Rob Breymaier, head of the Oak Park Regional Housing Center for the past 12 years, is leaving for a new post. He’s moving elsewhere on the spectrum of housing, affordability and community-building as he becomes chief operating officer of housing programs at the Heartland Alliance, a respected Chicago-based nonprofit.
He’ll be replaced on an interim basis by Michele Rodriguez Taylor who has been deputy director for the past year. A national search for his replacement will soon be underway, Garrett Buchanan, vice president of the housing center’s board told me last week as the three of them sat down for coffee at Live Café.
The next executive director, Buchanan said, will be charged with the same critical initiatives that would have been on Breymaier’s list if he had stayed. Beyond staying true to the housing center’s mission, that involves widening sources of funding beyond the organization’s current reliance on Oak Park’s village government. Right now, between property taxes and a pass-through of federal funds, Oak Park invests $575,000 annually in the housing center. That’s about half the center’s overall annual budget but constitutes some 80 percent of the money it spends directly in Oak Park.
Not as widely known are the housing center’s growing efforts to spur housing renewal and integration in near west suburbs, including Maywood, Bellwood and Broadview and in the West Side neighborhoods of Austin and Garfield Park. A few weeks back I wrote about the center opening of a new office in Austin.
The trio agreed that foundations and philanthropists are more interested in funding housing work on the West Side and the near west ‘burbs than in Oak Park.
“It’s very difficult to find outside funding for Oak Park,” said Buchanan, mainly because the village is perceived by funders as already wealthy and on top of its diverse housing challenges.
The housing center has a highly specialized position to fill. Sure, it needs a person who can tap new funding sources. Also, a person who can connect with sometimes dubious political and social service leaders in places like Austin and Maywood. Critically, it needs a person who can sell the mission of the housing center — 46 years out from its founding — to Oak Park residents and elected Oak Parkers.
And that mission, honed to its essential core, is racial integration in housing and in personal relationships. Rob Breymaier is the single person in Oak Park’s civic discourse who still talks about integration. The virtues, the necessity, the fragility of our racial integration in this town. Also an elected member of the school board at District 97 public elementary schools, Breymaier understands the strategy of equity in education and is a strong proponent.
But more elementally, Breymaier grasps that nothing good can happen if we don’t nurture, and fight for, integration. True in Oak Park, true in every town in America. The real estate market, despite the support of local real estate agents and apartment building owners, is not invested in integration. Hasn’t been. Won’t be.
Glenn Brewer, a former Oak Park village trustee, worked with Breymaier at the now defunct Leadership Council. He recruited Breymaier to apply for the housing center post. He’s proud of the impact Breymaier has made in maintaining the agency’s funding, in telling “the Oak Park story” widely and in extending its role into neighboring communities.
But he agrees that “in understanding what Oak Park has built, it starts with talking about race, and race as it relates to housing.”
Breymaier’s plain talk, his brave talk on race, will prove the hardest job description bullet point to replicate in the coming search. More than funding, more than digital apartment listings, his candor and his passion speak to the soul of the housing center’s purpose.
