An article in the national magazine focuses on the consensus-building housing strategies used by northeastern Illinois' Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, Metropolitan Planning Council and partners such as Chicago Metropolis 2020.
The efforts of the Mayors
Metropolitan Caucus to expand housing options in the Chicago region attracted
national attention in January. In an article entitled “The Chicago Effort" (Urban
Land
, Jan. 2003), Jennifer Lavorel,
describes the partnership between the new Housing Task Force of the Metropolitan
Mayors Caucus and MPC.
More than 270 mayors, all members of the Metropolitan Mayors
Caucus, have come together to promote housing and mixed-use developments
that meet community needs while also addressing broader regional sensible growth
goals.
The article praises the strategy of the
Housing Task Force not only for its voluntary and cooperative nature, but also
for its incorporation of physical planning and equity issues.
The Metropolitan Mayors Caucus asked MPC for help in forming a
Housing Task Force after MPC shared results from a 1999 Regional
Rental Market Analysis that documented the region's jobs/housing
mismatch. The
study concluded that where job markets are expanding, sufficient rental housing is not
available to support growing needs.
In early 2002, the
Caucus’ Housing Task Force developed a set of Housing
Endorsement Criteria and a Housing
Action Agenda, described in the article as “documents asserting the importance of housing as a regional
issue and laying out nine action items intended to promote policies and
practices that support attainable housing across the metropolitan Chicago
area.”
The article also highlights the parallel
initiative undertaken by Chicago Metropolis 2020 and quotes many of the Housing
Task Force leaders’ ideas about how to overcome barriers to attainable housing
throughout the region. Click here
for the full
article.