AFFORDABLEHOUSINGPILOTPLAN CLEARSKEYCOMMITTEEHURDLE
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to create affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods— on the Near North and Near West Sides and along the Milwaukee Avenue corridor— cleared a key hurdleMonday despite fears that rents are too high for families to afford and the area covered is too small.
The voice vote by the City Council’s Housing Committee followed a marathon meeting that featured a shouting match between Aldermen Walter Burnett ( 27th) and John Arena ( 45th).
Arena wanted to expand the plan’s boundaries farther north, to include Jefferson Park and Portage Park. Burnett didn’t want to complicate the issue.
“When I’m dealing with developers who bring belligerence to the table and find every single way to get around doing affordable units on site . . . whywouldn’t you give us a hand in fighting that fight when you have the legal defensible position to do it in this case?” Arena asked.
Burnett countered that he stood with Arena “when all of those skinheads or whatever they were” were opposing a controversial affordable housing project in JeffersonPark, and he expects Arena to return the favor.
“If y’allwant tomesswithmyward, I’mgonna mess with yourward,” said Burnett, whose NearWest Side ward is exploding with residential and commercial development.
“I’ve got thousands of units getting ready to come tomyward and, if I don’t do this, developers are all gonna buy out. I’m talking about areas where I don’t have any housing right now. . . . Y’allwant to play with each other up north, y’all do that, man. But don’t be messing withmy stuff.”
Planning and Development Commissioner David Reifman said the goal is to “promote affordability in a legally defensible way”— and create up to 1,000 units of affordable housing— then examine the results after the three- year pilot is over.
He argued the “data is not there” to support an expansion to Jefferson Park and Portage Park and that there are “other approaches and other programs” to create larger units. Housing activists didn’t buy it. Eugene Nelson, a leader of the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, questioned how Emanuel has the “audacity” to set rents at $ 1,300 a month for a one- bedroom apartment and $ 1,700 a month for two bedrooms and call that “affordable” housing.
“We can’t afford $ 1,300- a- month for a one- bedroom,” Nelson told a City Hall news conference. “Think of the people living under the bridge. Think of people trying to pay these high prices and can’t afford to buy their children food, can’t afford to put clothes on their backs.” Siri Hibbler, president of both the Field of Dreams Visionary Center and the Garfield Park Chamber of Commerce, said she has counseled more than 2,000 people since April, all seeking affordable housing. Their average income is $ 1,700 a month. Most are single parents.
“You’re asking them to put all of their income into paying rent and you call that affordable. . . . Where are these people going to go? Into the lake?” Hibbler said.
The mayor’s plan is a substitute for a stalled plan to impose dramatically higher demolition fees along the wildly popular 606 trail and impose a “de- conversion fee” whenever developers try to turn multifamily housing into more lucrative single- family homes. In the pilot areas, developers would no longer be allowed to pay hefty fees to buy their way out of a requirement to build affordable housing units on or near their new residential buildings.