City officials said they soon could be closing a deal to buy land with a $2 million grant that would build workforce housing in Jacksonville.

“When you ask an employer what’s some of the weaknesses that we have, it’s workforce,” Mayor Andy Ezard said. “What is another weakness? Housing. A lot of towns are in the same boat.”

He said the city is hoping the grant from the Illinois Department of Economic Opportunity covers the cost of the land.

The property the city is looking to buy is south of West Morton Avenue and west of Massey Lane. The workforce housing would look essentially like an extension of the Western Knolls subdivision. Jacksonville is in the process of buying the land, which it would then sell to a developer who is interested in housing development.

After the City Council meeting Monday, Ezard said the landowner and the city are getting closer to finalizing a deal. He excepts it to be closed by the end of summer. 

“We’re letting (the land owner) continue to do his normal thing until the state’s ready,” Ezard said. “And when the state’s ready, we’re ready, and then we close.”

One of the things the city is waiting for is what parameters the state needs Jacksonville to have in its request for proposals to developers, according to Ezard. Gov. JB Pritzker announced the funding award when he visited the city in April 2025. 

Illinois College engineering students created a presentation about what the neighborhood could look like. The weather prevented them from attending, but their professor, Charles Riggs, presented on their behalf Monday. The presentation, which included mockups of pickleball courts and a community pool, are not final. It was a chance for students to design what a real company could do once the city has the land and finds a developer.

“You’d want to get a developer that would be really interested in trying to promote this area to sell his houses, or their houses, and they can promote the area by having things in this … development that (potential residents) can’t get anywhere else,” Riggs said.

Ezard said the housing would support Jacksonville regardless of the fact that there aren’t as many major industries in town as there were in the past, which he referred to as “smoke stacks.”

“The small businesses are doing a heck of a job, and we’ve got to take care of them,” Ezard said. “By adding more population, it gets us more small business and maybe that potential smoke stack, and that’s what we do every day to try to make it more attractive for that to happen.”