Why fiber cement quietly took over the Chicago suburbs

If you drove through the streets of Naperville in 2014 looking at re-sided houses, the dominant material was vinyl. A wide range of qualities — some really nice insulated panels, some basic builder-grade stuff — but mostly vinyl, in whites and tans and the occasional brave green. Drive the same streets now and you'll see a different picture. Most of the houses that have been re-sided in the last six or seven years are wearing fiber cement, almost always hardie board siding, and the colors have gotten darker and bolder along the way.

That shift didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't really driven by homeowners doing exhaustive research. It happened because of a chain reaction in the local market.

The remodelers started recommending it first

Around 2015, you started hearing the same thing from established remodeling outfits across the suburbs: they were quietly moving away from vinyl. Not for any one reason — they'd just done enough callbacks. A warped panel here. A discolored section there. A homeowner unhappy that their twelve-year-old vinyl looked nothing like the new section installed after the storm damage. Vinyl was cheaper to sell but more expensive to stand behind.

Fiber cement didn't have those callback patterns. The early hardie installs from the late 2000s were starting to hit their ten-year mark and still looked good. The contractors who'd been recommending it in pockets started recommending it across the board.

Then the storms helped

Anybody who lived through the hail events of 2017 and 2020 remembers the aftermath. Whole subdivisions in the western suburbs had to be re-sided. Insurance settlements were paid out. And when homeowners had a check in hand and a contractor at the door, they got to make a real choice about what went back on the wall.

A lot of them upgraded. Not all — plenty of vinyl-for-vinyl swaps happened — but a meaningful percentage of those storm jobs ended up as hardie. Once you've watched your old siding shatter from baseball-sized hail, the pitch for fiber cement gets a lot easier to hear.

And then the comps started showing up

The third piece is real estate. Around 2018 or 2019, real estate agents on the North Shore and in the western suburbs started using "James Hardie" or "fiber cement" as a listing feature the way they'd use "granite countertops" or "finished basement." The material had crossed over from technical detail to selling point.

Once that happened, homeowners noticed. The math on a siding project isn't just upfront cost — it's what you recover at sale time. And if the comp down the street that just sold for $50,000 over ask had hardie, well, that's a data point.

It's hard to find a $600K+ home in Hinsdale or La Grange that's been re-sided in the last five years that didn't go with fiber cement. That's not because anyone made a rule. It's just what the market settled on.

The supply side caught up

One of the quiet reasons fiber cement was a tougher sell in the early days was that installation was a bigger lift. The boards are heavier, the cuts require special blades, and the fastening pattern is more demanding than vinyl. A lot of crews simply weren't trained on it, which meant the few that were could charge a premium.

By the early 2020s, that had changed. Most established siding crews in the Chicagoland area had done enough hardie jobs to be comfortable with it. James Hardie's contractor certification program (they call it the Elite or Preferred Contractor designation, depending on the year) put more trained installers in the market, and the cost premium for hardie installation has narrowed substantially compared to where it was a decade ago.

It's not just James Hardie

Worth noting: while we tend to use "hardie board siding" as shorthand, there are other fiber cement brands in the market — Allura, Nichiha, and a few smaller players. James Hardie is by far the dominant name in residential, especially in our region, but contractors will sometimes use alternatives for specific applications or where there's a price advantage. The material category, not just one brand, has become the default.

What this means if you're shopping now

If you're a homeowner in the suburbs comparing options in 2025, the calculus is different than it was even five years ago. The pool of competent fiber cement installers is wider, the pricing has gotten more competitive, and the resale signal has gotten clearer. Vinyl still has a place — particularly on rentals, on shorter-hold properties, or where the budget is genuinely tight — but it's no longer the obvious default.

You can still see the inflection point if you know where to look. On a typical block in Glen Ellyn or Arlington Heights, the houses re-sided before about 2017 are mostly vinyl, and the ones done after are mostly hardie. The shift happened in plain sight, one driveway dumpster at a time.