Tag: Department of Housing

Three days after the Chicago Tribune reported that the centerpiece of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s affordable housing program had fallen far short of his promises, Emanuel announced he was re-establishing the city’s Department of Housing. Indeed, Leah Levinger, executive director of the Chicago Housing Initiative, called the move a “smokescreen,” an attempt to frame the city’s growing housing crisis as a problem of bureaucratic inattention “instead of talking about the real issues of race and class segregation, and how public and private interests are harmonized.” Emanuel’s last big housing move—a revamped Affordable Requirements Ordinance, which increased opt-out fees for housing developers who get city assistance to avoid affordable housing quotas, was passed in March 2015, weeks before the runoff in the mayoral election. At the time the mayor’s office predicted the measure would create 1,200 new units of affordable housing over the next five years and generate $90 million for the two housing funds. According to the Tribune, the ordinance generated just 194 units in its first two years, and just $9.2 million in fees. DePaul’s Institute for Housing Studies estimates there are 230,000 units in Chicago that are affordable for 350,000 low-income households – a “rental affordability gap” of 120,000. Emanuel recently announced new initiatives for early education and for City Colleges. One ordinance would preserve existing public housing by requiring one-for-one replacement for units lost to redevelopment. It would also address longstanding problems with Chicago’s housing programs, which skew toward small units aimed at higher income levels—the proposed ordinance requires that developers produce affordable family-sized units, with half aimed at households earning below 50 percent of area median income. “Experiences from New York City and various cities in California are reasonably clear that modern rent stabilization measures [which include increases to cover inflation and expenses] – as opposed to first-generation, hard-cap ‘rent control’ – work well,” said Frank Avellone, policy coordinator for the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing. “There is no loss of units, landlords continue to make fair returns, and rent-stabilized buildings are some of the best maintained.” Levinger points out that, since existing housing programs (including CHA vouchers) provide subsidies that are based on market rent levels, rent stabilization would reduce their cost and allow them to reach more families.