Housing
prices have fallen in recent months
,but home ownership
continues
to be
beyond the reach of many of the region's working families. Harder still is
finding a well-built home near quality job opportunities, not to
mention transit,
good schools, and green space.
MPC and several partner organizations are working hard
to develop innovative strategies to overcome this hurdle. In an attempt to offer
the Illinois Housing
Development Authority
(IHDA) a range of options
from which to choose, MPC and its partners have devised a simple means of
expanding an existing incentive program to encourage housing rehab and
development activitywhere it's needed most. As discussed in the article Can 'Live
Near Work' Work Better?
(which explored another,
similar strategy), one means of addressing the shortage of government incentives
is to rework how federal Low Income Housing Tax
Credits
are allocated, a process determined by
the state's Qualified
Allocation Plan (QAP).
Another option is to explore the three points which the
QAP proposes three for developments in communities currently classified as
non-exempt - meaning 10 percent orless of their housing stock is considered
affordable -by the Affordable
Housing and Planning Appeals Act (AHPAA). Per
the attached letter co-authored by MPC and Chicago Metropolis 2020
,
many towns above that 10% mark in
2000 are likely to fall below, thus becoming non-exempt, by 2010. To
support those towns looking at this issue proactively,
the
simple
suggestion is to
make these three extra points available
for all Illinois communities whose share of affordable homes is
25 percent or less
(which naturally includes the 49 municipalities
with less than 10 percent at present).
As
evidenced
by
the above map, this innovation
would capture a number of communities with dense job markets
(the darker the underlying zip code geography, the higher the jobs-household
ratio in that area). Not only would these three points make
more development easier in
a
wider range of communities
, it
responds directly to requests from both developers and
municipal leaders
asking for state support for such proactive activity
advancing the state’s Comprehensive Housing and Planning Act.
A range of private firms,organizations, and
government bodies have joined MPC in this effort, including the
Illinois Housing Council
,
Business and Professional People in
the Public Interest
,
Brinshore
Development
,
Related Midwest
,
and the
DuPage Homeownership
Center
. IHDA is currently reviewing and revising the QAP, and
the support of such a broad coalition is critical.
For
more information
on MPC's efforts to ease the jobs-housing mismatch, Live Near
Work, or on its work to revise IHDA's QAP, please contact Robin Snyderman, MPC
housing director, at (312) 863-6007 or
rsnyderman@metroplanning.org
,
or
Josh
Ellis, MPC community development associate at (312) 863-6045 or
at
jellis@metroplanning.org
.
