Danny Wirtz and Michael Reinsdorf, heirs to two of Chicago’s most prominent real estate and sports empires, are in a position to propel their family legacies forward. And they have farther to fall if they don’t.
Wirtz and Reinsdorf are taking the lead on their family businesses’ biggest joint project to date: the $7 billion mixed-use megadevelopment around the United Center. The West Side arena is home to the Reinsdorfs’ NBA team, the Chicago Bulls, and the Wirtzes’ NHL team, the Chicago Blackhawks.
To succeed, they’ll need to rebuild their struggling teams under the watchful eyes of massive fanbases, maintain their families’ political clout to secure public funding and win over private investors who have been reluctant to shell out for similar projects. If they pull it off, it will be a Michael Jordan-esque threepeat of business wins.
Both the Reinsdorf family, which also owns the Chicago White Sox, and the Wirtz family made their fortunes in real estate. And that expertise offers an edge in the sports industry, where team owners are ramping up real estate investments to bolster revenues and support franchise performance.
The development, known as the 1901 Project, includes a 6,000-seat music hall, 1,300 hotel rooms, 9,500 apartments — 20 percent of which will be set aside as affordable — retail space and an elaborate park system that includes rooftop greenspaces above parking garages.
But even seasoned real estate players are struggling to launch similar projects in Chicago, and among sports team owners competition for political and monetary support is high as the Chicago Bears and the Reinsdorf’s own White Sox are also pursuing new stadium projects.
“Big projects like this, many of them are beautiful and they look great and none of it ever gets built,” said Andrew Hanson, head of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s department of real estate.
The families declined to be interviewed.
“For decades, the Wirtz and Reinsdorf families have proudly invested in Chicago and its West Side, contributing over $1 billion in private investment to date,” a representative of the development said. “The 1901 Project represents the next chapter in this ongoing commitment.”
Gen next
As preparations are underway for the United Center development to break ground this summer, both the Wirtz and Reinsdorf families are in various stages of implementing succession plans from their patriarchs to the next generation of leaders.
Danny Wirtz took over the Wirtz Corporation in 2023, following his father Rocky Wirtz’s death at 70. The company, founded in 1926 by Rocky’s father, Arthur Wirtz, owns and manages more than 80 residential properties and various commercial buildings in the Chicago area. It also has a hand in several other industries, including banking and alcohol distribution.
Meanwhile, the succession plans among the Reinsdorf family are less clear. Their billionaire patriarch, 88-year-old Jerry Reinsdorf, kicked off his family’s longstanding success in the real estate business by founding investment firm Balcor and later selling it for $100 million. Jerry is still heavily involved in day-to-day operations of the White Sox but he handed over control of the Bulls to his son, Michael, in 2010. As a result, Michael is leading the United Center redevelopment along with Danny Wirtz.
“Big projects like this, many of them are beautiful and they look great and none of it ever gets built.”
As the duo sets off to make their mark on the United Center, they also have separate development endeavors to keep track of within their own respective family companies.
The Wirtz Corporation is in the early stages of an ambitious, decades-long mixed-use redevelopment of a 700-acre, semi-rural property that has been handed down in the family since the 1850s.
At the same time, the Reinsdorfs are pursuing a new stadium site for the White Sox.
The United Center project appears primed to move forward first and is estimated to take 10 to 15 years to complete.
At that point, the new slate of leadership in the Reinsdorf and Wirtz families will either take a victory lap or explain why the project didn’t live up to expectations.
A real estate player’s game
More than a year ago, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban sold his majority stake in his NBA team, the Dallas Mavericks, to avoid the type of situation the Wirtz and Reinsdorf families find themselves in.
Cuban said owning a sports team today is just as much a real estate endeavor as it is an entertainment business and said he doesn’t have the experience required. He sold his majority stake in the Mavericks to Miriam Adelson and Sivan and Patrick Dumont who run hotel and casino group Las Vegas Sands Corp.
“The advantage is in what you can build and where and you need to have somebody who’s really, really good at that,” Cuban said at a press conference at the time of the sale.
Cuban’s observation is backed by data. Sports franchise owners have been relying on revenue from real estate plays and developing entire mixed-use districts around stadiums.
As of last year, there were 43 “sports venue-anchored” mixed-use developments in the U.S. and Canada. That number is expected to nearly double in the coming years with 41 sports-anchored developments under construction or planned, according to research from real estate consulting firm Robert Charles Lesser & Co.
As the Wirtzes’ and Reinsdorfs’ three major teams are all struggling to perform, real estate revenue will become even more important. While the Chicago White Sox’s record-breaking 121 losses in the 2024 season made local and national headlines, the Bulls and the Blackhawks have faced embarrassing strings of losses as well. In seven of the past ten seasons, the Bulls have recorded more losses than wins.
Although a team’s issues can rarely be pinpointed on a single person, some local sports writers are quick to blame the decision-makers at the very top. “Time for Bulls’ front office to stop cowering and show some honesty,” a recent Chicago Sun-Times headline read.
Meanwhile, the Blackhawks are facing their own troubles, breaking a franchise record of 53 losses in the 2023-24 season.
