By Linda Lutton
It’s not every day that you find someone offering you $25,000 to buy a brand-new loft in a near-to-downtown neighborhood that hasn’t been built yet. The line outside the sales office at University Village started forming at 4 AM on March 1, the day the development began accepting applications for the affordable housing program. For the most part it was a white-collar and white crowd, with a few blacks and Latinos.
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Rachel Weber, a professor of urban planning at UIC who was involved in the initial discussions of what University Village’s affordable housing program should look like, says things could be worse. “I feel like this is a better use of the TIF money than just a developer subsidy. It’s not optimal, but it’s a better version of a flawed public policy we have. All that money could have just ended up lining a developer’s pockets. This can help people buy homes.”
The Chicago Rehab Network, a coalition of 45 nonprofit community development groups, formally suggested some five years ago that city officials use local medians to determine affordability, rather than the six-county median. The response, says executive director Kevin Jackson, was “basically, ‘Don’t go there.’ It was a really strong response.”
Next week Beacham will mail letters to the 140 people who turned in applications March 1, letting them know whether they meet the income test. She says she’s disqualified people on both the upper and lower ends of the income scale, and she’s still accepting affordable housing applications. If you make more than most Chicagoans you might qualify.
