Six years ago, Claire and Myron Warshaw said goodbye to their Chicago-area home and moved to Union Pier, Mich., where they had long owned a vacation cottage. In so doing, they traded the bland, landlocked monotony and traffic hassles of the northwest suburbs for the azure harbors and blueberry fields of Berrien County.
Their home is out of the way, and some of the staples of modern existence, such as cable TV and high-speed Internet, were late in arriving.
Still, Claire Warshaw says, “It’s very easy to live here.”
The Warshaws are just two among ex-Chicago-area residents building new lives in the resort towns of southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana.
They’re finding a slower, more comfortable pace on or near Lake Michigan, yet a simple trip by car or train to Chicago’s Loop.
Nola and George Conte, formerly of Chicago’s Forest Glen neighborhood, moved to New Buffalo, Mich., in 2003. “The first word that comes to mind is ambience,” Nola said. “I love the people, love the locals. . . . You’re accepted differently than those coming in and out of Chicago. They welcome you with open arms, and they’re so friendly.”
In southwest Michigan’s Harbor Country, so named because it is within steps of harbor and country, developments are sprouting one-half mile to 15 miles from the lake in New Buffalo, Sawyer, Union Pier, Grand Beach and others, said Louis Price, manager of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in New Buffalo. Many buyers are looking for getaway homes, with the notion of making them their retirement residence.
“Most of the development here is still geared toward second homeowners,” said Nadra Kissman, owner and principal broker at New Buffalo’s Nadra K Real Estate. “But in the last 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of people from the city downsizing their Chicago-area residences and buying something larger here that becomes their major residence. … Some of the people only go into the city two or three days a week and can work from here the rest of the week.”
According to Kissman, since 2001, 1,275 residential units have been built or are being built in Harbor Country.
By highway or railway
Indeed, the ease of travel to “Michiana” is a major lure in the construction boom along these shores. Not only can Chicagoans zip to southwest Michigan in about 90 minutes using the Skyway, Indiana Tollroad and Interstate Highway 94, they also can ride Amtrak and the South Shore to stops in or near New Buffalo.
Amtrak serves New Buffalo with daily trains between Chicago and Grand Rapids but is expected to replace that run with two daily trains each way on the Chicago-to-Detroit route, Price said. Other commuters drive a few miles to a South Shore station near Michigan City, Kissman said.
Because southwest Michigan is so close to Chicago, future buyers often catch their first glimpses of the area on a weekend getaway. “We see a progression,” Kissman said. “People come up first to spend a weekend at a bed-and-breakfast. Then they come for a couple of weeks. Then they look for a small cottage. And the next thing you know, they’re upgrading to a year-round home.”
If there’s a typical Harbor Country home, it’s an approximately 1,500-square-foot-and-up cottage-style wood-frame house with three bedrooms, screened porch and deck, Price said. Homes are built on lots that start at $150,000 for an acre and a half in the areas farthest from the lake and rise to $250,000 to $350,000 closer to the water. Developments run the gamut from those offering larger lots to others that cluster homes but provide natural common areas such as hiking trails and ponds, he said.
One of the most talked-about New Buffalo projects of recent years is the Summer School Cottages & Schoolhouse Lofts development, built on the grounds of the shuttered New Buffalo High School, a 1930s-era brick structure. Part of the school was retained and turned into town homes, and about two dozen year-round three-bedroom “cottages” were added to the schoolyard, Kissman said.
The development, built between 2003 and 2005, sold out in 11 months.
Among the buyers were the Contes, who bought the home that had served as the high school’s art classroom.
“The windows are full height and go right up to the ceiling,” Nola said. “And I have those blinds that reflect the heat, and I can raise them up to the ceiling, and have these wide open spaces. It doesn’t feel like a house, it feels architecturally unique.
“George and I collect art, but that was only a coincidence,” she said. “It was just that this particular loft is a little more open than the others. This one gave us more openness.”
Condominium developments hugging the harbor channel in New Buffalo are rapidly changing the face of a once-sleepy lakeside town, adding substantially to the number of cars and pedestrians downtown. Condos there start at $450,000 and run to $1.7 million, Price said.
Twenty years ago, few could have foreseen the resort villages of southwest Michigan becoming year-round boomtowns. Built largely in the 1920s and ’30s as summer escapes for folks from Grand Rapids, South Bend, Chicago and Detroit, the towns that comprise Harbor Country were largely forgotten after World War II, Price said. The growth of suburbia and the affordability of air conditioning made getting away to the lake less a priority. At the same time, interstate highways allowed Midwesterners to venture farther on summer vacations.
