After a four-year fight, residents worried about skyrocketing rents and property values south of the Obama Presidential Center cleared the first hurdle Wednesday to secure new housing protections in the area.
Following months of stop-and-start meetings with Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration and last-minute changes, advocates won passage in the City Council Housing Committee of a more modest proposal than they originally hoped for.
Despite pushback from other neighborhood groups, including business interests, supporters’ hopes are high that the ordinance will pass the full City Council on Thursday before aldermen are mired in budget talks that will likely distract them from other matters.
The package was whittled down from its original proposal up to the last minute: The committee recessed more than once for huddled meetings with proponents and opponents.
The deal creates a pilot program that would set aside 30 city-owned lots for affordable homes to purchase and new rental units. It would also create a $3 million property tax debt relief program, giving out grants of up to $5,000 for residents of South Shore, Englewood and the Lower West Side and expand a “fair notice” pilot currently active in Woodlawn, giving renters a longer heads up when their leases are not being renewed.
The pilot area spans from 60th Street on the north to 71st Street to the south, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on the west to DuSable Lake Shore Drive to the east, and South Chicago Avenue on the southwest.
That cuts out the 7th Ward, which was part of the original ordinance. Local Ald. Gregory Mitchell did not back the ordinance. Other homeowners in the area, and the former alderman of the 5th Ward, argued the neighborhood already had affordable rental stock — including federally subsidized housing — and that longtime homeowners should instead be prioritized for protection to create a better balance of middle- and low-income residents.
City-owned lots that would be reserved for rental housing include those at 63rd and Blackstone — the closest to the Obama campus — 69th and Stony Island, 67th and Dorchester, and 71st and Paxton. At least 75% of the units built on those lots would need to be reserved for households with an income of no more than 60% of the area median income.
For 63rd and Blackstone, “residents displaced from the pilot area since May 2015” would get the first shot at leasing units in the first 30 days the property opens, according to the ordinance.
Spurred by rising property values and rents in the neighborhood since the Obama center was announced, organizers successfully passed a pilot program in the Woodlawn neighborhood in 2020 to maintain affordable housing and give current renters the chance to buy homes that went up for sale. But a similar program just south of the presidential center site in Jackson Park lagged until Wednesday.
The original ordinance codifying the demands of organizers for a South Shore Community Benefits Agreement had been sitting in limbo in the City Council for nearly two years. Johnson has generally backed the protections, but only expressed support for expanding and extending a program linking people threatened with eviction with housing attorneys. Even that program has not had a hearing since his public pledge to back it last fall.
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The updated ordinance aldermen were set to consider Wednesday at first included “right to eviction counsel program” authorizing the city to contract with a not-for-profit to provide legal services, but only if the city found the money to extend a pilot that has been funded with federal pandemic relief dollars. Those prospects already seemed dim amid the city’s budget crunch, and that part of the ordinance was struck out Wednesday afternoon.
The initial proposal also created a citywide “Office of the Tenant Advocate,” whose job would be to push policies to increase housing access, coordinate building-wide inspections to root out dangerous or unsanitary conditions and provide outreach about laws and policies involving rental housing, tenant organizing and renters’ rights.
The ordinance did not specify how the office would be staffed or its funding level. The advocate position was also struck from the package during backroom negotiations before the committee voted on it Wednesday.
A ban on move-in fees within the pilot program’s boundaries, a cap on rental application fees and security deposits were also left out, as were some of the costlier proposals for down-payment assistance and home improvement grants.
Yancy said both the tenant advocate and right to counsel were ultimately struck because several aldermen thought they were citywide proposals that “should be handled in a different space.”
He was still heartened by the committee vote. “I think what we were able to win is still significant for the folks who are going to qualify, whether it’s the property tax relief or building, hopefully, five new buildings with varied affordability, somewhere between deep and moderate,” Yancy said. “Ultimately, it’s a floor and not a ceiling, there’s more work to do.”
Ald. Jeanette Taylor, 20th, who fought for similar protections in Woodlawn, said she was dismayed there were not more conversations to prevent displacement on the front end. “We didn’t do this right the first time. (The Obama Foundation) got the land for 99 years. You all closed a major street. Then you saw properties in Woodlawn, Hyde Park, South Shore, Washington Park, skyrocket,” she said.
Taylor rents her home in Woodlawn and said there should be more protections citywide. “Everybody deserves to have housing that they can afford, they deserve to live in a safe community,” she said.
Some public commenters decried the abrupt substitution, which they said did not give residents enough time to review the changes.
Sharon Lewis, a longtime South Shore resident, building owner and executive director of the Meadows Eastside Community Resource Organization, urged committee members to pause consideration to give “community members and residents and businesses the opportunity to review and amend the language” and exclude city-owned plots along commercial corridors such as 71st Street or along Stony Island.
She and others said restricting market-rate development would halt the neighborhood’s progress in reversing what she described as “apocalyptic” blight.
Opponents of the ordinance have argued the neighborhood has been forced to take on the city’s most vulnerable residents, from a surge of Chicago Housing Authority voucher-holders displaced during Mayor Richard M. Daley’s “Plan for Transformation” to recent migrants seeking shelter and renting using city and state assistance. Quality businesses will not locate in the neighborhood, they argue, if there are not enough locals nearby who can afford to shop there.
“The narrative that this is going to create a new CHA or housing just for poor people, I think it’s misguided and misplaced,” Yancy countered after the vote. “What it really seeks to do is to be able to provide quality living spaces for families of varying incomes.”