Pricey Developments Locate Near Landfills With Willing Buyers -- Dumps Offer Financial Incentives To Homebuyers

GRAYSLAKE, Ill. - Amid the farmhouses, cornfields and winding roads of rural Lake County, Stuart and Carol Feen have bought a patch of land and are building their dream home.

It will have oak floors, a fireplace and a backyard deck. Within walking distance will be a 22-acre lake, miles of riding trails, a fitness center and even a community garden.

The Feens also feel pretty good about their neighbor: Countryside landfill, a 50-foot mountain of garbage spread over 80 acres, 9 million tons of trash and growing.

"What we were looking for - and we looked for a long time - was something better, something unique. And I think we found that," said Stuart Feen, 47, president of Plastic Bottle Corp. in Libertyville.

"We didn't buy a house next to a landfill. We bought an opportunity, a dream."

The notion that a garbage dump might make a welcome neighbor, particularly for upscale homeowners like the Feens, is taking hold across the country, turning conventional wisdom and, perhaps, common sense on its head, according to environmental experts.

Armed with new technologies they say cut down on dust and noise and reduce the risk of ground-water contamination, landfill operators are bringing people and trash together in pricey developments with such pastoral names as Prairie Crossing, where the Feens will live.

In Northbrook, Ill., buyers are snapping up dozens of homes costing upward of $400,000, all of them next to the now-closed Techny landfill. By this time next year, however, the Techny landfill is scheduled to be topped by a golf course.

No one in government or industry seems to be keeping count of the new housing growing around landfills. But they point to new developments as anecdotal evidence of change.

"I think what we're seeing is the wave of the future," said William Child of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. "Landfills and communities can work together and accept each other and actually benefit from each other."

Of course, it's not simple. Landfill operators are offering homeowners financial incentives, trading potentially millions of dollars in home-value guarantees for the right to build new dumps, expand old ones or keep existing ones running.

They are seeding communities with money, too. Contracts now often call for cities and towns to get a share of landfill revenues, upgraded municipal services or improved roadways - even a new firetruck.

"People are not at the point where they're saying, `Yes, put it in my back yard,' " said Will Flower, spokesman for Oak Brook-based Waste Management Inc. "But as urban sprawl continues and puts people closer to landfills, and as landfills are better operated, people and landfills will be more compatible."

On the crest of this wave is the Countryside landfill, operated by USA Waste Inc. of Dallas and Prairie Crossing. The development, the brainchild of Chicago-area businessman and environmentalist George Ranney Jr., consists of 317 houses on 670 acres across Illinois Highway 137 from Countryside. The Feens plan to move in next year.

USA Waste hopes to expand Countryside and keep it open for up to 20 years before turning its 200 acres into a park. The company is guaranteeing the original Prairie Crossing homeowners their purchase price - from $190,000 to $390,000 - plus an inflation allowance, should they later try to sell their homes and not recoup their investments.

The company also is spending more than $4 million on improvements to the dump and hundreds of thousands of dollars more on a prairie landscape and an open-space-preservation fund, said USA Waste's chairman, Donald Moorehead.

"To be successful in the future, we had to change. We had to deal with odors and everything else," Moorehead said.

When the Feens' home is finished, they will be able to stroll through wooded trails, canoe in their lake and purchase organically grown fruit at the community market.

They also should be able to step outside and gaze at the landfill, which when finished will be one of the highest points on the landscape.

For now, gulls hover over the mounding pile of trash. Trucks - more than 300 of them, six days a week - pull in and out of the dump. As for the smell, Stuart Feen said he and his wife have visited the construction site often but have never smelled it.

Homeowners elsewhere are not quite as happy. When Elaine Turski moved to Naperville in 1976, she was well aware of the landfill in the Greene Valley forest preserve. But the landfill operators, Waste Management, and the DuPage County Forest Preserve Board had promised the landfill would close in 1993 and be turned into a ski hill. Turski still has a copy of the master plan that shows a chalet, ski lifts, even a toboggan trail.

"I thought I was in heaven when I moved here," said Turski, 44.

But, she said, life next to Greene Valley has hardly been heaven. Her friends steer clear of her home because of the smell and the thunder of trucks, hundreds of them every day.

"Landfills aren't good neighbors," Turski said. "And the operators aren't so hot, either."

Stuart Feen is undeterred.

"Everybody creates trash, but nobody wants to live with it," he said. "Well, I don't have any problem disposing of my waste where I live. Somebody's got to."