“My family moved here around 1970, and at that time, there were quite a few vacant cottages,” Price said. “People didn’t really use them then, and development was quite slim.”
In the late 1980s, Price said, the area was rediscovered by people in the Chicago area, and all those little cottages were bought and rehabbed. Since then, a lot of development has happened. “They’ve run out of vacant land near the lake, and that’s why these newer [inland] developments are being constructed,” he said
Kissman is also a longtime resident of the area. “When I was a child here, it was Memorial Day to Labor Day,” she said. “The cottages were built for summer, and it was hard to get up here during the winter. Now everything is built for year round-use, and you see a lot of people spending more of their year here.”
Not everyone’s happy, though. The growing numbers of visitors and year-round residents have some of the long-standing locals grumbling about the growth. “When Labor Day comes around, a lot of people are a little relieved that it’s easier to find a parking space in downtown New Buffalo,” Kissman said.
Longtime residents around New Buffalo would also like to see more of the clustered home developments to preserve open land, Price said, but added, “There are those buyers who want one or two acres for their own property.”
In Warshaw’s relatively short period as a full-time resident, she has seen growth become a larger issue. The political hot button these days is whether there’s “enough infrastructure–water, sewer–for all the people coming in,” said Warshaw, who moved with her husband from Arlington Heights.
Betsy Bohac moved to Harbor Country 25 years ago from the Northwest Side of Chicago. She’s also the zoning administrator and clerk of Chikaming Township, north of New Buffalo, reports the type of clustered home developments that residents would like to see are those that place 50 percent of the land into perpetual conservation easement, and leave the other 50 percent for home development.
“We’re hoping that developers will step up and do that kind of clustered-home development,” Bohac said, adding that none of the 50-50 communities have been built yet.
Back home in Indiana
Matt Lesniak, who grew up in and now works in the Chicago area, bought a single-family home on the lake in Beverly Shores, Ind., about six months ago. Lesniak, 36, envisioned it as a second or vacation home for himself and his family, but, he said, “We now spend half our time there, because it’s so close to Chicago. We just get up and go.
“I never knew about Indiana Dunes until I went there. . . . It’s this idea of nature and spectacular sights and not necessarily feeling people are right on top of one another.”
If there’s an irony in all this, it’s that many Chicagoans hustling to and from Harbor Country are darting by another resort town much closer to home.
Chesterton, Ind., is not as well marketed as Harbor Country, says broker Donna Hofmann of Chesterton’s Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. But it offers many of the same pleasures.
Ninety-five percent of Hofmann’s buyers come from the Chicago area, and about half of them are people 50 and older. “Some of them are looking for lakefront homes, some for country homes, but with both used for the same purpose: a vacation or getaway home that will become a retirement place,” she said.
Those searching for country getaways tend to be seeking two to 20 acres, at prices from $400,000 to $1.5 million for house and land. Beachfront buyers are looking at $350,000 or so for an entry-level two-bedroom home on a half acre of woods a couple blocks from the beach. And everyone in most of the beach communities near Chesterton has beach access, she said.There is one big difference between Chesterton and Harbor Country, she noted. The former is close enough to Chicago that as many as half of the full-time beach community homeowners commute daily to downtown Chicago for work, she said. “I can be at my favorite parking spot in the Hancock Center in 55 minutes,” Hofmann said.
That could be a big reason Chesterton will be discovered by more getaway and retirement home buyers in the near future. “Over the next 10 years,” Hofmann said, “We’re going to grow by leaps and bounds.”
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Harbor Country pursuits
With more residents have come more activities.
In nearby Three Oaks, which has evolved into a cultural center, folks can take in an artsy film at the Vickers Theatre or enjoy a performance at the Acorn Theater, said Union Pier resident Claire Warshaw.
Saturdays in the summer, there is Three Oaks Music in the Park, a free series in Dewey Cannon Park featuring Big Band to bluegrass. Antique shops, art galleries, golf and fine restaurants also vie for business.
Timeless pursuits also await. Warren Dunes State Park still beckons just 10 minutes away on Red Arrow Highway or Interstate Highway 94. “Pick-your-own” blueberry farms and apple and peach orchards lure fruit lovers summer and fall.
Harbor Country’s sandy, fertile soil and lush grapevines make this a place of award-winning wineries, among them the Round Barn Winery in Union Pier. And country bicycle paths encourage riders to pedal up to 100 miles through the forests and fields of Harbor County, according to Louis Price, manager of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in New Buffalo.
–Jeff Steele
