Mayor Bauer explains why Illinois communities need a state housing policy at a Naperville hearing on state housing issues.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today, and for your needed leadership on housing issues in Illinois. My name is Ila Bauer, and I am the Mayor of the Village of Round Lake Park. It might be useful for you to know that I am also chair of the Lake County Municipal League and on the leadership team of the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus Housing Task Force.
While I agree with many of the recommendations being presented today — the need for new rental housing capital and subsidy dollars, and the need for tax and other incentives to encourage use of these dollars — I am primarily here to stress to the need to include housing in comprehensive planning, and to build in accountability mechanisms so that municipalities indeed meet the housing needs of people who live and work in their communities.
I think there is a growing recognition among local mayors that, no matter what issue we care about most — whether it's economic development, education, welfare reform or traffic — we need a broader range of LOCAL quality housing options (near jobs and transit) , at all price points, to address that issue with any success.
But sadly, housing issues often divide us as a region. The truth is that the simple mismatch between supply and demand is daunting, but housing work is further complicated by the stereotypes and misconceptions, and the variety of needs from town to town. Did you know that Lake County passed a uniform development ordinance in 2000 that initially had no reference to affordable housing? Why? Because the public and its elected officials could not agree on either the need nor the strategy to address that need. We had months and months of task forces and public hearings to bring affordable housing into the ordinance, and the resolution was sadly watered down. The truth is that despite the population and job growth in Lake County, we were like many counties in Illinois that lost rental housing in the 1990s, and much of this had to do with community opposition, fear and even ignorance.
That experience fueled my interest to participate in the new Metropolitan Mayors Caucus. I was very pleased to be part of the Caucus' development of a Housing Action Agenda, one that simultaneously addresses the priorities of both high job growth and reinvestment communities. To develop that Housing Action Agenda, the Housing Task Force of the Caucus set aside all the housing jargon (affordable, subsidized, market, etc.) and just endeavored to articulate the kind of housing we all agree is needed in our communities. It was this consensus which resulted in the Housing Endorsement Criteria and formed the heart of our Housing Action Agenda. I have attached both the Housing Endorsement Criteria and the Housing Action Agenda to my testimony.
The Housing Endorsement Criteria is the document we adopted to address the question "what kind of housing are we talking about?" The concept of the Housing Endorsement Criteria is this: If a housing proposal includes homes that are affordable to the workforce and a range of other income holders — if it is near transit, near jobs, well managed, well designed, and promotes diversity — then our region needs this housing.
With the Criteria established, it was much easier for mayors to approve the rest of the Housing Action Agenda, which includes preservation and production strategies, and other forward-thinking items. I head up the Action Agenda item related to Good Planning , and as I see it there are two aspects: One, what do we as mayors need, ourselves, as incentives for undertaking the kind of planning needed to promote such housing? And two, what can we as mayors do to make it easier for developers to rehab or build housing which meets the Housing Endorsement Criteria?
I want to point out that a key planning recommendations in the Millennial Housing Commission (MHC) Report requested by Congress was to "devolve" HUD and housing policy to the State. While local mayors do not support this idea, I share it with you today to stress how central your role may be in the future. However, local mayors do like the MHC idea siphoning off a portion of all federal funds for local, regional and state efforts to promote more regional coordination of housing, labor, transportation and service dollars. With this flexibility, a more optimum State role can be explored.
Already, I am encouraged by the passage of HB 4023. As you know, this legislation authorizes the state Department of Commerce and Community Affairs to support comprehensive planning and zoning efforts by offering financial aid, training, model ordinances and technical information to cities and villages that request assistance. The legislation spells out for the first time the issues to be addressed by comprehensive plans, including housing.
HB 4023 essentially encourages local governments to establish housing development policies to meet the needs of current and future residents. I urge you to further establish accountability mechanisms to make sure that attainable workforce housing would be created as the result of the planning legislation described above. I'd recommend priority funding for state infrastructure grant and public works programs for municipalities whose new housing developments include target percentages of affordable housing, or otherwise promote our Housing Endorsement Criteria.
Assuming it gets the funding it needs, and I urge your support in allocating the $6 million recommended, HB 4023 will help us integrate housing into broader sensible growth and community development strategies. I can tell you from my own experience that good planning is costly.
My town was named as one of the Competitive Communities by DCCA, but frankly this has not helped us much in terms of covering costs. I just added up what we have spent over the past 10 months, nearly $40,000, and we are just beginning to start drafting policy statements and still need to go to the residents for continued input and review. Our initial estimate was well over $100,000.00 which is an amount that is totally impossible for our community to spend. I've had very little support, monetary or otherwise, from the State during this process.
In addition to looking at the state's role in planning, mayors are also looking at our local role: How should we modify our own zoning and development regulations to encourage the construction of housing which meets our Criteria? Such modifications vary for all of us, but we are looking at everything our policies on lot size, density, and parking requirements, to how we can speed the process for review and approval of housing development proposals, to what financial incentives or land discounts we can offer. To the extent that you can prohibit exclusionary zoning, more and more mayors will think about what inclusionary strategies work in their own backyards.
I can't conclude any testimony on housing without pointing you to a whole other influential public policy issue and that is school funding. As long as school funding is overly reliant on property taxes, communities like mine are handicapped. None of us can afford to the consequences of inadequate schooling, nor the disincentives to develop multifamily housing triggered the way we fund schools.
I thank you again for your leadership on this issue, and ask that you work with local mayors to forward a state housing agenda. We need your leadership, and I think you need ours, if we are truly to address the tremendous demand for housing in Illinois, town by town . . ..