The Neighborhood That Never Happened Behind Forest Street

Drive east on Forest Street past Oak Manor Drive and the houses on the south side give way to woods. They run south almost to Francis Street and east nearly to Maple Street, about 38 acres of trees and wet ground in the middle of town, a block from the Locust School campus and within a third of a mile of two more schools. Most people in Marengo have driven past it a thousand times without a second thought.

Those woods have a paper trail. Marengo Weekly spent time this month in county land records, state corporate filings, assessment data and real estate listing records to piece it together. The short version: the city approved a neighborhood of duplexes and houses there by 2007 that was never built, the land spent a decade owned by a bank, a Cary real estate developer bought it from that bank in 2022 for $400,000, and it is now under contract to an unnamed buyer after being marketed at $1.86 million, with materials pitching senior housing and apartments.

Nothing about a sale is final until a deed records. But the story of this land is worth telling now, because the next chapter, whatever it is, will run through public hearings at City Hall.

The Plan: 54 Duplexes and 24 Houses

In December 2006, a company called Four Seasons of Marengo LLC bought the land from a local family trust for $1,320,000, according to the deed recorded with the McHenry County Recorder. The same day, the company signed a $2,132,000 mortgage with First National Bank of Marengo. State corporate records show the LLC had been formed in April 2005 and list a single manager, Michael Reschke, at a Woodstock address.

The project had a name, Four Seasons, and an approved plan: 54 duplexes and 24 single-family home sites, according to marketing materials that still circulate with the property today. The city's paperwork backs up that a project was approved. In December 2007 the city recorded an ordinance establishing Special Service Area Number 3 over the land, a taxing mechanism cities typically attach to new subdivisions as a backup funding source. A condominium association for the project was incorporated in early 2008. The city's current zoning map still carries a variance or special use marker on the parcel, the cartographic residue of whatever was granted.

Then the housing market collapsed. The timing could hardly have been worse: in September 2008, the same month Lehman Brothers failed, the project refinanced into a $1.9 million mortgage with Home State Bank. Not one home was ever built.

In December 2012, Four Seasons of Marengo deeded the land to Home State Bank for ten dollars, the form a deed in lieu of foreclosure typically takes. State records list the company as involuntarily dissolved. The condominium association that never had a condo to govern is dissolved too. The only physical trace the project ever left is on paper.

The Bank Decade

Home State Bank owned the land for almost ten years and spent much of that time trying to sell it. Listing records show the bank asked $640,000 in 2018, then $475,000 in 2020, then $425,000 in 2021. A deal reached contract in December 2018 and listing records even marked it closed the following month at $517,500, but county land records show no deed, and the bank still owned the land when it listed again in 2020.

In September 2022 the bank finally sold, for $400,000, to Marengo Partners LLC, a company formed three weeks before the closing. Its sole manager, per state filings, is John Green of Cary, a real estate developer who is president of Lynnwood Development Corp.

It is worth being clear about what the record shows here: the land had been publicly listed, at falling prices, for most of the four years before the sale. Green's company paid roughly what the bank had last asked and did it with cash; no mortgage appears in the county records.

The Relisting

What happened next happened fast. Within a week of closing, listing records show, the property was back on the market at $2,221,020, more than five times what Marengo Partners paid.

No buyer emerged at that number, and the asking price has moved in wide swings since: down to $1.17 million in late 2022, up to $1.86 million in 2024, down to $1.2 million in 2025, and back up to $1.86 million this past February. Along the way the owner did the quiet work of getting land ready to sell. A land-planning firm produced a fresh concept plan in January 2025 showing 62 single-family lots, with about half the site set aside for stormwater detention, a park and open space, a reflection of the wetlands and woods on the property. A second concept in the same marketing package shows townhomes plus about four acres of apartments. That June, a corrective deed added a 0.06-acre sliver of the land that the 2022 deed, and the bank's own 2012 deed before it, had left out.

