The Chicago area does not have enough apartments and the rents are too high, affecting everyone from senior citizens who can no longer afford to live in the communities where they raised families to fast-food workers who cannot afford to live in the towns where they work, according to a new report.
The vacancy rate for the six-county region is a tight 4.2 percent, and rents have increased 20 percent since 1995, outpacing inflation, to an average of $723 a month, according to the study issued by the Metropolitan Planning Council and funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The report was sought by the Chicago Housing Authority to gauge the type and availability of rental housing for the thousands of families expected to be displaced by efforts to rebuild the public housing system.
The report has broader implications for the suburbs and highlights a regionwide rental shortage that could have a long-term impact on housing for the elderly and for entry-level workers, housing advocates and municipal leaders said.
“This is an issue; it is not a crisis,” said Robin Snyderman, who oversaw the study for the Metropolitan Planning Council. But, she said, “it’s a potential crisis, and we are in a position to prevent it if we start acting collaboratively now.”
The need for more affordable apartments is particularly acute in the suburbs, where the population has been growing, the report said.
Between 1990 and 1999, the population of suburban Cook County has increased 3.2 percent but 5.7 percent of available apartments have been lost, leaving a total of 238,600 units, the study said.
During that same time, the population in DuPage County increased more than 14 percent, but the number of available apartments increased just 3.6 percent, to 80,500, according to the report. Lake County’s population rose 19.3 percent, and rental units rose 10.8 percent to 52,800 during those years, according to the report.
Job growth in the northwest corridor, DuPage County and Lake County is igniting a need for more housing, housing advocates said.
“We have jobs for people, but we don’t have homes for them,” said Donna Thomas, executive director of the not-for-profit Northwest Housing Partnership.
The planning council report suggests easing property taxes on apartment buildings as an incentive for the development of more rental units, streamlining zoning ordinances and building codes, educating landlords about housing vouchers and informing residents about the need for more rental units in the suburbs.
Rolling Meadows Mayor Thomas Menzel said the first step is to convince people in the suburbs that more rental units are needed. For one thing, suburban land has become so valuable that villages prefer to see it developed for commercial use, which generates sales taxes, Menzel said.
Rolling Meadows voters last year defeated a referendum proposal that would have allowed the city to provide 40 rental units for senior citizens–a proposal Menzel favored.
“The suburbs have to accept the fact that they have an issue that needs to be addressed and, if they don’t, there will be negative consequences in the future,” Menzel said.
Those consequences include the inability to get workers to service jobs in the suburbs, and seniors who can no longer stay in the homes where they raised their children, he said.
“I’m not sure the suburbs are aware or want to address that there is a problem,” Menzel said.
Elk Grove Village has found a way to help the seniors who first settled the town in the 1950s, Mayor Craig Johnson said.
Twenty years ago, the town paved the way for its first senior-only apartment complex, and last year it opened a second complex. Village officials are negotiating for a third complex to be built as well, Johnson said.
