I want to respond to Susan Buchanan’s statement [Ways to grow affordable housing in Oak Park, News, Sept. 4] that “the capitalists” have failed and we need to “make” them build affordable housing.
In the case of expensive housing, I would not cite the failure of capitalism, but rather strong demand to live in Oak Park, and our progressive tendencies to regulate and subsidize. In Oak Park, we have a lot of people who want to live here and limited supply, which has driven up housing prices. The most effective ways to make housing more affordable are to either make fewer people want to live here or build more housing units.
I much prefer the second of those options, and almost anything that would make it less cumbersome to build housing would get my vote. Unfortunately, we have a complex set of regulations governing what you can build here, which makes housing more expensive than it needs to be.
We cannot regulate our way to affordable housing. Look at the results of the current inclusionary zoning ordinance. Every developer who has built a 25+ unit building in Oak Park since 2019 has opted to pay the $100,000 per required unit penalty. That means each of these buildings has been more expensive than it would otherwise be. This is the opposite of making housing more affordable, and our cumbersome regulations mean that fewer buildings get built.
We take the fee and use it for various subsidies through the Housing Trust Fund, but we cannot subsidize our way to making housing affordable. A subsidy can help the few people who receive it, but this is often a small percentage of the people who need it, and it serves to make that thing more expensive for everyone else. A subsidy is not a “big picture” solution.
Progressive folks often portray the issue as “affordable housing” vs. the “greedy developer.” This is not useful. If what we need is more housing units and a developer will build them, I don’t care if they’re “greedy.” For lots of reasons, it’s really expensive to build new buildings. We’re not likely to address all of those reasons anytime soon, so most new housing built is going to be expensive. That’s OK. Our best chance of maintaining affordable housing options is to keep existing apartments and condos along corridors such as Washington Boulevard as decent-but-not-fancy units.
If every upscale buyer or renter can find a new unit, this takes pressure off of existing buildings to be rehabbed and their prices increased.
If you are an existing homeowner whose main goal is to maximize your property value, then our current situation is A-OK. But we say that we want housing to be more affordable. You as an individual and we as a village need to decide which one we actually want.
In a village with limited vacant land, if we are serious about increasing housing supply, we need to build taller buildings. This may mean that a big building gets built at the end of your block. We cannot pay lip service to “affordable housing” if what we actually want is a system that keeps housing limited and expensive.
Jeremy West is a resident of Oak Park.