CASEYVILLE • On nearly 500 acres of hilly woods here, an unfinished million-dollar house sits vacant. A lonely, overgrown street leads to the dwelling, and a "NO TRESPASSING" sign warns visitors away. Boards cover some of its broken windows.

This is Forest Lakes, a stalled subdivision in St. Clair County. Its vandalized display home and empty streets are all a developer has to show from an investment of more than $30 million.

Land-use experts call such developments zombie subdivisions - the living dead of real estate.

"I've got to tell you, Forest Lakes is embarrassing," said Kevin Kaufhold, the Belleville lawyer who helped the village of Caseyville negotiate the development agreement with the project's owner, Caseyville Sport Choice LLC.

Jim Holway, a land use expert, said most zombie subdivisions were in Southern and Western states where overheated markets led to the housing bubble's burst in 2007.

"The real estate market was just wild," said Holway, director of Western Lands and Communities, a joint venture of the Sonoran Institute and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. "People couldn't build houses fast enough." In central Arizona - including Phoenix, where Holway lives - as many as a million planned home sites lack buyers, he said.

Though the worst of the housing boom and bust of the mid-2000s largely bypassed the Midwest, the St. Louis area wasn't immune to the market gyrations that left some subdivisions with more weeds than lawns, more empty sidewalks than children on tricycles.

At least a half-dozen zombie subdivisions are spread across the region. They are near the metro fringes, where cheap and plentiful land drew developers eager to take advantage of a strong housing market.

Forest Lakes may be the region's most costly zombie. While Caseyville has received no tax revenue from Forest Lakes, at least it hasn't lost much money on the project, Kaufhold said. The big losers are the banks that bought $31 million in tax-increment financing bonds the village issued for Forest Lakes and spent by Caseyville Sport Choice to build miles of streets and utility lines, he said.

"Had the real estate market not gone bust, who knows how many hundreds of homes would be built there now," he said. "A private sector failure is what this is."

Holway said some abandoned projects would revive on their own once the housing market recovered. Revival could mean redesigning subdivisions with fewer lots. For those left for dead, developers could weigh alternatives to foreclosure, such as using the property as a wildlife conservation area, he said.

A LONELY OUTPOST

About 60 miles west of Caseyville, on the border of St. Charles and Warren counties, is a zombie subdivision in Foristell. McBride & Son, the region's dominant home-builder, set out five years ago to build Liberty, a project on 600 acres, complete with a post office surrounded by more than 1,000 homes.

The project has but one tenant - an operating post office, with a street leading up to it. No homes have been built. John Eilermann, McBride's chief executive, said the company still intended to complete the 1,200-home project, even if it took another five years. "We've stuck with it all the way through," said Eilermann, adding that westward suburban growth would eventually reach Foristell.

He said the post office, built on land McBride sold to another developer, would spur eventual development at Liberty.

"I spent a lot more on the street than what I sold the (post office) ground for," Eilermann said.

Sandy Stokes, Foristell's city administrator, said the town of 500 people cleared snow from the one Liberty street, but otherwise spent no money on the project.

"The benefit is that we got a wonderful post office out of it," she said. "Otherwise, there isn't really anything out there, because the housing market just went flat. It kind of leaves a big, blank slate."

Stokes said she was hopeful that another proposed Foristell housing project - Liberty Valley, by developer Ted Kienstra - also would get built eventually.

Kevin Cottrell, chief economist for Kelsey Cottrell Realty Group of Ballwin, said McBride and other major builders could often carry zombie subdivisions until the market resuscitated them.

"They have enough staying power to finish these things," he said.

McBride, for example, has swooped in and bought empty lots on failed St. Louis County subdivisions taken over by banks, Cottrell said.

Magnolia Trace in Ballwin was among subdivisions McBride bought when the initial builder, Taylor-Morley Homes, went out of business in 2008. Taylor-Morley had sold only two Magnolia Trace houses. McBride dropped prices and in a year completed the 28-house subdivision.

Another Taylor-Morley zombie project, Arbor Valley near Castlewood State Park, was revived as a McBride development.

"It's tougher in a rural area like Foristell," Cottrell said. "You don't have a lot of economic viability if there's not much else around it."

LIVING ON THE EDGE

At the northern edge of Godfrey, in Madison County, is River's Edge, where the Jones Co. halted sales in November 2009 after building during the previous two years about 80 of 313 planned homes. Jones was a subsidiary of Centex Corp., which Pulte Homes, based in Michigan, acquired in April 2009. Some River's Edge streets end abruptly where open fields begin.

River's Edge neighbors Darrell Sherfy and Michael Stuller said they hoped developers would resume construction.

"I don't care if they walk away from it, as long as they agree to sell the lots to people who will build on them," said Sherfy, a retired hospital worker. "They told us when they suspended operations it was all because of the economy."

Stuller, a registered nurse, said Jones had sold display homes at discount prices, putting stress on later buyers who had difficulty getting lenders to make loans at higher prices.

Godfrey Mayor Mike McCormick said he hoped the extension of Illinois Route 255, which is under construction through Godfrey, would help River's Edge. He pointed out that the subdivision was miles from the Mississippi River. "I don't know where they got that name," he said.

As for Caseyville, Belleville lawyer Kaufhold said the Forest Lakes developer misread the housing market: It tried to build an enclave for downtown St. Louis business executives willing to spend $400,000 to $1 million for a house in Caseyville.

"We really think it was overly enthusiastic," he said. "We told them we weren't sure some of this would sell."

For now, Caseyville officials can only watch the weeds grow at Forest Lakes and hope that after banks foreclose someone will pick up the pieces left by "essentially defunct" Caseyville Sport Choice, Kaufhold said.

Efforts to reach a company representative were unsuccessful.

The company is an affiliate of Sport Choice of Bakersfield, Calif. The firm specializes in golf course communities and initially considered such a development in Caseyville, Kaufhold said. After a market study showed the area already had similar projects - nearby Far Oaks and Stonewolf in Fairview Heights - the developer decided to devote much of Forest Lakes to hiking trails, horse trails and parks.

With no progress in sight, the main road is barricaded to prevent people from roaming the area. "We don't like it being a mess, but the whole thing is a private sector project," Kaufhold said. "We can't go cut the grass, because we don't own it."