruptcy.
Smith became a prominent Realtor, and Hill began his rise as a leading developer, eventually becoming president of the Home Builders Association of Greater Chicago.
Aware of veterans’ pent-up demand for affordable single-family housing, Hill in 1951 optioned an unincorporated 537-acre farm tract south of Arlington Park Race Track, where he planned a community of modest ranch homes to be priced initially from $8,990 to $9,990.
Working from a sales tent pitched next to a model home, Hill quickly took more than 300 deposits from buyers attracted by the preconstruction prices.
It was May, 1953, however, before he secured county zoning approval for the project. The plan had been opposed vigorously by adjacent suburbs, which were leery of affordable housing, and Palatine School District 15, which feared the projected influx of children would bankrupt the system.
Ground was broken for the first house on July 21, 1953, to be followed from 1954 through 1956 by almost 4,000 homes on the original site and 663 additional acres acquired south of Kirchoff Road. Eventually 6,000 homes would be built.
For three years, 600 families a year moved into Rolling Meadows, and Hill turned out to be a major benefactor of the school district that had originally opposed his plan.
He donated the use of five homes for temporary classrooms until completion of the first school building, which Hill built and equipped. He also donated $200 a home to a school construction fund, one of the first Chicago-area developers to do so. The district eventually named a school in his honor.
In a 1989 Tribune interview, Hill spoke of his pride in Rolling Meadows.
“I’m convinced that one of the reasons for this community’s unusual solidity was my original insistence on a minimum 10 percent down payment,” he said. “I got upset by those deals where veterans could buy a house with $200 down because when the economy slowed down, some people would just walk, leaving instant eyesores.
“Here in Rolling Meadows, everybody had a real stake. The result was a more stable community and the avoidance of heavy foreclosures,” he said.
To ensure such stability, Hill encouraged a sense of community among his buyers.
He established a homeowners association, donated a church building, donated land for Clearbrook Center, pushed for and paid for incorporation as a city and donated a house for the first city hall.
Asked in 1989 what he was happiest about after 50 years as a home builder, Hill said:
“I never had to cheat anybody. Sometimes the pressures of life are so great that people must do things they know are wrong. I never got into that box.
“I enjoyed what I was doing. I didn’t need a yacht or a lot of other things. Success was measured by doing what’s exciting to you. I wanted to put my drop in the bucket by making the world a little bit better place to live in.”
Hill was a resident of Des Plaines and Eagle River, Wis. Survivors include his wife, Elizabeth; his daughter, Georgia Walter; two sons, David and Tracy; seven grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
