Daniel Levin had a keen eye for underappreciated property in Chicago and in 50 years as a real estate developer forged new ground in making sometimes-gutsy calls to build large projects in areas of the city that hadn’t attracted much development.
Levin, the founder and longtime chairman of The Habitat Co., left an imprint all around the edges of downtown Chicago, whether through founding the East Bank Club or constructing the massive Presidential Towers complex. He developed nearly 25,000 dwelling units in six states for people at all income levels.
“Dan was an extraordinary trailblazer who dramatically improved the landscape of Chicago,” said Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett, The Habitat Co.’s president and CEO from 2007 until 2009. “Not only did he teach me, and countless others, a tremendous amount about every aspect of the real estate business, but importantly, through the power of his unique example, he taught me how to be a more effective leader, and a better person.”
Levin, 94, died after a brief illness Jan. 11 at his Winnetka home, said his wife of 30 years, former U.S. Ambassador Fay Hartog-Levin.
Born and raised in Detroit, Levin was the son of Rhoda Levin and federal district judge Theodore Levin. He attended Central High School in Detroit and then received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1950. He picked up a law degree from the U. of C. in 1953.
Levin worked as a law clerk for Luther Youngdahl, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., and with his family’s law firm. But after working on an urban renewal project in Detroit, he moved to Chicago to work with high-rise developer and urban renewal pioneer Herb Greenwald, who had worked closely with architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Greenwald died in a 1959 plane crash and Levin struck off on his own, working on modest projects, including some buildings on the North Side and a grocery store and shopping center in Hyde Park, Hartog-Levin said.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Levin started teaming up with contractor James McHugh on a variety of urban renewal projects, including the mixed-use residential and commercial South Commons complex in the South Side Douglas neighborhood and the Noble Square housing development on the Near Northwest Side. What became McHugh-Levin Associates quickly moved on to bigger things including the 52-story Newberry Plaza apartment complex on the Near North Side and the 760-unit Wheaton Center apartment complex in downtown Wheaton on the site of the former Chicago, Aurora & Elgin railroad yards.
In 1971, Levin and McHugh co-founded The Habitat Co., the Chicago-based development and property management company that managed buildings that the duo constructed.
In 1979, after failing to get financing for two towers on River North land formerly owned by the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, he built the East Bank Club, Chicago’s largest private recreational complex, on the 3.26-acre site as his and McHugh’s first major nonresidential project. Built at a cost of $15.5 million, the 406,000-square-foot sports complex contained 10 indoor tennis courts, six outdoor tennis courts, two jogging tracks, two swimming pools, exercise rooms, a golf green and two cocktail bars, along with a heated, 290-car garage.
“What he wanted to provide was a home away from home — someplace where people felt comfortable to meet people,” his wife said.
Levin also viewed the East Bank Club as a bold bet on continued development extending north and west from the city’s core.
“I would be surprised if (this location) doesn’t become a more dramatic conversion than the stuff that’s happening in Printer’s Row and some of the others downtown,” Levin said in a 1979 Tribune interview.
Levin and McHugh’s largest project was the 2,346-unit Presidential Towers complex: four 49-story towers built in a onetime skid row area in the West Loop that had been cleared in 1968. Completed in 1985 and the city’s largest residential development since Arthur Rubloff built Sandburg Village in Old Town in the 1960s, the project was the West Loop’s first major housing development. It eventually helped stimulate development in the West Loop, although in its early years, the complex went into default due to lower-than-expected occupancy.
Levin’s political and family connections — his cousin, Carl, was a U.S. senator from Michigan, and another cousin, Sander, was a member of the U.S. House — sparked concerns that he had received special treatment from federal and local governments, including insured and subsidized loans from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and bargain-priced city urban renewal land.
The Presidential Towers project got a low-interest, $180 million construction loan raised through the sale by the city of tax-exempt bonds — the largest loan of its type ever made by the city — and an insured, low-interest federal mortgage. But Levin dismissed any notion that political clout played a role. He told the Tribune in 1984 that the solution to the financing problem for Presidential Towers that had been caused by soaring interest rates and initially unavailable tax-exempt funding was, “in fact, a unique bipartisan effort at the city, state and federal levels that included the mayor, governor, both of the state’s U.S. senators and Republican as well as Democratic congressmen.”
Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and her family teamed up with Levin as co-investors in Presidential Towers after the project’s default.
“We were partners for decades,” she said. “He always, like one would expect, lived into his commitments, and was always looking out for everyone’s best interests and not just his own. He genuinely, genuinely cared about the best interests of Chicago, and he sometimes took on projects not to put another shekel in his wallet but to help the city.”
Levin told the Tribune in 1996 that his career had been marked by hits and misses, saying that some including Newberry Plaza and Presidential Towers were “not financially successful projects.”
“I don’t lose money on everything,” he told the Tribune. “Sometimes I have a good day. (But) I’m not in it for the profit. I find particular satisfaction in residential developments, being able to work on big pieces of land, getting involved with planning issues. I like urban renewal and changing the character of neighborhoods. Nobody has to take up a collection for me. But I’ve spent millions I’ll never get back, and I have no regrets.”
From 1987 until 2010, the Habitat Co. acted as a court-appointed receiver of the Chicago Housing Authority’s then-bankrupt and vandal-plagued scattered-site public housing program. In a letter to the Tribune in 1999, Levin said he believed that “the issues of ending racial and economic segregation are critical to the city’s long-term health” and noting that Habitat had worked to build in all but two of the predominantly non-Black community areas as defined by court guidelines.
“He has a quote that is kind of our guiding light at Habitat, which is that no project is only an investment in real estate — it’s an investment in the community and the lives of the people who live and work there. And that can be applied to everything,” said Matt Fiascone, Habitat’s current president.
Levin was a longtime trustee for WTTW-Ch. 11 and WFMT-FM radio, and was vice chairman of the Environmental Law and Policy Center. He and his wife were donors to the University of Chicago Law School, and the Levin Reflecting Pool, created during the 2008 renovations of the law school’s Eero Saarinen-designed building and courtyard in Hyde Park, is named for the couple.
A first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Levin is survived by a son, Joshua; two daughters, Judith Deheeger and Elizabeth Bernardaud; 11 grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; a stepdaughter, Alyssa Rapp; and a stepson, Jeffrey Rapp.
Services were private.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.