If your work takes you to Chicago’s northwest suburbs and you’re considering a move further out you might be interested in West Elgin.
West Elgin’s not an actual municipality. It’s a name given to a section of Elgin to set it apart from the city that’s known to many as the foreclosure capital of the northwest suburbs. The West Elgin moniker is not, obviously, designed to trade on Elgin’s cachet – it doesn’t have any – but to say it’s not like the more familiar and older parts of Elgin. West Elgin children, for example, attend Burlington District 301‘s above-average schools rather than Elgin District U-46‘s typically subpar ones. The housing stock in West Elgin is almost entirely new construction.
My tour guide is John Hall Jr, a custom home builder who owns John Hall Homes with his brother Joshua. In parts six through eight of the videos on this YouTube playlist we stop at the lavish owners club and pool complex at one of the developments where John is building, then take a detailed look at one of his custom homes. The first four parts focus on homes and lifestyles in Saint Charles, the community where John lives and also builds.