Last Wednesday on WGN Radio, John Williams and I were talking about “strategic defaults.” That’s the current term for the situation where people walk away from their mortgaged home, figuring that its value has dropped so far that they will never make anything on it. Williams and I both opposed the practice. Here is how some other people feel.
List Price: $1.98 million
Sale Price: $2 million
The Property: A Winnetka mansion that went into foreclosure when its owner, a developer of Chicago condos, reportedly left the country as his business went belly up, is back in the hands of its original builders, who are sprucing it up before putting it…
The tightly organized geometry of the façade of this house in Ukrainian Village tells everything you might want to know about the interior. With an exterior like that, the inside is going to have to be light, crisp, and artfully laid out. And it is…
The beneficiaries of the condo bust now include apartment-hunters in West Rogers Park. Apartments in a classic Chicago building—a massive edifice of salmon-colored brick and limestone on the corner of Morse and Oakley avenues—that was being converted to condos in the waning days…
List Price: $1,050,000
Sale Price: $975,000
The Property: One of five Prairie-style townhouses on a corner in Hyde Park, this home originally belonged to Robert A. Millikan, a University of Chicago physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on electrons and on the photoelectric effect.
List Price: $1.6 million
The Property: Don Erickson, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, designed this 14-room house in Barrington for himself and his family in 1969. “The house was his laboratory,” says his widow, Pat. “He was always doing something new to it.”
By sifting through builders’ projects that went bust in the Chicago suburbs, Ohio-based M/I Homes is hoping to make its name here as a company that successfully picked up where others left off—and handed off the savings to homebuyers.
List Price: $5.075 million
Sale Price: $4.75 million
The Property: In early 2008, a suburban couple paid $4.417 million for a nine-room condominium in a new block of residences at 900 North Michigan (aka the Bloomingdale’s building) that was created on…
Richard Gillman, the former CEO of Republic Windows and Doors, has sold his multimillion-dollar condo at 30 West Oak Street. Gillman’s abrupt closing of Republic’s Goose Island factory in December 2008 led to a workers’ protest that drew national attention. Last September the state’s attorney charged Gillman and…
List Price: $3.449 million
The Property: This four-year-old brick and limestone house in the prized Blaine School district in Lake View takes maximum advantage of its extrawide lot. With a width of 37.5 feet (instead of the standard 25), the lot was able to accommodate an interior floor plan that pushes the stairs off to one side, resulting not only in a four-level box staircase, but also…