“The Blackhawks are one of the highest-valued franchises in the NHL and to be in that space and be at the bottom of the standings, those two things don’t line up,” said veteran Blackhawks reporter Mario Tirabassi.
But he added that Danny Wirtz may have what it takes to turn the team around.
“I still have faith in the broader scale of where he wants to bring the team and the organization from an on-ice perspective and from a front-office perspective,” he said.
Whether the Reinsdorfs or the Wirtzes can be entirely blamed for their teams’ failures is debatable. But drawing new fans in and compensating for losing records make the success of the United Center redevelopment even more important to their family legacies.
Bulls, Blackhawks and Bears, oh my
When the United Center plans were revealed last year, the Wirtz and Reinsdorf families emphasized that the development would be primarily funded privately.
That commitment has helped fight the growing perception that arenas often fail to create an economic impact that is proportional to the amount of taxpayer dollars used to subsidize their development.
“If we’re being truthful, teams and leagues and owners and ownership groups, typically, if they can, will fleece the public for public funding,” said Brice Clinton, a professor of sports administration at Northwestern University. “So at least there’s some good will in that the infrastructure upgrades are a win-win.”
That’s also why mixed-use developments are often more palatable to area residents and politicians than arena or stadium plans alone, he added.
It’s unclear how much of their own fortunes each family will contribute to the project but the joint venture has been buying up parking lots surrounding the arena for years. As of mid-January, the families had already spent more than $80 million on land acquisitions.
For the project to come to full fruition, some public funding will be necessary, the arena’s COO Terry Savarise said at a Jan. 16 Chicago Plan Commission meeting.
That could take the form of support for the affordable housing portion of the project, public infrastructure such as a new CTA Pink Line train stop and public parks proposed for the site.
After a slew of mostly positive public comments, local officials sounded open to providing support for some aspects of the redevelopment plan. Nailing down those details will be a crucial task as the project moves through several phases of development.
And public opinion will drive that conversation.
The local goodwill, rare for a project of this size, was built over decades. It began when the families won over West Siders with their proposal to build the United Center in the 1980s shortly after the Chicago Bears failed to build a stadium in the same area.
They maintained those local relationships via partnerships with local contractors, outreach to a nearby community college and jobs training for residents of public housing complexes in the area.
“I was elected in ‘95 and they already had a thing going with the community,” Alderman Walter Burnett Jr. said of the Wirtz and Reinsdorf families. Burnett represents the ward where the United Center is located.
But the United Center plans are moving forward at a competitive time. The Bears, Blackhawks, Bulls and White Sox all currently have stadium or arena plans in flux and in need of public support.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson floated the idea of granting tax breaks to a White Sox stadium proposal in the form of Tax Increment Financing, or TIF dollars. But at the same time, he’s leading an initiative to wind down the city’s use of TIF and repurpose those funds for a citywide bond program.
With the future of TIF funding on shaky ground, the Reinsdorfs found even less luck at the statehouse.
“I think the pictures that we’ve all seen … are all terrific but again, that’s not enough to make it a priority in my view for Springfield,” Governor J.B. Pritzker said last year.
For similar reasons, leaders of the Chicago Bears, who do not have ties to the Reinsdorf and Wirtz families, have been engaged in a public back-and-forth with the cities of Chicago and Arlington Heights over plans to either revamp their lakefront stadium at Soldier Field, build a new one nearby on the South Side or relocate to the northwest suburb.
While the possible relocation of the White Sox will prove a test for new leadership in the Reinsdorf family, the competition for public dollars among the city’s major league sports teams could present a challenge to their shared vision with the Wirtz family for the United Center.
Megaproject, mega problems
If the United Center redevelopment progresses as planned, it will buck the trend of other recent megadevelopments in Chicago that have been proposed but ultimately stalled out.
In Lincoln Park, Sterling Bay built a life science office before postponing a surrounding mixed use development. At The 78 in the South Loop, Related Midwest has proposed multiple iterations of plans for the 62-acre site since 2016, including the potential White Sox Stadium, but has yet to deliver a single one.
And in Bronzeville, a public-private partnership between the city of Chicago and a coalition of developers led by Scott Goodman’s Farpoint advanced a $3.8 billion proposal for a retail and life sciences campus. A groundbreaking ceremony was held in 2023 but vertical construction work has yet to start.
Finding outside investors to bolster the family’s investments won’t be simple but name recognition can’t hurt.
“It’s a tougher financing market to get deals together,” said commercial broker Brad Feldman of Chicago-based Interra Realty. “But if you have a strong sponsor like the Reinsdorf and the Wirtz families … they have the wherewithal to pull something like this off.”
While the United Center project has so far enjoyed significant local political support, outside investors have been wary of Chicago politics. Lending and investing is hardly at a standstill but some trends have emerged showing more outside interest in the suburbs.
Add on rising construction costs and the possibility of foreign tariffs proposed by President Donald Trump and the real costs of the $7 billion, 10- to 15-year phased development could balloon.
“I don’t think anyone would build this project and say, ‘no matter what happens in the next 15 years, we’re building all of this,’” Hanson, of University of Illinois at Chicago, said. “It’s just a timing of construction thing…They’re thinking, ‘what are the biggest pieces of this that we see as the most viable? Let’s build those first.’”