Only a few months ago, Kent Shodeen was skiing in Aspen, Colo.
He took on the slopes like he does everything else in life: aggressively.
He was on a new trail, but that didn’t slow him down. He guessed his speed to be 40 to 50 m.p.h. when he took a wrong turn and went tumbling down the side of the mountain.
He ended up with a fractured arm, but when he struggled to his feet, he heard cheers from the people in the ski lift overhead who had seen him fall.
It’s not unlike his life as a developer. Kent Shodeen takes enormous risks, continuing to put millions of dollars behind diverse projects that he develops in the Tri-Cities area of Geneva, Batavia and St. Charles.
Not everybody may be cheering at what he has done and has planned for the future, but they’re definitely taking note. The 57-year-old Geneva resident has made his mark on the Fox River Valley.
Perhaps the most visible of his recent projects is the Herrington Inn, an elegant riverside hotel carved out of a historic creamery in Geneva.
“The Herrington was truly a gift to the city,” said Christine Jeffries, Geneva’s director of economic development. “It exceeded all of our expectations. Nothing was overlooked in it, and the detail is spectacular. It is a statement of Kent’s respect for the city of Geneva.”
His newest projects range from restoring historic sites to creating a planned community whose design is said to be a harbinger of lifestyles of the future.
On the historic side, he is designing a new community on the site of Geneva Community Hospital (now merged with Delnor Hospital). He razed most of the buildings at the south end of the popular 3rd Street retail mecca but kept the historic Dodson House and Eastview structure. The new development will include homes, retail shops, offices, condominiums and some apartments and it will also feature the surrounding ancient oak trees that will be incorporated into a park.
North of Geneva on the Dam, where he built stores and a restaurant into the facade of an old factory, he has another riverside project that will include condominiums, some additional shops and office space and probably another hotel.
And just west of Randall Road, in unincorporated Kane County, is his biggest project to date, the multimillion-dollar Mill Creek development. The site, bordered by Keslinger Road on the north and Batavia’s Main Street on the south, will have 2,000 housing units on 1,500 acres. Housing density will be a little tighter, Shodeen said, but plenty of open space and recreational opportunities are included in the design. Instead of giving people lots of space in their back yards for leisure activities, he said, the design will give it to them in the form of such things as bike trails, golf courses, wetlands and soccer fields. And the plan makes use of environmental resources; for instance, water will be recycled for irrigation.
“It’s going to be an outstanding subdivision,” said Sam Santell, planning director for Kane County. “Kent is putting a lot of emphasis on the quality of life in this development.”
Does it make him nervous to be balancing so many huge projects at once?
“You just don’t look at the zeros,” he said offhandedly with a smile. But then he added: “You’re always taking a risk. That’s part of the business.”
He took a risk, in fact, on his first project. He had thought he wanted to be a doctor, so he went to Northwestern University in Evanston. But he left before getting a degree and took a job selling insurance in Batavia. He was newly married with one small child and working part time selling mill work when he decided to buy a lot and build a house.
“Before I could spell builder, I was one,” he said. It was risky, said his wife of 35 years, Joan. But they had a backup plan. They were living in an apartment, and if the house didn’t sell, they would move in.
They never got the chance. Shodeen sold that house, then built a few more, one at a time, and sold those, adding a hyphen in the name of his Sho-Deen Construction Co. to make it look more professional. Five years later, he bought some acreage in Batavia, got it zoned for residential and built his first big project, Carriage Crest, a development of single family homes.
After that, he went on to build apartments in St. Charles at Wessel Court, lots of houses throughout the Tri-Cities area from affordable to upscale, the St. Charles Mall on Illinois Highway 38 (which is failing under different ownership), the Jewel-Osco plaza just west of it, and the Dominicks plaza across the street, among other things.
He has diversified his business to include hotel and apartment management, rental properties and three Geneva restaurants (Riverwalk, Ristorante Chianti and Atwater), as well as his building projects.
How does he do it?
With lists.
Behind a completely clean desk in his new offices in a modern redesign of an old building on Illinois Highway 31 in Geneva with a view of the river, he flips the pages of a legal-size writing pad. On it are lists, written in tiny, precise, angular handwriting. They are lists of projects Kent Shodeen wants to do. Some lists are for the day, complete with phone numbers, of people he must call.
Another list is for his life. Once this list had 250 items on it. Now he has it pared down to 140 or so, and it has gotten as low as 100.
Nobody, though, he said emphatically, tells him what to do for the day. It could be playing golf or having a glass of scotch, if that’s the important thing he wants to do. Or it may be working until late at night to accomplish what he wants to have done for the day.
But ultimately, he said, everything on the lists will get done.
“Sometimes things are on the list for a long time,” Joan said, “but he prioritizes and eventually gets to them.”
