Hometown Celebrates 60 Years of 'Modern Day Suburbia'

At a time when 16 million GIs were returning home from World War II and picking up their suspended lives after answering the call of duty, the United States was in dire need of housing.

Around the country, developers like Levitt and Sons that built the nation’s first planned suburban community in a former potato field in New York, were taking advantage of the availability of cheap land and the need for housing that could be mass produced quickly and at low cost.

In November of 1949, FHA officials cut the ribbon on the first home to be completed in the $16 million Hometown suburban housing project on 300 acres of prairie bounded by Crawford (Pulaski), 91st Street, Cicero and 87th Street.

Plans called for 1,510 single-family duplex units and 13 two-story apartment buildings containing 90 rental apartments in what was then the Chicago-area’s largest planned suburban community in the postwar era. The homes were tailor-made for returning World War II and Korean veterans “who didn’t have a heap of money.”

Located 11 miles southwest of the Loop, chances were if you driving down Southwest Highway in 1950 you may have spotted a billboard that read: “Hometown: $8,500, 2 Bedroom Ranch Houses, J.E. Merrion & Co.” The price included sewer, water, paving, sidewalks, land and landscaping.

According to historic documents available at the Hometown Library, veterans were able to purchase a duplex unit with a down payment of $200 and a monthly mortgage of $58.68. If you were not a veteran, you needed a down payment of $1,400 and your monthly mortgage payments were $52.34.

Within a few short years, the less than one-square-mile planned community had built it’s own parish and grammar school, and opened the Hometown Plaza shopping center on Southwest Highway in 1951.

The community had become so successful and self-sustaining that on June 6,1953, it was incorporated as a city.Then-Cook County Clerk Richard J. Daley swore in Hometown's first city council.

This Saturday, Hometown will celebrate its 60th anniversary as a "model for modern-day suburbia" with a parade featuring 12 original homeowners as the Grand Marshall.

Like Mayor Kevin Casey, whose father purchased the third home built in Hometown, many of the families living in the suburb today are second- and third-generation descendants of the original GI homeowners.

“I was born and raised in Hometown and I married a girl who was born and raised in Hometown,” Casey said. “I’m about as Hometown as you can get.”

Looking at Hometown in 2013, one gets a sense of its early roots as a community that sprang from the wide-open prairie. The one-room library housed in the municipal center and the city’s narrow physical boundaries are more reminiscent of rural America than an inner suburb planted next to Chicago. 

The librarians still use typewriters to type up cards to document the newest acquisitions in the library’s card catalog. An ancient adding machine with a pull handle inventories money collected for water bills, city vehicle stickers and the like.

Casey, 58, describes the city’s residents as resilient, tough and with a chip on their shoulder when mistaken for a subdivision of neighboring Oak Lawn, Evergreen Park or Mt. Greenwood.

When an EF-4 tornado tore through the city in 1967, those residents not lucky enough to have crawl spaces in the basement-less slab homes hid in closets or bathrooms or lay flat on floors in hallways, praying the rosary.

The tornado that killed 37 people in Oak Lawn also nearly wiped out three blocks in Hometown. The close-knit community of tough Southsiders who took care of their own, banded together and helped their neighbors rebuild.

“As youths we jumped on a dump truck and helped clean up,” Casey said. “Then you went to the VFW where they gave you lunch. You’d go back out and clean up some more.”

Like much of the mass produced housing stock of the 1950s, the duplexes were built so they could be easily modified. Extra bedrooms and rec rooms were added as families grew.

Hometown, population 4,039, is served by a mayor, clerk, treasurer and ten aldermen, two per each ward. In half-seriousness, Casey says there is an alderman for each of the city’s roughly ten blocks.

The community also has its own fire and police departments. Casey says there is no other city like it in America.

“When my dad bought his house, my grandfather told him it wouldn’t last five years,” Casey said. “We’re still going strong. There is still a need for affordable starter homes."