The listing is written for developers, not for a family shopping for a lot. Held by Blue Chip Commercial Real Estate of Crystal Lake, it pitches a "38 Acres Residential Development Site," notes the prior approval for 54 duplexes and 24 houses, offers "Complete Project Plans" including final engineering, and says the "City of Marengo Will Support Alternative Uses & Density," naming senior housing, assisted living and apartments as the examples.

In mid-May of this year, listing records show, the property went under contract. The asking price at the time was $1,860,000. The buyer has not been named in any public record yet, and the actual sale price will not be known unless and until a deed records. Contracts on land like this can and do fall apart; this land's own history proves it.

Marengo Weekly sent written questions to the listing brokers on August 26, two of them meant for the owner, and asked for answers by September 11. None came by that date. We will add whatever the brokers or the owner send.

What the City's Own Plan Says

The listing's claim that the city would support denser housing here is not sourced in the listing itself. But it has a plausible public basis: Marengo's comprehensive plan.

The plan the council adopted in April 2025 encourages, in its residential chapter, "age-targeted residential developments, including senior living communities and assisted living facilities... near existing assisted living along Maple Street." The existing senior care anchor nearby is Florence Nursing Home on East Grant Highway, a block to the north. The plan's future land use map paints the site plain residential, and its action items push infill development inside city limits generally.

A comprehensive plan is a policy document, not a zoning decision. The zoning map is blunter: the land is zoned R-1, single-family residential. Whatever approvals existed in 2007 did not leave a higher-density zoning district behind. That means duplexes, townhomes, apartments or senior housing on this land would require a rezoning or planned development approval, with published legal notice, a public hearing before the Planning and Zoning Commission, and a city council vote.

In other words: if the pending sale closes and the buyer wants what the marketing promises, the whole question comes to City Hall, in public.

There is one more piece of unfinished 2007 business. Special Service Area Number 3, the taxing mechanism recorded over the land for the dead project, has never levied a tax. It is still listed on the land's current tax bills as a taxing body, at a rate of zero, and no council action concerning it appears in three years of council packets. It simply sits on the title, almost two decades on, waiting for someone to deal with it.

Why It Matters

Marengo is building homes right now, but all of it is the finishing of subdivisions laid out long ago. Brookside Meadows, which stalled in the same crash that killed Four Seasons, was finished out by M/I Homes starting in 2022 and has since sold out. Deerpass Meadows, along Route 176 on the east side, has been filling in with duplexes, single-family homes and townhomes since about 2020. Neither is a neighborhood started from open ground, which is part of what makes the woods behind Forest Street worth watching. The comprehensive plan projects the city will keep growing and says more housing variety is needed to serve it.

There is also a plain dollars answer to why empty land in the middle of town matters. The entire 38-acre tract generated $16,764 in property taxes this year as vacant land, with a bit over half of every dollar going to the two school districts whose campuses lie a few blocks east of it. For scale: one of the new M/I houses at Brookside Meadows, which sold in January 2025 for about $423,000, was billed $9,302 in property taxes this year. Two houses like that pay more than the whole tract does. Whatever eventually gets built here, and whatever it costs the city to serve, the gap between what empty land pays and what rooftops pay is a large part of why the comprehensive plan keeps talking about infill.

Thirty-eight buildable-ish acres inside city limits, a short walk from three schools, with municipal water and sewer available according to the listing, is one of the few places that growth could physically go. The county is rebuilding Maple Street itself this summer, with federal surface transportation money covering most of the cost. Whether what eventually gets proposed for the site is single-family lots, senior apartments, or nothing at all is not knowable today, and this article makes no prediction.

What is knowable is the pattern: this land has broken every plan anyone has made for it since 2006. The people of Marengo will get a say in the next one. Marengo Weekly will report the deed when it records, and the petition if one is filed.

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Marengo Weekly reviewed deeds, mortgages and ordinances in the McHenry County Recorder's index, assessment and tax records for the five parcels, Illinois Secretary of State corporate filings, MLS listing histories distributed through public real estate portals, the City of Marengo's zoning map (revised February 2025) and 2025 comprehensive plan, city council packets from 2023 to 2026, and the property's current marketing materials. Documents cited are on file.