Affordable Housing for Chicagoans
He is an up-and-coming architect. Been on the job nine or ten years and has already earned a big career jump. Now he wants to buy a house in the West Loop, but he's afraid of the credit crunch and his income's nowhere near six figures. What does he do? He contacts Find Your Place in Chicago.
She is a single mother of three, a grade school teacher on Chicago's South Side, who often has to skip at least one monthly bill to survive. She wants a better residential neighborhood for her children, watching the low-income neighborhood's influences on them. Is she stuck? How can she move up? She can contact Find Your Place in Chicago.
These anecdotes are composite examples of the wide variety of people who benefit from FYPC. FYPC is affiliated with the City of Chicago's Partnership for New Communities, a consortium of programs created to prevent slums and provide public housing alternatives. Mayor Richard Daley announced the FYPC program in September, when the housing market was already in a shambles and just before the economy took a nosedive. Later that month, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Steven Preston bequeathed Chicago $55 million to help improve mixed-income public housing and to ease the blow of the national mortgage crisis. The funds will be used to buy and redevelop abandoned properties hit by the mortgage crisis. One million dollars of that will go to FYPC.
With those clams, the program will stimulate the housing market multifold, generating sales for developers whose work has all but stopped. It will also help homeowners keep their homes and empower prospective home buyers such as the architect and the teacher. Therefore, it benefits the city overall. It's one way of dealing with the credit crunch and a better alternative than putting up Radiant Garden City Beautiful projects.
Urban planning activist Jane Jacobs coined the phrase in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It essentially combines the Utopian yet improperly functioning urban-planning systems such as the Radiant City devised by Swiss architect/planner Le Corbusier, English journalist Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, and Chicago's own Daniel Burnham, the leader in the City Beautiful movement.
'Orthodox planning is much imbued with puritanical and Utopian conceptions of how people should spend their free time, and in planning, these moralisms on people's private lives are deeply confused with concepts about the workings of cities,' she wrote. 'There is ... room in cities for ... differences and ... in taste, purpose and interest of occupation.' A city is, after all complex order.
Instead, the FYPC program is not a prescriptivist response to how the city should handle the fallout of the housing market; it is an organic response that allows its denizens to make choices. It enhances the city's socio-economic diversity and its residents' differences in taste. Furthermore, it paves a more responsible avenue toward the American Dream.
Imagine your own neighborhood without stopgap measures like this. The octogenarian down your street loses her house, followed by your neighbor who lost his job and his house, followed by the newlywed couple up the street, then more and more homes in your neighborhood are abandoned and left vacant. Your new neighbors are vagrants. Property values plummet. Vandalism, graffiti and crime become as common as watching families play in their front yards.
Enter the FYPC program
'All of us in city government work hard to make sure Chicago is the kind of city where people want to live, work and raise a family. That means investing in the kinds of things that help create opportunity — education, workforce development, critical infrastructure and the environment,' Daley said when announcing the program. 'And, of course, it means investing in housing, which has been a key part of our strategy to improve the quality of life for all residents of Chicago.'
FYPC's more than 200 residences, priced from $150,000 to $450,000, include condos, single-family homes, two-flats and townhouses in 22 neighborhoods. Some are new-construction projects that almost fell by the wayside when the real estate bubble burst; others are rehabs with contemporary finishes. The city's developer partners, lenders and philanthropic organizations supplement the federal monies to offer significant incentives. These incentives include federal tax credit, money for down payment and closing costs, free upgrades, and financial assistance from area employers.
This is not gentrification. This is not a new form of public housing communities, hence the Radiant Garden City Beautiful. It's enriching communities throughout the city. For example, consider the Century Tower in the Loop. For less than $135,000, FYPC participants can select a studio condo there — a historic Art Deco high-rise within walking distance of the House of Blues, the Merchandise Mart, the Chicago River and ample public transportation. Century Tower's developer, American Invsco, offers a number of incentives: down payment and/or closing-cost assistance, federal tax credits, or 3 percent, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages.
To find out more on how the TaxSmart incentive program works visit the FYPC Web site.
What would Jane Jacobs say about Chicago's FYPC program?
View more blogs by Nichole Reber at Spacedesignjournal.com
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