River Forest is not a community built on affordable housing. More or less the opposite. And yet there is a law, the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act, passed a decade ago and intended to ensure that every community has some modest amount of housing rated as affordable.
Just to be clear, and not to disparage subsidized housing, we are talking here about homes, apartments, condos that a River Forest teacher, a store manager, a police officer could afford.
River Forest, and 40 other communities with familiar names and similar demographics, have now failed to submit a plan that would move the community toward a target of adding affordable housing units to bring it into compliance. These towns had almost two years of notice and several reminders from the Illinois Housing Development Authority.
But the June deadline came and went and we are now left with weasel talk from Village President Catherine Adduci and Village Administrator Eric Palm. The latter said, “The village will be working to verify that we are indeed non-exempt from the IHDA’s affordable housing act.” The agency says River Forest is non-exempt and you had two years to “verify” that fact and you chose to ignore the law. For her part, the typically forthright Adduci took cover from Palm and mimicked his stall tactic.
How about this as a response: “River Forest would be a better and more inclusive town if we could thoughtfully add some economic range to our housing stock. Luckily we have a few multifamily housing projects currently on the table, one of which is on land we actually own, where we will look to negotiate some sort of set-aside. We look forward both to complying with this rule and to growing the richness of our community.”
Now that would be leadership.
