In seeking a new home, this journalist encounters firsthand the rising housing costs and disconnect many people experience between where they live, where they work, and where they create their community.
What an amazing stroke of luck! I was standing on the sidewalk in front of an Evanston apartment I had just toured, explaining to the owner that I was looking for a quiet place to rent. Being a writer and often working from home, quiet was very important. But thanks to the loud, party animal-type guy who had moved into the apartment below me in the last year, quiet had become a tenuous commodity in my life….
Defining Home
As I scoured ads and placed phone calls, drove through neighborhoods and asked friends for leads on possible apartments, I found myself pondering the question of what I was really looking for. I didn't think so much about square feet or whether parking was included, as about what kind of place would feel like a place to breath, emotionally and spiritually. A place to live.
What did "home" really mean to me?…
As luck and having so many friends on the grapevine would have it, I found a new place within another two weeks. A better, cheaper, more modern, and likely quieter place in Lincoln Square. Already, I was imagining the short walk to the Old Town School of Folk Music.
I was fortunate. But the experience of searching for new living quarters also left me wondering about the future of our city and region, and even more curious about the ways we have come to think about home not only in our personal lives, but as an expression of our community and the broader world.
The Big Squeeze
To satisfy my journalistic curiosity, I did some research on housing in the Chicago area. I also contacted the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), a local non-profit organization concerned with regional coordination of housing, travel, and work issues. What I learned was not exactly encouraging. Hundreds of thousands of area families today find themselves hard-pressed to locate affordable mortgages or rents. The MPC calls it the "Great Millennium Housing Squeeze."
The Chicago area's population has been growing -- by 830,000 over the last decade. That's an 11.4 percent increase. Yet the supply of affordable rental housing grew by less than one percent, according to MPC. Apparently, housing prices in high job-growth areas where people would like to live, or in up-and-coming city neighborhoods, have escalated beyond the reach of most working families. But where housing is more affordable, there are also fewer jobs. Consequently, a lot of people are paying a lot more now on housing than they should, or can really afford. They're also making longer commutes from their homes to their jobs.
The thought occurs to me that if the concept of Feng Shui speaks to the energetic art of space and arrangement, then social policy in housing has been more like an amateur's karate kick to the body of what constitutes metropolitan livability. With more than 270 municipalities in the Chicago region, decisions about land use and zoning remain largely fragmented and uncoordinated. Developers, of course, are inclined to go where the profits are, generating housing trends and needs inherently vulnerable to the vagaries of a largely unregulated market. As citizens and as a community, housing is what happens to us while we're busy making other plans.
Chicago remains a city of architecture and artistry. It's edgy and entertaining, infuriating and enjoyable, and ever insistent upon our vigilance. It's imposing and impressive in the sweep of its power and an untidy mess of failed potential. The city has gotten shamefully used to the enduring reality of homelessness, but it is not Calcutta. I know many middle-income friends who live in nice, comfortable homes, who've been paying mortgages for years and are doing okay. If we have the money, the options about where and how we live are probably as open-ended as any on earth.