Ayshia Harris spends 2 1/2 hours a day commuting by public transportation to her job as a customer service representative in Mt. Prospect.
Harris, 20, who lives in the West Pullman neighborhood on Chicago’s Far South Side, would love to move closer to her office. But “the rents are high out here,” she said on a recent morning at the CTA station in Rosemont.
“It’s also hard for me to find a place to live here because I’m young, and some people require you to be 21 years old. Others require you to have been at a job for a year or two, and I’ve been working in this one for only five months.”
Harris and many others are going where the jobs are — the suburbs. But they live where housing is more affordable — the city. Their daily trek, sometimes requiring multiple transfers from bus to elevated train to suburban bus, can become so onerous, they quit for jobs closer to home.
That situation repeats itself often enough that planners and legislators, as well as business leaders, are taking notice and starting to consider solutions. Possibilities include more money for transit, but also for more affordable housing outside the city. And a bill pending in the legislature would have the state make low-interest auto loans to workers who need to buy cars to get to work.
The jobs-housing debate has long been tinged with issues of class and race: Many entry-level workers are lower-income minorities, yet most of the jobs being created in the Chicago region have been in the predominantly white, middle-class suburbs.
Economics are driving the discussion, said MarySue Barrett, president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a Chicago-based business consortium.
“As the pace of growth has expanded, the tipping point has apparently been reached,” Barrett said.
Suburban jobs, particularly entry-level ones, are going unfilled because “people are less willing to put up with 90-minute commutes in each direction.”
The traditional recourse has been to make it easier for city residents to get to the suburbs by improving mass transit or building more roads. The Pace suburban bus agency, for example, has introduced innovations such as reverse-commute express buses, subscription buses and van pools.
But funding for public transportation is limited, and suburban highways are mired in ever-worsening congestion.
And now, the Metropolitan Planning Council cites findings of its latest study on affordable housing (no more than 30 percent of income toward housing costs) and the jobs-housing gap to argue these efforts are not enough. The group is throwing its considerable weight behind the housing option.
It is lobbying in Springfield for passage of the “Live Near Work Act.” The bill, which has passed the Illinois House and is pending in the Senate, would give the Illinois Housing Development Authority the chance to offer up to $2 million in matching grants to employers who help workers with down payments on homes or subsidize rents of those saving money for down payments.
The planning council also is working with System Sensor, St. Charles, on a pilot employer-assisted housing program. The firm has signed up 15 workers for housing counseling. Three have signed contracts to buy homes, with the company contributing part of their down payments.
And the council is backing Cook County Assessor James M. Houlihan’s proposal to lower the assessed valuations of large rental properties from the current 33 percent of market value to 26 percent. This could reduce property taxes for landlords and encourage construction of more rental housing.
By pursuing housing, the council implies city-to-suburban transit is still too inefficient and inconvenient for most people. Its study, Barrett said, “is our way of telling employers that we may not be able to shuttle our way out of this problem. It really is a recognition that housing has been missing from many debates in this region.”
Authors Janet L. Smith and Barbara Sherry of the University of Illinois at Chicago cite Illinois Department of Employment Security data showing jobs in the city of Chicago held virtually flat through the 1990s.
During the same 1990-98 period in the suburban collar counties, the number of jobs grew by double digits — from 13.5 percent in DuPage County to 31 percent in McHenry County.
In Cook County, the study found there were entry-level jobs for less than a third of the families on public aid. At the same time, DuPage County reported 7,241 more such job openings than people to fill them, and the situation was similar in Lake, McHenry and Kane Counties. Only Will County had more people than jobs.
In another part of its study, the MPC estimated that in 1999, Chicago had 541,000 entry-level jobs and 240,800 affordable apartments, for a ratio of roughly two jobs for every unit. Meanwhile, suburban Cook County and Will County had about 7 entry-level jobs for each affordable unit.
Further, a study for Pace by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago reported such eye-popping city-to-suburban travel times as Roseland to Schaumburg, 123 minutes by car, 142 minutes by transit; and Austin to Buffalo Grove, 75 minutes by car, 153 minutes by transit.
While the MPC pursues affordable housing, state Rep. William E. Brady (R-Bloomington) wants to make it easier for low-wage earners to buy cars to get to work.
He has introduced a bill, which has passed the House and is pending in the Senate, to have the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs work with local governments and not-for-profit organizations to write as much as $2 million in auto loans. Each loan would be for up to $2,500 and have an interest rate of no more than 2 percent and a term of at least 24 months.
The measure also proposes a $6 million program in which the state commerce department would work with local governments to subsidize the commuting costs of low-income workers.
