At baseline, most Oak Parkers believe our village requires a multicultural heterogeneous community of every economic, racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual preference, and educational level possible to be truly their home. The problem is that, with our current economic system and market forces, this is a tall order. Housing in Oak Park, especially owner-occupied, single-family housing, is in high demand and short supply. In our economic system that means increasingly costly housing.
The village board and the SHAPE Program see the solution as eliminating single-family zoning, opening the village to turn over single-family residences to 2- to 6-flat buildings on the same footprint. Confronted with the possibility that these units will be high cost with some affordable units, they respond that people will move from their older homes to these new homes, leaving old properties with decreasing value for purchase or rental costs. There has been minimal investment by village government to develop missing-middle housing to open the door to more diversity. Thus our village government is planning to rely on the same market forces that created our current housing and diversity problems to solve our current diverse housing problems.
I believe our village government must take on an active role to literally develop new middle and affordable housing options as well as middle home ownership opportunities. There is a groundswell of middle prospective homeowners who want to own their own single-family home yet the village board does not address this housing demand.
Oak Park has a limited but very real supply of distressed and/or vacant housing units as well as vacant lots. Might not these potential housing parcels be acquired by the village and then enter into public/private partnerships to build affordable housing units using the village’s excellent credit rating, political power, and intergovernmental relations resources on a large scale?
The cost of owning and building housing units is greatly increased by the property tax load and building code load which will become even heavier with the proposal by Village Manager Kevin Jackson to increase village property taxes and the proposal by the high school to raise its levy in 2028.
Affordable housing is more complicated than some think. How do we plan and assess all of the many options and strategies that are out there to address the problem and choose the ones that maintain Oak Park’s stated values while solving our very real problems of supply and demand?
Frank Vozak
Oak Park
