I attend community meetings all across Chicago and I hear the same story at each one: A family has their kids while living in the city. They love their neighborhood and apartment, but as their kids get a little older, they outgrow their space or need space for a grandparent to stay, and cannot afford to buy a home in the city. They don’t want to leave, but they can’t afford to stay. These aren’t just anecdotes — Chicago has lost close to a million people over my lifetime.
The next mayor of Chicago has to change this. We have to reduce the cost of housing so people can stay in the city and we can attract new people. This is critical not just so people and families can afford a piece of the American Dream — to own a home — but also to climb out of our fiscal hole by growing our way out. Rather than increasing taxes on the diminishing number of residents and businesses here, we need to grow the number of people and companies so we can generate more revenue to address our debt and ensure we have the resources the city needs. This all starts with housing.
First, the problem: The median home price in Chicago now is $420,000, and the age of first homeownership nationally has risen from 28 to 40 today. Close to half of renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their incomes on housing. For every 100 extremely low-income families, there are only 24 rental units available. Teachers, police officers, firefighters and nurses should be able to own a home in the city they serve. Homelessness continues to rise.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Home prices and rents are skyrocketing because we haven’t built or preserved enough homes. We have a shortage of 4 million homes across America and more than 100,000 affordable homes here in Chicago. The solution: build more homes. But how?
We need to start with a north star goal of building or preserving 50,000 starter homes or apartments across the city in five years. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we can look to cities that have produced a lot of new housing and seen rents and home costs lowered, such as Austin, Denver and Atlanta. Atlanta’s mayor set up a Housing Strike Force with senior executives across every major government agency that touches housing, making housing everyone’s mission. They have already built or started construction on more than 10,000 new units. We must do the same.
The federal government has a critical role to play. I have spent more than a decade bringing back millions in federal funds for affordable housing projects across Chicago from the Irving Park YMCA’s single-room housing program to the Belray Apartments in Lakeview. And I was proud to vote recently for the most significant piece of housing legislation that passed Congress in decades. But Congress can only do so much. States and cities must carry the torch and implement the reforms proposed in the federal legislation.
Here’s how I propose Chicago jump-start its housing production to reduce costs: (1) remove barriers to build; (2) lower the cost of construction; and (3) finance missing middle homes.
Removing barriers to build includes fast-tracking permits from one year to one month. We also have to update our zoning to allow more duplexes, triplexes and four-family flats; more density near L stops and bus routes; and more accessory dwelling units (ADUs). Zoning reforms work. Minneapolis implemented a number of zoning reforms, and recent research found residents spent 34% less than they would have without the reforms. In Chicago, that same level of cost reduction would save a typical renter more than $700 per month
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.More units on more lots means more revenue without hiking taxes. For example, as Abundant Housing Illinois notes, “replacing a $500,000 single-family home with a $1.2 million four-flat generates 2.5 times the tax revenue on that same lot.”
We must also put public land to work by fast-tracking some of the thousands of vacant parcels owned by the city for affordable housing. The other innovation we need to leverage is modular construction. Inherent L3C is a modular home company already operating in Chicago and can cut construction time from eight months to eight weeks with significant cost savings as well.
In the second category of reducing the cost of construction, we need to update our building code to make it cheaper to build while ensuring safety. Every building does not need copper pipes when PVC is much cheaper. This also means aligning the prevailing wage with what other progressive states like New York and California do, and paying a residential rate for single family or smaller projects, rather than the commercial rate, which should be paid for large projects. The city should also waive tap fees for things like water and sewer for affordable housing.
We must also expand the pipeline of workers able to build and repair housing, as the industry faces a shortage of 650,000 workers. This is an incredible opportunity to create a pipeline from Chicago Public Schools into community colleges and apprenticeship programs where young people can earn six-figure salaries. We should set a goal to train 10,000 new electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians and carpenters over the next five years.
Finally, we must develop creative ways to finance affordable and missing middle homes. The first step here is for the city to reform its Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program to reduce the cost per unit from close to $700,000 per unit, by paring back costly requirements, shortening approval time and standardizing scoring. Another obvious solution is to use tax increment financing funds for affordable housing in the areas where the funds were collected, rather than for general operating expenses, as the current mayor is doing. The Affordable Requirements Ordinance also needs to be implemented with more flexibility to ensure market rate projects are not stalled and affordable units come online as quickly as possible. I’m looking at revolving funds and other financing tools to jump-start more construction and preservation of starter homes and apartments.
The solutions to lowering housing costs and growing our population are not complicated. But they do require leadership and a relentless focus on outcomes. We need to move from rhetoric to reality. Chicagoans can’t afford to wait.
U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Chicago, is a member of the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations and is running for mayor of Chicago.
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