Despite Illinois’ famous appetite for local control, with more units of local government than any other state, a new way of doing business – municipal collaboration – is proving effective and attracting both political and media attention. A group of communities in the south suburbs and a North Shore town are discovering it is well worth the effort to collaborate – with neighbors and local employers, as well as across a range of community development issues.
Lake Forest, a well-to-do north suburban community, recently received local media attention for a proposal to develop 16 townnhome-style apartments in the new Settler’s Green development, on land donated by the city, close to the west Lake Forest Metra stop and shopping district.
Lake Forest deserves kudos not only for understanding the benefits of providing a range of homes near transit and jobs, but also for working with a qualified developer to build and adequately manage the property. The community has also partnered with its neighbors Highland Park, Northbrook, Deerfield and Highwood, as well as area employers, through the Charter One Workforce Housing Initiative, to cultivate innovative solutions to help more local workers afford homes in the communities in which they work every day.
Meanwhile, a group of communities – led by the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association, under the banner of the South Suburban Housing Collaborative – also is taking a collaborative approach. However, their challenge is quite different: foreclosure recovery. They received national media attention in Shelterforce magazine – as well as more than $9 million through the Neighborhood Stabilization Program created by HUD to assist communities that have been or are likely to be affected by foreclosed and abandoned properties.
Emboldened by support from the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, the Regional Home Ownership Preservation Initiative, MPC and other partners, the South Suburban Housing Collaborative is leveraging additional funds to support its comprehensive redevelopment plan, which would create or preserve some 474 energy-efficient homes along the Calumet River as well as existing and proposed south suburban transit lines; and demolish and/or land bank targeted sites for future mixed-income and mixed-use development.
To many, the South Suburban Housing Collaborative seems radical – and it certainly does fly in the face of a more typically competitive municipal mindset. But the south suburbs have been collaborating for years on a range of issues, and on the whole, they’re sold. In fact, they’re taking collaboration to a whole new level, by working on common development guidelines so that developers can “one-stop shop,” rather than try to navigate 18, 20 or even 30 different sets of zoning codes, rules and regulations. The towns are going the extra mile to woo developers, who sometimes avoid the suburbs entirely because of the multiple city procedures, ordinances and politics involved.
In a blog post that updated the Shelterforce story with NSP 1 and NSP 2 developments, the reporter quotes a common MPC refrain about how “collaboration is an unnatural act—it takes a lot of discipline and diplomacy, but it definitely creates efficiencies for the municipalities themselves and all the entities who want to do business with them.”
The stories of Lake Forest and the South Suburban Housing Collaborative are proof that the approach creates efficiencies for municipalities – and companies that want to do business with them.
On a surface note, both media stories were sprouted at the same event: In June 2009, MPC was thrilled to accommodate the request of partners at the National Housing Conference’s Center for Housing Policy to facilitate two mobile tours of these divergent, suburban housing markets. The two journalists who wrote these stories each attended one of the mobile tours.
While the Center for Housing Policy featured these collaboratives as “Solutions for Working Families,” the state is also learning from these examples: Illinois is prioritizing subregional capacity building within its 2010 Comprehensive Housing Plan. MPC also sees both municipal collaboratives as good models for the Obama administration’s Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities and the proposed Livable Communities Act. The collaborative approach to comprehensive, sustainable community development works best when private sector employers and developers are encouraged to support both their own workers and innovative local and regional planning. Please help us get this message across to your Congressional leaders, and ask them to include private sector incentives in the Livable Communities Act.