The Ten-Dollar Deal Behind Huntley's Fullest Downtown Season Yet
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
The Village of Huntley sold its own former Village Hall for ten dollars. Not ten thousand. Ten. The buyer, a Wauconda developer called True North Properties, then put roughly $2.5 million into gutting and rebuilding it. That gap between what the village charged and what the developer spent is the whole story of why downtown Huntley feels different walking into this fall than it did two Falls Fests ago.
If you've lived here a while, you already know the shorthand version: Café Roma took over the old Village Hall, Shops on Main opened up the corner at Route 47 and Main, and the usual September lineup is back on the calendar. What most residents haven't connected is that these aren't separate, coincidental updates. They're the visible result of a deliberate financing push the village has been running for three years, and this is the first fall where all of it is actually running at once.
The old Village Hall at 11704 Coral Street sat mostly administrative for years before the Huntley Area Chamber of Commerce moved in and eventually moved out to the Union Special building. In February 2024, the village board sold the building to True North Properties for $10 and paired the sale with a redevelopment agreement that did the real work. The developer would get 100 percent of the new incremental property tax revenue, an estimated $30,000 a year, for the first five years. It would also qualify for up to $150,000 in TIF reimbursement, split so that half arrived at permit issuance and the other half only if the restaurant opened by September 30, 2025. Miss that date and the penalty ran $100 a day.
That structure explains the pace of the project. A building that generated zero property tax as village-owned space needed to become something that generated sales tax, video gaming revenue, and eventually full property tax, and the incentives were built to make that happen on a clock rather than whenever a contractor got around to it.
Trustee Ronda Goldman put the reasoning plainly when the board reviewed renderings in 2023.
"We need this on the Square."
That single line, reported by Shaw Local at the time, is the closest thing downtown Huntley has to a mission statement for the last three years of redevelopment.
The finished project kept the two-story historic front of the old hall intact and demolished the single-story rear addition, replacing it with new construction that brings the total footprint to roughly 5,115 square feet with a 1,890-square-foot basement. The addition allows for up to 217 seats, which is a lot of restaurant for a building that used to hold council meetings. It also squeezed the walkway between the new construction and the neighboring BBQ King Smokehouse down to about five feet, and it added a public restroom on the exterior specifically so it can serve the crowds at downtown events without anyone needing to duck into a restaurant to use the facilities.
The tenant is Café Roma, a second location for the Elgin restaurant owned by chef Frank Redisi, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. The Elgin location built its reputation slowly, opening as a lunch-only spot before expanding into full dinner service and catering. This year's village welcome message from Village President Tim Hoeft lists "the addition of Café Roma to downtown" among the projects the village now counts as finished, alongside Shops on Main and a new expanded parking lot west of D.C. Cobb's.
That's worth sitting with for a second. A building that was tax-exempt, publicly owned, and generating nothing for the village's tax base is now a full-service restaurant with a liquor license, a banquet capacity, and public restrooms for the Square. That's not a restaurant opening. That's a fiscal strategy that happens to come with dinner service.
A block away, the retail side of the same push has quietly graduated. Shops on Main, the village's retail incubator at 11879 Main Street, launched its first cohort in November 2025 as a holiday-only test run funded in part by a $975,000 grant tied to federal small business funding. That first season ran weekends through December 20 and then closed for winter.
This year is different. On May 1, 2026, Shops on Main opened for its first full operating season, running Friday through Sunday all the way to December 20. That means the ten storefronts, which include Bare Rags for curated apparel, Huntley Art Hub Gallery for local fine art, Sew Mine for fabric and sewing kits, The Chef Shoppe for spice blends and kitchen goods, and Pots and Pies for baked goods, will still be open when Fall Fest crowds show up in September and when trick-or-treaters make their way around the Square in October. Last year, the shops weren't there yet for either event. This year, they are, and that's the actual difference a longtime resident should notice: it's not that new stores exist, it's that they're finally open on the same weekends as everything else downtown already draws people for.
Add in the D.C. Cobb's expansion project, which pairs a roughly 5,000-square-foot restaurant space with 18 apartment units above it and more parking behind it, and the pattern is clear. This isn't one lucky restaurant deal. It's three or four separate projects, financed through overlapping incentive tools, timed to land in the same two or three years.
Here's what that build-out means for how the next ten weeks will actually feel on the Square, based on the village's own event listings:
None of these events are new. The Fall Fest alone has run for more than 21 years. What's new is what's open between them. A family walking the 5K in September or trick-or-treating in October now passes a full Italian restaurant with public restrooms and ten small shops that weren't there last fall, instead of a shuttered municipal building and an empty storefront.
None of it works if there's nowhere to leave the car. The village has put roughly $5 million into downtown parking over the past several years, bringing the total to nearly 650 spaces. Village Manager Dave Johnson has noted that a structured parking garage would run about $50,000 per spot compared to $9,000 to $10,000 for surface lots, which is why the expansion has stayed at ground level rather than going vertical. It's not the most exciting line item in the downtown story, but it's the reason the Café Roma crowd and the Fall Fest crowd and the Shops on Main crowd can all show up on the same Saturday without turning Coral Street into a standstill.
The through-line here isn't that Huntley got a new restaurant and some new shops. It's that the village spent a $10 building sale, a TIF agreement with a penalty clause, a $975,000 federal grant, and a $5 million parking investment turning a Square that used to come alive three or four weekends a year into one that's supposed to hold up every weekend from May through December. This fall is the first real test of whether that bet pays off, and residents will feel the answer before anyone writes the follow-up story.
If watching your neighborhood's downtown fill back in has you wondering what it's doing to home values on your particular block, that's a different conversation, and it's one the Currey Koertgen Team has with Huntley homeowners regularly. How Much Is Your Home Worth?
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