With the go-go state of the real estate market in the earlier 2000s, it seemed like a no-brainer. To ease the worries around Barrie Park while crews dug contaminants out of the soil, Oak Park Village Hall would buy up properties nearby and later sell them for a profit.
But then, a little thing called the Great Recession happened, and the real estate market crashed. Village hall recently sold the last of six homes it bought around Barrie Park and ended up losing $360,095, or 22.5 percent of the money originally invested.
Former village trustee Galen Gockel supported the program at the time, and he said it would have been difficult for Oak Park to foresee the troubles in the real estate market.
“There was never, in anybody’s mind, a doubt that we would be able to recoup the costs,” he said.
Between 1893 and 1931, a manufactured gas plant operated on the site of Barrie Park, located on the 1000 block of South Lombard, leaving coal-tar contaminants in the soil. Remediation of the park started in August 2001 under the coordinated efforts of the park district, Village of Oak Park, ComEd and Nicor.
Closed to the public since January 1999, the park finally reopened in September 2005 with the first Barrie Fest — an annual neighborhood celebration at the park that features games, live entertainment and food.
During the long voyage to the unveiling, Oak Park instituted two programs in 2004 to help ease the worries of people living close to the park. The Barrie Park Reinvestment Program doled out up to $30,000 in loans and grants to people living around the park (half of the grants, or up to $7,500, were paid by ComEd). The loans were intended to help residents invest in their homes, improve the housing stock and return “vibrancy to the Barrie Park neighborhood,” according to the program’s guidelines.
Of 101 properties eligible for the loan program, 94 homeowners took advantage, according to the village. Residents only needed to repay the loans if they sold their homes, which has happened 15 times. Three of the participating homes have fallen into foreclosure.
Oak Park also instituted the Barrie Park Buyout Program, in which 30 properties near the park were eligible to be purchased by the village. Oak Park would then remediate the properties and put them back on the open market.
All told, only six property owners ended up selling their homes to the village, for a total of about $1.6 million. The last of those homes, at 1041 S. Lombard, formerly occupied by Village Manager Tom Barwin, was sold last month at an $83,222 loss.
While the village took a hit on the deal, the homeowners who originally bought the homes fared much better. In the previous sales, those homeowners paid a total of about $766,400 for the six homes, meaning, overall, they doubled their money in selling to the village.
Oak Park determined the purchase prices back in 2004 and 2005 by conducting two appraisals, then averaging them out, according to Deputy Village Manager Lisa Shelley. Village hall paid for the homes, along with the loan-grant program, by taking on about $3 million in debt.
Village Manager Tom Barwin, who came to in Oak Park in 2006 after the programs were instituted, thinks the village’s investment paid off. After living near Barrie for five years, he believes the neighborhood is strong.
“The collapse of the housing market was something that was unanticipated by virtually the whole country, so that had a little impact on the bottom line,” he said. “But any time you can strengthen a neighborhood in the face of an extreme challenge, it would sure seem to be a success story.”
Trustee Ray Johnson, who voted in favor of the buyout back in 2004, said the sale numbers track with the entire slumping real estate market, and it’s no indictment of the Barrie neighborhood housing values. He thinks Oak Park could have done much worse, compared to other sales around town.
“Frankly, some home values have gone down by a wider percentage,” Johnson said. “Certainly the condo market has taken a heavy toll in value reductions since the height of the market. There is no surprise that there was going to be a hit, but I don’t think it was a fire sale.”
From the ashes of Barrie Park grew a strong community group called the South East Oak Park Community Organization, which hosts Barrie Fest each year. Jim Kelly, one of the founders, said the fact that only six people sold their homes is testament to the area’s attractiveness.
“It’s part of the resilience and the commitment to the neighborhood that motivated us to start SEOPCO,” he said. “People have really deep roots here, and the fact that they could weather this incredible interruption to the neighborhood’s life for almost six years and still decide that this is where they wanted to remain is a really good sign.”