Just 10 years ago, no one envisioned housing subdivisions and commercial parks springing up on nearly 2,000 acres in the northern suburbs that had long been home to Navy aviators, religious missionaries and a menagerie of wildlife.
But that was before a painful process of belt-tightening that’s been felt all the way from the Pentagon to Vatican City.
Today, it’s only a question of how quickly, and carefully, a transformation that by some estimates could easily exceed $1 billion in redevelopment will occur at the soon-to-close Glenview Naval Air Station (GNAS) and the vast Techny property directly across Willow Road in Northbrook. The two sites are the largest and most valuable tracts of undeveloped land remaining in northern Cook County.
The future of these fields of chest-high grasses and rolling hills is being decided by two groups, and neither is a private developer.
One is the Village of Glenview, which is in the enviable position of taking over in September some 1,100 acres of air station property bequeathed by the U.S. Navy.
The other is the Society of the Divine Word, a Roman Catholic missionary order whose religious forebears, starting out a century ago in a small room over a cheese factory, began amassing more than 1,000 acres of fertile farmland in what was then the town of Shermerville.
Although Glenview’s bureaucrats and the society’s priests have adopted mixed-use plans that are similar, in many ways they mirror the layout of Glenview, Northbrook and nearby Northfield.
But there are differences in the way the village officials and the priests are going about developing the land.
For example, under Glenview’s master plan, 65 percent of the land will be made available for private ownership, which Village President Nancy Firfer has insisted is the key to making the redevelopment “self-financing” and not a burden on taxpayers.
The vast majority of the Techny land will be leased, curtailing potential short-term profits but giving the society long-term control over the land.
“I think the Glenview plan has the potential of being synergistic with the Techny plan,” said John Novinson, village manager of Northbrook, which in 1988 annexed approximately 770 acres of the Techny property.
The seeds of change were planted in 1986, when the priests at Techny, which is celebrating its centennial this year, started mulling the idea of leasing much of the society’s land holdings to make up for recent shortfalls in financing their worldwide humanitarian work.
Then in 1993, the federal government, in a surprise move, decided to include the Glenview naval reserve installation in its list of budget-cutting base closings.
While the Techny project got a big head start, the endeavor was hampered by reversals in the real estate market. The original master plan developer withdrew and only recently has significant headway been made in the development of the society’s properties earmarked for residential uses.
Glenview officials, who formed a community task force, have recently completed a final reuse plan for the Navy base and sold $60 million in bonds for infrastructure improvements. The village, as the local redevelopment authority, is refining its business and economic development planning and completing an environmental impact statement.
The next step is to see how long it will take for the air station land to be placed on the market and what the response will be to both projects among developers asked to commit large sums of capital.
“How long does it take for the real estate market to absorb 2,000 acres? Nobody knows for sure,” said Glenview Village Manager Paul McCarthy.
The priests at Techny ponder the future of their property, which covers nearly 800 acres centered on Willow and Waukegan Roads, in the context of the next 100 years, even the subsequent millennium.
“We are not interested in getting the last penny out of every inch of land. We have a much greater priority for ourselves, as well as for our future neighbors and friends who will occupy our back yard,” said Rev. Francis Kamp, chairman of the society’s land-use committee.
The society, headquartered at the Techny missionary seminary, has more than 6,000 members worldwide. But only 65 missionaries, most of them elderly priests and brothers, plus a smaller number of immigrants from Vietnam, remain at Techny today. In its heyday in the early 1900s, Techny was a self-contained religious community that numbered more than 450 people and operated the St. Joseph’s Technical School for Boys, chicken and bee farms and an assortment of trades.
Standing by a window in one of the twin towers at the society’s ornate Divine World International conference center and pointing to the green fields below Kamp said: “Missionaries yet unborn are going to be taken care of thanks to what we do today. I can’t think of having my life be more meaningful than to be part of a centuries-long process of goodwill.”
Under the current Techny plan, nearly 160 acres along the east side of Waukegan Road has been retained by the society for its continuing uses.
The society has designated up to about 350 acres for commercial uses, which has been offered to developers based on 99-year leases to maintain control over the land; about 115 acres for residential development on land that will be sold; and about 150 acres for open space.
The Techny landfill, which closed in 1993, is zoned to eventually contain office buildings. As an interim use, it has been developed into a 9-hole golf course that is scheduled to open to the public in September.
Glenview officials also say their land-use plan for the air station is highly constrained by quality-of-life standards set forth by the community.
But under the base-closing agreement that ceded the land to the village, Glenview is required to move forward as quickly as possible with economic development.
