The postwar suburbs that sprang up on the prairie were the American Dream - a home, a yard, a garage - packaged and ready for purchase by anyone with a modest down payment.

Before the advance of the suburbs, land around the city was country. It was farmland. It was isolated.

A few developers saw potential. In the late 1940s, Kimball Hill, who until the early 1950s had made a name for himself building homes but not entire communities, started buying land on the fringes of Arlington Heights. He gathered more than 500 acres, much to the amusement of those who saw nothing out there but furrows.

Hill saw rows of affordable starter homes for young families. He also saw demand for those homes.

"My father paid $1,500 an acre for the first two farms he bought. People thought he way overpaid," said David K. Hill, now chairman and CEO of Kimball Hill Homes. Kimball Hill died in 1993 at 83. "Today, we've paid over $150,000 an acre and felt it was OK if we could get the zoning."

Kimball Hill was among the pioneers. In 1950, when he started building homes in the fields west of Arlington Heights, there was no Schaumburg, no Hoffman Estates. Established towns like Arlington Heights and Mount Prospect were an eighth of the size they are today.

On July 21, 1953, Hill broke ground for the first house in what would become Rolling Meadows. Five months later, 436 homes were under construction and 20 families a week were moving in.

When the city incorporated in 1955 there were more than 5,100 people living there. Hill set aside land for parks, industrial and commercial areas, schools and churches.

Four years later, Jack and Sam Hoffman started turning the corn fields they had been buying into the first tracts of housing for the community that would become Hoffman Estates.

"They were the first to install what we now know of as the suburbs," said Barbara Kininmonth, a vice president with Hoffman Homes. "Not just the houses, but schools and churches. They were the original pioneers of communities."

About the same time, established communities like Arlington Heights, Mount Prospect and Palatine started getting in on the suburban boom. Their boundaries began expanding with homes built by Centex, Kennedy Homes and Norwood Builders.

The six-county Chicago area's total population is just over 8 million people. A little more than 2 million, or slightly better than 1 in 4, live in the city of Chicago. At the same time, suburban development in those six counties has gobbled up as much land as 14 Chicagos.

So now, as the suburbs approach middle age, where are they headed? The suburbs' futures are in the hands of their second- and even third-generation residents.

Parents of the baby boomers founded the suburbs. Today the baby boomers themselves and their children are determining what gets built.

David Hill is a good example. he has carried on the family business and today Kimball Hill Homes builds houses across the country.

Homes that once cost between $5 and $10 a square foot to build now cost between $45 and $150 a square foot.

In 1950, the national standard home was a three-bedroom, 1,000 square-foot unit that sold for $9,990. Today, the national standard is 1,900 square feet in a price range 15 or 20 times that amount.

And locally, even though open space is at a premium, the standard home is even larger - 2,700 square feet selling for upwards of $200,000, Hill said.

As subdivisions continue to expand past Elgin, past McHenry and past Gurnee, middle-aged suburbs and inner suburbs are re-examining and, in some cases, reinventing, themselves.

In Rolling Meadows, an old downtown strip mall has been replaced by midrise condominium buildings built by David Hill. In Arlington Heights, 40-ish developer Mark Anderson has led the charge to introduce mixed-use residential and cultural development into the downtown's traditionally retail setting.

"You're just beginning to see significant downtown redevelopment actually going on in places like Arlington Heights and Mount Prospect and even a little in Palatine and Barrington," Hill said.

With few large tracts of land left on which to build subdivisions, developers in middle-aged suburbs are turning their attention to smaller parcels. Hill predicts more dense "infill" developments featuring affordable housing.

Hoffman Homes' Kininmonth said her company has turned from a mammoth subdivision builder into a custom developer of smaller tracts. Hoffman sees a piece of land and rather than simply covering it with homes, it tries to determine what kinds of development - including schools, parks and retail - makes the best use for the surrounding area.

"It can't just be a series of homes," Kininmonth said. "It has to meet the needs of the people."

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