By Stan Maddux   

For the first time in more than 40 years, there will be no Christmas at a northwest Indiana family tree farm, where the first of 750 upscale homes could start going up this spring. Luers Tree Farm in Schererville was purchased by Drapac Capital Partners, an Australian real estate investment firm headquartered in the U.S. at Atlanta.

Under the agreement, the tree farm could have continued until development began. Doug Luers says he and his four siblings are getting up in years and felt it was time to move on, especially with the hard work involved in running the operation.

“We’re all getting older, and time marches on. It’s got to happen sometime, I guess,” he says.

In 1976, his father, Arnold “Bud” Luers, planted the first tree on the farm that started with just a few plots before the population of the northwest Indiana community shot up to more than 30,000 presently.

He went from selling Christmas trees out of an old RV trailer to having 50 acres with six varieties of trees.

Later came Sweetie’s Christmas Shoppe with its homemade pastries, Christmas cookies and other goodies, along with Santa Claus visiting after Thanksgiving. Bud Luers was 92 when he died in 2011.

Development coming
Max Cookes, a spokesman for Drapac Capital Partners, says a time frame for breaking ground has not been decided. On paper, the subdivision has room for 750 homes. How many get built and how long it takes depends on factors like the economy, he says. Homes will be priced from $350,000.

Plans include a farmers market, community garden, walking trails and athletic facilities. Recently, the town finished annexing the entire development site to allow for the extension of water and sewer lines.

The farm was already in the town’s corporate boundaries, but much of the 700 acres of surrounding land was not. Annexation followed rezoning of the entire parcel from agriculture to residential planned use development, says Schererville Town Manager Robert Volkmann.

Cookes says approval of the final drawings and construction permits are all that’s needed before breaking ground. He doesn’t anticipate any last-minute snags because of how cooperative town officials have been in a process that began more than a year ago.

“They were very easy to deal with and understood what we were trying to achieve,” Cookes says. His firm was drawn to the site because areas of northwest Indiana like Schererville, Crown Point, Valparaiso and St. John ranked high in market studies for being able to support new upscale housing.

“We looked at everything from a development and building perspective and thought that it made a lot of sense as a potential home market to focus on,” Cookes says.

A half-century ago, farms were a common site in Schererville. Some people wonder if any of the farms still there will be around a generation from now because of people continuing to relocate from Illinois to take advantage of Indiana’s lower property taxes.

Priced out of farming
Volkmann, a 40-year Schererville resident, says much of the development has been on land passed down to children of farmers selling the property that only a developer with deep pockets can afford.

“Those kids have gone to school, and they’re all in different careers, and the property is too expensive for somebody who wants to farm,” he says.

One concern about the new subdivision is adding traffic to already heavily traveled U.S. 30, U.S. 41 and some of the major connecting arteries, which were once lightly traveled country roads. Volkmann says the increase will be gradual because it will take 10 years or longer for all homes to go up.

He also says traffic flows pretty well except during afternoon rush hour or when a bad crash on Interstate 94 several miles to the north causes detouring traffic to spill onto local highways. Many new occupants will likely be older families with fewer driving-age children still at home.

Like with any new development, though, Volkmann says studies will be done to determine how to successfully absorb the extra traffic into the local road system.

“It’ll cause us to do some improvements, but it’s not something we’re not accustomed to,” Volkmann says.

Doug Luers, 56, describes the decision to get out of tree farming as “bittersweet” but one that had to be made considering the hard work involved and passage of time. After graduating from Purdue University, he left the farm to work as a production supervisor at Indiana Packers in Delphi. He was at Hormel Foods in Minnesota before he returned to the farm 20 years ago.

“We got tired of doing it. I’m worn out. I’m ready to retire,” he says.

Maddux writes from northwest Indiana.