Chicago needs to fix its affordable housing law
By Jess Schwalb
Chicago is an increasingly expensive place to live – almost half of all renter households in Cook County and the vast majority of lower-income households in Chicago pay more than 30% of their monthly income on rent. Rising rents across the city contribute to the decline of Chicago’s Black population, as well as the displacement of Latinx and Black Chicagoans from rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Especially for low-income families, finding affordable, accessible, and available housing in Chicago’s deeply segregated neighborhoods is a huge challenge.
One way the City of Chicago attempts to create more affordable housing in affluent neighborhoods is through the Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO), a law that requires developers to set aside a certain percentage of their units to be rented at below market-rate. The ARO only applies to developments with 10 units or more that receive city benefits, such as TIF funds or a zoning change, or that are building on city-owned land. If developers choose, they can pay a fee instead of building some of those affordable units. However, these fees have been mostly used to steer affordable housing away from gentrifying areas, adding them to struggling South and West Side neighborhoods instead.
This April, City Council passed an updated ARO which requires developers keep at least 20% of units in their building at affordable prices. According to the new law, some neighborhoods have stricter affordability requirements depending on their location in the city, such as their proximity to downtown or gentrifying areas. And while the April 2021 updated ordinance strengthened several key parts of the law, there’s still a lot of work to be done to ensure that Chicagoans of color have access to these affordable units.
Along with our community partners, yesterday we submitted public comments to the City of Chicago’s Department of Housing with recommendations on how the city can improve the ARO program. In short: the ARO has the potential to help make Chicago a more integrated and affordable city, but to truly make it effective the city should penalize ARO developers that violate local fair housing laws, regularly collect and publish data on who is applying for and renting affordable units, and move toward a centralized leasing platform where low-income tenants can easily find and apply for ARO units.
In our comments, we also shared some key insights about the ARO based on our fair housing testing program. Posing as renters interested in ARO buildings, our fair housing testers found significant gaps in compliance, treatment, and even awareness of the ARO’s requirements among developers. While some of our testers received accurate information and prompt follow-up from leasing agents about affordable units, other leasing agents stated that they had no knowledge of the ARO program. Several testers experienced source- of-income discrimination and were falsely told that Housing Choice Vouchers cannot be used to rent ARO units or that they needed to show proof of income over 3x the monthly rent in order to apply. For the ARO to be successful, it's critical that we root out these patterns of discrimination and hold housing providers accountable.
Click here to read the full text of our comments to the city, submitted alongside our community partners: The Chicago Housing Initiative, ONE Northside, Access Living, Shriver Center on Poverty Law, Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance, Southside Together Organizing for Power, Housing Choice Partners, Working Family Solidarity, LiveEquipd, and Center for Changing Lives.
To learn more about our fair housing testing, or to sign up to serve as a fair housing tester, contact Outreach, Intake, and Testing Coordinator Jess Schwalb at schwalb@clccrul.org