Have $100? This four-bedroom home in Mount Greenwood could be yours.

The ancient Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus is credited for first delivering the adage “You have to spend money to make money.”

Community leaders of Gaelic Park in Oak Forest are testing Plautus’ hypothesis by investing over half a million dollars into building a home in Chicago’s Mount Greenwood neighborhood that will be raffled off with the proceeds going to Gaelic Park Charities.

“We are taking a risk, no two ways about that,” said John Devitt, a contractor and a volunteer director of Gaelic Park. “If we don’t sell 6,000 tickets we are going to lose in this deal.”

The group is only one-sixth of the way there but has until March 2024. That’s when one person who purchased a $100 raffle ticket will get the keys to a new, three-story, four-bedroom home on Sawyer Avenue between West 104th and West 105th streets, just off Kedzie Avenue in Mount Greenwood.

Often, high-value raffle prizes such as homes or cars are donated by an individual or organization. But in this case, leaders in Oak Forest’s Gaelic Park community pooled resources to purchase the land for $170,000 and pay for the construction, which is quoted at $425,000 and will — hopefully — be finished by March, according to Devitt.

Devitt clarified that while almost a quarter of the Gaelic Park leadership works in construction and contracting, they are not the ones being paid to build the home. Instead, they are lending their expertise — and daring spirit — to oversee the project for free.

“Risk taking is in our blood,” Devitt said.

The paid work is going to several companies, some from within the community, that will handle various parts of the homebuilding process, said community leader, volunteer and professional housing contractor John Barrett.

The funds raised after the first 6,000 tickets are sold will go to the Gaelic Park Charity, which is focused on furthering community projects, maintaining public spaces and fostering Irish culture according to Devitt, Barrett and Chicago Gaelic Park Chicago’s website.

Still, the obvious question remains: why not skip the hassle of building a home and donate the $600,000, or just hold a large cash raffle for a few hundred thousand dollars?

Devitt says he, too, asked these questions early on in the planning.

The community leaders say they are taking a page out of downtown Chicago’s playbook and leaning heavily into one of humans’ great vices.

“I think we can see the state of Illinois and every state in the union has taken on gambling as a form of taxation,” Devitt said.

For Chicago, gambling looks like a new casino downtown with more on the way. For the Gaelic community, gambling means betting that they can turn $600,000 into much more.

Devitt said the community has done two cash raffles in past years. And while low six figures were returned both times, leadership hopes this house will act as a marketing tactic to deliver more of a buzz, drive more ticket purchases and ultimately provide greater returns.

“We’re putting a lot on the line,” he said

One of the draws of the home is that the land, purchased by Gaelic Park leaders in spring 2022, is within Chicago city limits. Chicago firefighters and police officers are required to live within city limits. Gaelic Park’s leadership hopes to tap into their Irish roots and advertise the Chicago-based home to the large number of Chicago’s public servants who share Irish heritage.

The Irish roots to the Gaelic community are integral to the formation of this raffle. Both Barrett and Devitt explained home raffles have a long history of success back home in Ireland. In fact, while high stakes raffles in the U.S. are often for charity, in Ireland, people raffle off their homes as a technique to increase the sale price.

In a 2021 story in The Irish Times, a home in County Mayo, Ireland worth $100,000 was raffled off by the owners and generated more than $1 million in earnings. The Times article tells multiple stories like this one in which private sellers vastly beat their home’s market value by promising their home to some lucky person for less than a hundred euros in a raffle.

Still, the hope of a windfall gain is matched with the chance that this could also be a massive amount of work for minimal gain. Or, it could even cause the community to suffer a loss. But Barrett expressed little fear as the only thing to do now is finish construction, continue promotion and wait for March.

“We’ve never done one of these things before,” he said. “You can’t be in this game if you’re nervous.”