Shodeen has a lot of energy. He twirls his glasses as he speaks or fiddles with a pen. He has lived most of his life in the Chicago area, growing up on the South Side. At 57, he could be mistaken for a non-Latin look-alike of Hector Elizondo, who plays chief of staff Dr. Phillip Watters in the television show “Chicago Hope.” Shodeen’s hair and beard, though, are sprinkled with gray, and he smiles more. Plus, his eyes can take on a wily look, especially when asked probing business questions.
He has a reputation for demanding a lot from his staff. “If they can’t do the job, I’ve got the wrong person,” he said.
But he is also known to be intensely loyal. “He has a great staff that is fiercely loyal to him and has a tremendous loyalty to my family and our company,” said Harry Seigle, whose family owns a chain of lumber and building stores in the western suburbs.
Critics say he gets more than his share of concessions from local governments, that he can be arrogant and that he can also be temperamental, but Jeffries chalks charges like that up to the personality traits necessary to be a successful developer.
“With the risks they take, developers can be a little high strung,” she said. “They’ve got personality, character and energy. And when they say they’re going to do something, they do it, even if it’s something you don’t want them to do. You can depend on them doing what they want to do.”
It comes down to vision, Santell said.
“When you run across someone who has a longtime vision, he sometimes gets frustrated with people who think dogmatically,” he said.
One of Shodeen’s most reliable characteristics, said some, is that he is very upfront.
“With Kent,” said Robert Hupp, director of planning and development for the city of St. Charles, “he’ll always let you know exactly where he stands.”
But when things get tense, said Jeffries, it’s not uncommon for Shodeen to break the ice with a joke. “He has a great sense of humor,” she said. “He can really lighten the mood when things get heavy.”
Fun is definitely on his agenda–and on his lists. He enjoys all sorts of sports like golf and tennis, has a sign in his office that says “preserve wildlife, throw a party,” has a small fleet of collectible antique automobiles including a 1934 Packard Super 8 convertible coupe by LeBaron and tools around for his daily trips in a Jaguar convertible.
He’s close to his four children (most of whom work for the company) and his six grandchildren.
And he seems embarrassed talking about some of the philanthropic things he has done for the community.
“You do what you have to do,” he said with an abashed smile.
One of the things he “had to do” was putting up the front money for a building the St. Charles Historical Museum wanted to buy to give them time to organize a fundraising campaign.
Shodeen has always been generous where the hospital is concerned, said Craig Livermore, president of Delnor-Community Hospital.
“He’s been active in the men’s foundation since the 1970s, and he made a leadership gift in our 1991 campaign for the new hospital that was tremendously helpful in setting the tone for that campaign. The gift went for our Emergency Services Center,” said Livermore.
“He has done many things that have not been publicized,” Seigle said. “He has offered his hand to a lot of people in need. He presents the veneer of a hard-crusted businessman, but, at the same time, people who are close to him know a dimension of his character that a lot of other people might not recognize.”
But people are beginning to see his vision. In his buildings and projects, the people of the Fox Valley are beginning to understand the way Kent Shodeen sees his community and how he sees it in the future.
“He builds more than houses,” Seigle said. “He builds neighborhoods and communities. His grandchildren years from now will be proud to drive through the neighborhoods he has built.”
SHODEEN’S PROJECT LIST
These are are some of the major projects that Kent Shodeen has built or has under construction in the Fox Valley:
Commercial projects:
Jewel/Osco, St. Charles: 62,000 square feet.
2075 Prairie St., St. Charles: 12,000-square-foot strip shopping center.
201 S. 3rd St., Geneva: 10,000-square-foot retail building housing Chianti Ristorante.
Geneva on the Dam, Geneva: 50,000-square-foot office, retail and restaurant space on banks of Fox River.
Tri-City Center, St. Charles: 82,000-square-foot commercial center containing Dominick’s, Walgreen’s and 19,000 square feet of strip space.
Saddlebrook Office Complex, St. Charles: 18,000 square feet.
One Commerce Center, Geneva: 16,000 square feet of office and industrial space.
Williamsburg Executive Center, Geneva: 18,000-square-foot office complex.
Williamsburg Professional Center, Geneva: 22,000-square-foot office condominium complex.
One River Centre, Geneva: 28,000-square-foot office/retail complex.
Residential projects:
Kenston Court Apartments, Geneva: 41-unit apartment/condo complex.
Wessel Court Apartments, St. Charles: 228-unit apartment complex.
Covington Court Apartments, St. Charles: 208-unit apartment complex.
Brittany Court Apartments, Geneva: 228-unit apartment complex.
Carriage Crest, Batavia: 156 custom homes.
Hunters Woods/Hunters Fields, St. Charles: 445 custom homes and townhomes.
Geneva East Phases I, II, III, IV and VI, Geneva: 519 single-family homes.
Chesapeake Commons, Geneva: 226 townhomes.
Williamsburg/Williamsburg South, Geneva: 183 custom homes.
Williamsburg Village, Geneva: 47 condominiums.
The Townes of Fox Chase, St. Charles: 74 deluxe duplex homes.
Pine Meadows, Aurora: 208 single-family homes.
Mill Creek, rural Kane County west of Geneva: 2,000-home planned community.
