Posted on Tue, Oct. 05, 2004

Housing boom hits O'Fallon
But rapid growth has some nervous
BY PATRICK J. POWERS
ppowers@bnd.com

Dried stumps of corn stalks harvested long ago surround the quiet intersection at Milburn School and Old Collinsville roads. But wait a couple of months and that corner will never look the same.

The fertile farm fields have been disappearing quickly, giving way to one of the area's largest housing explosions. There are 1,400 homes already in the works in northwest O'Fallon, with another 190 under construction just across the city limits in Fairview Heights.

"I don't like to see it," said Dennis Auth, who's lived on about 17 acres at 549 Milburn School Road for the past 27 years. "It's like we're growing houses and not crops out here."

O'Fallon city leaders expect as many as 10,000 homes could be built in the next 20 years in that part of town. There's no telling how many more could be built just across Old Collinsville Road in the northeast corner of Fairview Heights.

If each additional home brought the average family of 2.5 people to O'Fallon, the city's population would swell 16 percent from its 2000 Census figure of 21,190. That doesn't include people who move elsewhere into the city.

"I think it's just going to overpower everyone," said Ward 5 Alderman Dennis Renner, who represents a portion of the area under development. "The only place I've seen anything like this is in the suburbs of Chicago. It's nuts and it's still going."

The deluge of new homes started more than two years ago, and it started with a sewer. The Caseyville Township sewer district spent $575,000 to expand its service north of Interstate 64. When it was completed in August 2002, the developers weren't far behind.

"If there wasn't any sewer out there, this land would probably still not be developing," said Ted Shekell, O'Fallon's director of planning and zoning. "It's tapped into what I would consider a suppressed demand."

A few houses existed along the sides of Old Collinsville and Milburn School roads before the sewer, but most of the land was undeveloped farm fields. Large-scale developments were something the people in nearby Fairview Heights worried about.

But where the sewer goes, so go the houses.

"It's just the way O'Fallon's going to develop," said Mark Halloran, the president of Halloran Construction. His company is developing the 157-home Milburn Estates on 51 acres along Milburn School Road. "Sewers basically dictate your development. Where else are you going to go in O'Fallon?"

There isn't much undeveloped land that is as close to St. Louis, accessible to the interstate and still situated within the O'Fallon school districts. "It's one of the few places you can go in the Midwest in the shadow of a regional mall where you have farm fields," Shekell said.

There are seven neighborhoods, each with plans to construct at least 65 homes, that already have gained at least initial approval from city leaders. The 412-home Savannah Hills, 76-home Windermere Ridge and 65-home Bluffs at Ogles Creek already have homes rising.

"It's getting closer and closer to me," said Dorothy Barnhill, a resident of 545 Milburn School Road since 1984. "It was just great living out here until it started getting so crowded."

And that's what has some city leaders growing a little nervous.

"What really worries me is there's just no way those roads are going to handle all the traffic," Renner said.

City leaders earlier this year hired transportation consultants -- HDR Inc. of Omaha, Neb., and St. Louis-based Crawford, Bunte, Brammeier -- to examine potential traffic patterns in the northwest part of town.

The group made a series of recommendations to the city, namely to build additional thoroughfares that could accommodate the expected growth. The only thing they left out was determining who might pay for these infrastructure improvements.

O'Fallon is also looking at expanding to the north on 7,500 acres that push well into Madison County along the proposed Gateway Connector highway corridor. O'Fallon is currently looking at expanding sewers into that area, but Troy leaders want to limit O'Fallon's growth into what they consider to be their back yard.

The Gateway Connector is expected to connect Columbia to Troy, in part using Illinois 158 to form an outer beltway. It is expected to generate significant growth in rural areas.