His ideas include forcing state pensions to invest 10% of assets in housing and pushing higher density on suburbs. | Courtesy Capitol News Illinois
By Dennis Rodkin | Crain’s Chicago Business
Strict zoning and high construction costs have long hampered the development of new market-rate homes in the middle range — homes that are neither subsidized for low-income people nor built at the high end for affluent buyers.
Now, Gov. JB Pritzker is launching a new effort to tackle those barriers, signing an executive order yesterday creating an Illinois director of housing solutions.
“If we are going to build on this state’s record of growth and prosperity, lower costs for Illinois’ working families, and be a state that everyone can call home, we must build more housing in every Illinois community from Cairo to Chicago,” Pritzker said.
The role of the director, not yet named, will be to work with state and local agencies to promote policies that allow more multifamily homes in single-family areas and programs that pay qualified homebuyers the difference between what they can afford and what it costs a developer to build.
These and other possible solutions were presented to Pritzker in September in a report from the Ad Hoc Missing Middle Housing Solutions Advisory Committee.
Building middle-range housing has become an urgent need nationwide, as the country is reported to be short at least 6.5 million homes. That drives prices up, leaving middle-range people with fewer options.
And Illinois is tied for last among the states in building new homes.
The shortage of new middle-range housing, Pritzker said, “has many causes and it requires comprehensive solutions.” Overall, the goal is to build more new housing, a mission that both contenders in the November presidential election shared.
One Chicago-area developer of affordable housing said he appreciates Pritzker’s effort to reduce obstacles to building new housing.
“We need help getting through,” said Scott Henry, whose Chicago firm, Celadon, has developed several affordable projects, either in new construction or by rehabbing old structures.
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