Oak Park can begin addressing its problems with housing diversity and affordability by starting with three broad steps, village staff members reviewing the issues suggested last week.
Those steps are allowing for additional multifamily housing in Oak Park’s business districts, addressing housing and parking holistically, and updating the inclusionary housing ordinance.
Those recommendations come as part of a Metropolitan Mayors Caucus housing study that resulted in a strategic vision to remedy what have been intractable and complex problems in Oak Park. That includes easing the tight housing stock while ensuring housing is affordable enough so people across income bands and racial or ethnic backgrounds can live here.
“Affordable housing,” according to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, is defined as housing in which the occupant is paying no more than 30% of their gross income for housing costs, including utilities. Ben Schnelle, a MMC associate, said the MMC also measured it as the number of rental options that are affordable for those earning 60 percent of the area median income.
In Oak Park, the area median income is $103,264, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, so those renters would need to earn $61,958 each year to afford a monthly $1,548 rent.
In the study, the MMC identified 10 housing challenges facing the community and goals to help alleviate them:
- Rental affordability; Increase the supply of affordable rental housing
- Homeownership affordability; Expand the variety of homeownership opportunities
- Racial diversity and integration; Increase racial diversity across all parts of Oak Park
- Climate change; Progress towards the goals established in Climate Ready Oak Park
- Racial homeownership gap; Respond to racial disparities in access to homeownership
- Homelessness; Expand the supply of housing options for unhoused populations
- Aging in community; Increase housing options for older adults to downsize and age-in community
- Physical accessibility; Increase the number of physically accessible homes
- Housing for adults with IDD (intellectual and developmental disabilities); support housing options for adults with IDD
- Older housing stock; Address housing maintenance issues across a variety of housing types
Schnelle also outlined nine recommendations for how to start meeting those goals, and of those, Brandon Crawford, the village’s deputy director of development services, suggested focusing on three. He said the ones chosen could be implemented quickly should the board decide to move forward.
Integration and equity
In his presentation, Schnelle also pointed out prices for houses in Oak Park are rising faster than income. In 2022 in the village, an affordable home for a median-income earner would be roughly $293,000. But the median sale price was about $525,000. For Black U.S. households, making a median income of $50,000, Trustee Cory Wesley pointed out those houses would be nearly impossible to afford.
Rob Breymaier, the former executive director of the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, said in a public comment he believes the village needs to recommit and reinvest in integration. There’s an increasingly segregated rental market in Oak Park, he said, as a result of decreasing investment.
“This increasing segregation is harmful to everyone in Oak Park,” Breymaier said. “It’s also antithetical to the equity, diversity and inclusion statement that you [the board] have all committed to.”
People will move to Oak Park because of its amazing schools and community, Wesley said, even if that means living in an apartment or house below their income level. But that drives out lower income earners from the community.
“What it does is it increasingly makes it [Oak Park] a less diverse place,” Wesley said. “Once you start decreasing the rates in the class diversity in the village, you’re going to decrease the equity. And then that is a vicious cycle, because if you don’t have minority representation here to advocate for equity, the equity starts to go down.”
One solution, according to the MMC recommendation, would be for the board to update development policies so more housing can be included in Oak Park’s business districts. This could increase density and enable multifamily developments.
Another recommendation: updating the inclusionary housing ordinance. Strategies for this include expanding its geographical jurisdiction, increasing the “in-lieu” fee for developers opting out of building affordable units and requiring larger developments to build more affordable units than smaller counterparts.
The former President of Housing Forward, Henry Fulkerson, said in a public comment that he thinks developers opting out of making 10% of their units affordable should have to pay more than the $100,000 per unit, which is the current fee required that is then contributed to the affordable housing fund.
Trustee Brian Straw said he supports the MMC recommendation, because right now, no developers are opting to create affordable units and are instead paying the fee.
“[That] tells me that we have set the in-lieu payments at a rate where everyone says ‘Oh, that’s cheaper, let’s do that,’” he said.
Parking
Another recommendation focuses on looking at housing and parking together. Schnelle said these factors are intertwined, and that the current requirements may limit housing density. The village could reduce on-site parking requirements, especially in affordable housing developments, where they have proven to be largely unnecessary. Another suggestion was to allow overnight, on-street parking, especially in high-demand areas.
Trustee Lucia Robinson said she was against allowing overnight parking because there’s no extra demand or waitlists for it. Others, including Trustee Susan Buchanan and village President Vicki Scaman, however, said they were interested in exploring an elimination of the ban.
Trustee response
While Oak Park may be outperforming its peers when it comes to affordable housing, residents still want to expand that supply, Schnelle said. The challenge of rental affordability dwarfed any other concern in the community surveys recently taken.
Wesley said he believes the answer is to build more units aggressively, a strategy he felt was not particularly prevalent in the MMC’s study and presentation.
“What I’m suggesting is that we take the things that we know work and do those things here,” he said.
The board also has previously received residential pushback regarding new developments and construction, Buchanan said, claiming that one resident told her that if a building went up, it would “ruin [their] life.”
“You cannot say you care about affordable housing and then protest against density,” she said.
Robinson also suggested another way to increase revenue for the affordable housing fund. The village could fund the Oak Park Housing Authority initiatives from its general fund instead of from the affordable housing fund, following suit with other village partner organizations, she said.
