Oak Park’s Neighborhood Services Director Jonathan Burch presented two scenarios to the Ad Hoc Housing Task Force at the Friday, Nov. 6, meeting on what could be done to change the village’s Inclusionary Housing Ordinance.
One option was to do nothing; the other expanded the requirements and fees to make it stricter, but neither make development feasible in any area of the village with any size of building studied.
The meeting did not have a quorum, so no official action was taken by members. The conversation served to give village staff feedback on the options to drive their ongoing work to find possible solutions.
The current ordinance focuses on Transit-Oriented Development areas with a fee-in-lieu of on-site affordable units. The fee is currently at $100,000, but will be $130,000 with inflation adjustment, and is applicable to buildings with 25 or more units.
The second option presented for an updated ordinance changes geographic focus to downtown Oak Park, Hemingway District, Pleasant District, and Madison Street, west of Lombard. It would apply to new development with 7 or more units and require 15% of units set aside as affordable to align with Cook County’s Affordable Housing Special Assessment Program. The fee-in-lieu would be raised to $225,000.
Everywhere outside of the outlined areas would be more of an incentive approach with access to financial programs.
The county assessment program offers three levels of assessed value reductions, which impacts property taxes, for the percentage of units affordable for renters at 60% of area median income. The lowest tier starts at 15% reserved units. It can be a very helpful tool if leveraged in the right way, but it is still not enough to offset the financial gaps in development itself.
There is a struggle with layering existing tools like offering bonus units for affordable development in tandem with the County’s AHSAP tax incentive. They often compete, and employing one defeats the purpose of the other.
“It’s about trying to find something that you can marry together that will work seamlessly and not get tangled up in sort of logistics rules and regulations, and you know, not layer in additional costs that may be faced by the developer, because for a developer, I mean, it’s really a simple math problem,” said Frank Sullivan, one of the task force members.
There is still a consensus between most members of the committee that continuing support of the Housing Trust Fund is a priority. Because development is still unlikely with market conditions and high expenses in Oak Park, options for other revenue sources for the trust fund will possibly be explored as well.
“I would love to see more affordable housing here in Oak Park, but I do think what is meaningful is to not require or heavily incentivize on-site units because the way you make affordable housing developable is either an operating subsidy, a cap like a subsidy to your development costs, or a rental subsidy, and we don’t have any of those,” said Co-chair Sarah Louise Beck. “From an IHO perspective, I think our biggest leverage is to be able to collect that fee, but I do think that fee needs to be reasonable.”
These options are very preliminary, and the task force gave feedback for staff to continue to explore options with the inclusionary housing ordinance and other tools. It was clear that development will only become feasible when multiple tools are combined to work towards the same goal.
“From a staff perspective, we think it’s likely that we will take in your feedback, bring you forward conversations related to these other financial programs, and then bring them all back together in one grand conversation, so we can piece them all together in a way that makes sense and is mutually reinforcing because of the current market conditions in our state,” said Burch.
Burch said village staff will be presenting other possible financial incentives and tools that might help close the gap at a later meeting.
“This thing is hard, so I just wanted to make sure that everyone here at this table is giving themselves grace as we discuss it. I don’t think there is a silver bullet, and I don’t think that whatever solution we do eventually land on, I don’t think it’ll be perfect,” said Trustee Cory Wesley who was at the meeting as an ex officio member of the board. “But hopefully it’ll be better than what we have, and it’ll be something we can build on to continue getting better into the future.”
The proposed zoning changes for Oak Park, another possible tool for affordable housing being explored, continue to move through the decision process with the next Plan Commission public hearing on Nov. 12 at 7 p.m. at Village Hall.