"Build Preserve Lead: A Housing Agenda for Chicago's Neighborhoods," the City's third five-year plan, sets forth a strategy that is both sensible and courageous.
Chicago is home to hundreds of competent housing professionals,
organizations, and advocates. Many of these entities served as advisors as the
Chicago
Department of Housing embarked upon its third five-year plan.
Quality affordable housing is core to MPC’s agenda, which works to strengthen
the connections between where people live and work, how they move from place to
place, and the funding, education, land use, and tax policies that support
them. Central to this mission, as a regional policy and advocacy organization,
is promoting equity of opportunity, sensible growth, community reinvestment, and
economic stability throughout the six-county region.
Given the regional demands for housing and the capacity
of the City, MPC's housing work in Chicago in recent years has focused primarily
on the Chicago
Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation,
and the historic
rewrite underway of its zoning ordinance — both
initiatives spearheaded outside the Department of Housing.
MPC was thus pleased to participate as an advisor on the five-year plan, via
President MarySue Barrett, and applauds the leadership and vision of
Commissioner Jack Markowski.
The final plan, Build Preserve
Lead: A Housing Agenda for Chicago's Neighborhoods
, incorporates several MPC priorities.
Building on the needed attention to expanding and preserving the existing stock
of affordable housing, the Plan makes six points that MPC
finds particularly encouraging:
- The formation of an intergovernmental task force on affordable housing was
a courageous and necessary innovation. Clearly, the success of every
City issue — education, jobs, health care, safety — depends on the
availability of quality, affordable housing for Chicago families, the local
workforce, and households with special needs. MPC applauds the City’s decision
to improve its coordination and leadership on housing, especially at this time
when Gov. Rod
Blagojevich is instituting a similar intergovernmental effort for the
State of Illinois.
- The five-year plan’s formalization and prioritization of a regional
approach is another strategy MPC commends. In recent years, the City has
been very supportive of the Housing Agenda of the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, and this
five-year plan offered the first opportunity to formalize that commitment.
- The plan’s bold emphasis on federal and state advocacy to support its
goals is also critical, as it not only addresses the obvious need for more
resources, but also the more esoteric but potent issues related to regulatory
and zoning issues.
- Given the tight resources available, it is also important to note the
City's leadership in support of the Chicago
Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation. Certainly, by investing half
of the Department of Housing’s multifamily resources in this historic effort,
the City is making a difficult decision to temporarily reduce the
investments previously made with these funds. Given the impact of this
redevelopment on neighborhoods throughout the City and beyond, MPC praises the
Department for its leadership in this area. Similarly, the City’s investment
in supportive housing as part of this Plan is laudable. Without public
support, this is another examples of an essential housing program that the
private sector would and could not handle alone.
- MPC was also pleased to see an expressed commitment to leveraging more
private sector resources. The City’s continued effort to prioritize its
resources to address the housing needs of lower-income people will require an
increased investment on the part of business leaders who, more and more, are
recognizing the costs accrued when housing is not affordable to their own
workforces. In the last five-year plan, 18 percent of the Department’s
expenditures supported households earning over 80 percent of Area Median
Income, an income level common among the local workforce. MPC offers to
continue its partnership with the City in expanding employer-assisted housing programs, building on
successful initiatives at the University of Chicago, the Illniois
Institute of Technology, and Advocate Bethany Hospital .
- The City's five-year housing plan reflects both a sound understanding of
the housing market and a set of clear priorities and goals. Good housing
policy and programs cannot be implemented in a vacuum. MPC was pleased
that the department referenced its 1999 Regional Rental Market Analysis, which speaks to the need to
update information on regional housing supply and demand in the near
future.
No plan is perfect, and good plans must evolve along
with the world surrounding them. But, it is essential to articulate goals and
commitments up front, as does Build Preserve
Lead, to achieve the sort of successes
to which the Chicago region has and will continue to aspire. MPC looks forward
to helping the City implement this Plan, hopefully surpassing many of the
goals stated
, as
was the case from 1999 to 2003.