15 years of Sun City Huntley, Part 1

Pioneers settle in Del Webb’s first midwest community

SUN CITY – This coming Sunday, April 27, a group of Sun Citians will celebrate a very unique anniversary.

Neighborhood 2 of Sun City is 15 years old this month, and that makes Sun City 15 years old. N.2 was the first one formed in the community in April, 1999.

The party will be at South Union Roadhouse near Marengo. The couple probably enjoying it most will be Bob and Jayne Ackley – the first residents of Sun City. They closed on their new retirement home on the morning of April 15, 1999, and moved in that same afternoon. The second couple to sign on was Richard and Elizabeth Vaughn, they closed on the following Monday morning. The third were Harry and Virginia Leopold on that same Monday afternoon. All three couples still reside in their homes.

“We didn’t try to be the first in any way, it just happened that way,” Bob Ackley said. “It was a whirlwind of activity all that first day. It was amazing how they made such a fuss over us. There were reporters from Chicago and the suburban newspapers, the Huntley Mayor [James Dhamer] was there, all kinds of Del Webb officials, and the movers, as well as workers building other homes on our block.”

“I remember going to bed that evening, and it suddenly got very quiet and still, and it was almost eerie,” Jayne said. “Then the next morning, we welcomed the noise that started up again when the workers came back to work.”

Fast forward to present day:

“The first bus trip outing conducted by Sun City for our new neighborhood was to Donley’s, in the summer of 1999,” said Connie Osika, current N.2 rep on the Neighborhood Advisory Council. “So we thought it was fitting that we went back to the Roadhouse, which Donley’s has become, to celebrate this anniversary.”

Anniversaries are all about history. Where and how did Sun City start? How did it come to Huntley? Why did it become one of the most wildly successful home-building projects in Chicago area history? Why is it unique?

Sun City’s story began in a Phoenix, Ariz. office of the Del Webb construction company in the early 1990s. (Some company sources say the process that led to Huntley began as early as 1988). A group of marketing and project planning officials believed that after 40 successful years of building active adult retirement communities in the nation’s Sun Belt, they were at a crossroads.

After a lot of “where do we go from here” talk, they asked themselves: Instead of continuing to ask retirees to move far away from their homes to get to a retirement community, could we bring the community to them?

Thus, a new era in Del Webb’s history was born. That new idea’s evolution was revealed recently by Valeria Dolenga, spokesperson for the Pulte Group.

“The first Del Webb active adult lifestyle community was opened in the Phoenix area on Jan. 1, 1960. It was a first of its kind, a place catering to active adults aged 55 and better that were attracted by the concept of affordable and active retirement living,” Dolenga said. “Later, however, Del Webb found that most retirees didn’t want to leave their family, church, doctors, and friends. When you put all of these together, you want to build a community within about a 50-mile radius from where they live, but give them a different lifestyle.”

This new approach became a reality in Huntley in a few short years. Huntley, like Phoenix, would get the same name that Del Webb himself created in 1960. Webb was a successful home building and commercial development executive and owner, who was also well known as a co-owner for 20 years of the New York Yankees.

One of the chief proponents of a four-season Sun City far from the Sun Belt was Dave Schreiner, who grew up in the Chicago area and hooked up with Del Webb in Phoenix after a 12-year stint in advertising. By early 1995, he was a senior vice president of marketing and sales. Del Webb officials, enthusiastic about this new concept, asked Schreiner to head a land search team in the Midwest.

The Midwest Sun City site search began sometime during 1995.

“I remember the critical day well,” Schreiner said. “The top guys said to me, ‘Okay, Schreiner, you’ve been touting this four-season idea, now see if you can actually do it. You’ll be in charge of it.’”

Schreiner was Sun City’s first employee, serving as general manager from 1996 to 2001. He moved into the Holiday Inn Hotel on Route 31 in Crystal Lake and led a two-year effort to search a four-state area and find a site for what eventually became one of the largest residential subdivisions in the Chicago area.

In addition to contacting municipal and county government officials in Indianapolis, northern Indiana, southwestern Michigan, and Illinois, Schreiner also sought a lot of grass-roots input. He went to Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, asked local residents to take bus trips to more than a dozen sites, and provide feedback in exchange for lunch.

“We knew we needed to be on or near an interstate highway corridor, or similar transportation route. After more than a year of this, we narrowed our focus to the Chicago area and northern Illinois,” Schreiner said.

“We were contacted by people in Harvard, Il., near the Wisconsin state line, and later by officials who offered a site just north of Woodstock. Both sites were attractive, but both involved dealing with many landowners,” he said. “Eventually, we rejected both of them.”

Then, a small farming community at the intersection of Interstate 90 and State Route 47 got Del Webb’s attention. Its population was about 3,500. It offered nearly 2,000 acres with only two land owners, and the village was actively looking for a residential-style developer.

“The bus riders voted for Huntley by a wide margin because of its convenient access to a major transportation artery leading to the surrounding area as well as Chicago,” Schreiner recalled.

It was now early in 1997.

Almost all of Huntley’s site was owned by The Prime Group, a local real estate firm that was looking for a developer for the residentially zoned site. The remainder of the land was owned by the Vernon Drendel family, which had farmed the area south and west of Huntley for many years.

Negotiations with the land owners went fairly quickly in early 1997, and Dhamer and his staff were receptive, according to Harriet Ford, former director of public relations for Del Webb.

“The mayor was a visionary, like Del Webb, and he was very enthusiastic about Del Webb’s plans for a 5,500-home subdivision and the availability of an active adult lifestyle and affordable homes,” she said.

Also playing major roles at this time were Jack Gleason, Del Webb’s executive vice president for Project Planning and Development, and Robert Eck, vice president of Land Development. Gleason reportedly said that Del Webb started considering a four-season Sun City in the late 1980s.

“Many of our visitors [in the Sun Belt] told us they wanted to stay near their friends and families,” Gleason said. “We’d been hearing that for many years. We came to the Chicago area because it was our second-largest area of sales in the southwest.”

Eck played a big role in negotiations with the village.

“The property was already annexed into the village as part of a larger master planned community that was approved for the Prime Group,” he explained. “Del Webb actually purchased the residentially designated property within that master plan from the Prime Group. We entered into a development agreement with the village that included the adoption of an ‘active adult overlay district’ for the 55-and-over aspect of the district within the larger master plan.”

The deal was finalized in two stages in the summer of 1997. The village board signed off on the land use and zoning agreement on July 24, and agreement by the Del Webb board of directors followed about a month later. Excavation of the site began almost immediately, and layout for the more than 5,000 home lots, streets, entrances, and natural wetland areas was well underway by the end of that year.

Schreiner opened the first Del Webb office in the Huntley Outlet Mall. His first two significant tasks were the hiring of Ford, who aggressively and successfully communicated Del Webb to the area, and the recruiting of one of the largest real estate sales staffs in the Chicago area.

(Next installment – groundbreaking, celebrities, a unique 100th birthday party, a fateful merger, the spawning of other Del Webb communities, expansion of clubs and activities, partnerships for golf, dining, and medical care, and more.)

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