Business View Magazine | March 2020

374 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MARCH 2020 ILLINOIS Growing to Greatness T he Village of Hoffman Estates, Illinois is a much sought- after northwest suburb of Chicago, located primarily in Cook County. In the early 1950s, the area where Hoffman Estates now sits was a rural farming community, with Elgin as the area’s major economic center. 1954 proved to be a pivotal year, when a local farmer sold his 160-acre farm to Sam and Jack Hoffman, owners of the Father and Son Construction Company, who had plans to establish a subdivision in Cook County. This land, now known as Parcel A, was located east of Roselle Road between Golf and Higgins Roads. The first homeowners began to move into the new subdivision in late 1955, purchasing homes on half- acre lots for $14,500. On September 19, 1959, residents voted to incorporate as the Village of Hoffman Estates. The new Village had a population of about 8,000, and the incorporated area was just under three square miles. Fast forward to 2020. Today, James H. Norris, Village Manager of Hoffman Estates, reports, “We’re a community of approximately 53,000 diverse residents, looking forward to the 2020 census. We’re a northwest suburban Chicago community that’s about 22 square miles in size. We have around 5,000 acres of Cook County forest preserves in our community, which means that a significant amount of those 22 square miles is green space that will never be developed for anything other than recreation and open space. The result is a great quality of life for residents of Hoffman Estates, as well as a number of distinct business nodes that offer broad choices for companies looking to locate in the northwest suburbs.” Hoffman Estates started as a bedroom community, but that changed in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when Sears relocated their headquarters from the Sears Tower in downtown Chicago to a new 800-acre business park in the Hoffman Estates. The area, TES,